If you do any freelance or contract work, as I do, you might’ve noticed something missing in the mail this year. That would be Form 1040-ES, a series of vouchers that allows freelance workers to pay estimated taxes each quarter so that they don’t get penalized for late payments at the end of the tax year. This series of forms tends to show up in the mail right at the New Year, often beforehand. As of this writing, the IRS hasn’t sent them out at all.

It isn’t hard to guess why. It’s still early in 2018, but you can already begin to see the effects of Tax Cuts And Jobs Act of 2017. The Washington Post has reported that some workers have already seen a marginal paycheck increase, which is very nice. Sometimes it’s even more than a buck fifty! That fractional, very-much-temporary uptick in pay is what the GOP hopes satisfies lower-income Americans enough so that they forget about all the OTHER shit that bill contains. Charles Koch was so pleased with the bill’s passage that he handed Paul Ryan half a million dollars, which is both totally legal and not at all weird. Amazon is poised to make an extra $789 million from the tax cuts even though they paid NO Federal income taxes for 2017. That’s right: zero.

Personally speaking, my own taxes will likely increase next year because of a provision within the bill that eliminates a lot of potential itemized deductions. These deductions are normally a chance for freelancers, who already pay an extra self-employment tax that salaried workers do not, to find vital savings. The bill also puts a cap on deducting your state and local taxes, including property taxes, from what you owe the Feds (Blue states, not coincidentally, tend to have much higher state and local taxes compared to their red state counterparts). I will not be alone in discovering such unpleasant increases, and that extra tax money I pay will NOT be redistributed downward. That’s gonna be money allocated for Scott Pruitt’s travel pillow fund, or it’ll pay off Donny Junior’s bar tab in India, or it’ll be slurried into one of Jeff Bezos's protein shakes. And we haven’t even gotten to the part where your possible tax savings could be easily wiped out by horrifying increases in the cost of health care.

But perhaps more ominous than what is in the bill is what is NOT in it. By all accounts, this was a sloppy bill, pushed through without many legislators knowing what the fuck was in it, and with notes scribbled, by hand, into the margins. According to the New York Times, the IRS has lost over 21,000 employees this century alone, and Trump is poised to cut the agency’s budget even further. The number of audits has plummeted, with only .7% of all individuals audited in 2016. The IRS, as it stands now, is crippled. "It's both an issue of not enough enforcement, and, the agents doing the enforcement are not trained well enough on what to look for," Michael Iwanczuk, an accountant in the Baltimore area, told me. "I represented clients in two audits in the past year. One I had an experienced auditor who was decent to deal with. The other audit, the auditor must have had less than 5 years of experience and I was explaining the concepts to the auditor and I could tell none of it was sinking in."

You are only beginning to see the problems with that lack of knowledge and enforcement. This is a tax code made in Donald Trump’s image. It is vague, stupid, and easily manipulated. If the IRS doesn’t have the manpower to parse the bill and send out estimated tax forms in time (and for real, I’m starting to get nervous about this because I don’t wanna get assessed penalty fees), how are they gonna prosecute REAL tax fraud? The IRS actually had a plan to make tax filing fully automated, essentially doing your return for you, but lobbyists for Turbotax and H&R Block successfully blocked it, leaving the agency to process millions upon millions of extra homemade tax returns, more than it can possibly handle.