IRS audits completed

As Tinder accumulated paid subscribers between 2015 and 2023, the IRS completed fewer and fewer audits, an inverse correlation of -0.9666 that raises the alarming possibility that tax enforcement and romantic opportunity are in direct competition for the nation's attention. Perhaps the auditors themselves are on Tinder. Perhaps the budget cuts that gutted the IRS's audit capacity freed up exactly the mental bandwidth that Americans redirected toward swiping right. The US Treasury has not issued guidance on this. The IRS, presumably, is too busy not auditing people.

IRS audit completions declined sharply over this period due to sustained congressional budget cuts to the agency—IRS funding fell by roughly 20% in real terms between 2010 and 2022, with staffing dropping from about 94,000 to under 75,000 employees. Tinder launched in 2012 and its paid subscriber base grew steadily, reaching approximately 10 million by the early 2020s, driven by the normalization of online dating and subscription monetization. The inverse relationship reflects an expanding tech economy on one axis and a deliberately defunded government agency on the other—two forces moving for reasons that have nothing to do with each other.

Government underfunding and the commercialization of loneliness are both real phenomena of the 2010s; their numerical opposition is a coincidence. The data reflects two separate political and cultural stories that happen to move in opposite directions—which is all correlation ever does.