Look! you don't need tens of thousands of backlinks to get a higher PR. What you need to do is to update what is on your page and make sure you put something meaningful and something beneficial on that page and leave the rest as it is. As I said earlier on, when it comes to backlinks, DP is a paramount king. The problem here is that, though DP has great content, the content is mixed with so much gabbage to the point where a search engine like google can't even distinguish the good from the bad and hence put both at the same scale and that is the main reason why DP's PR is going down instead of going up.
Do you mean to say that google took $14 from your account? It is highly impossible for google to take back the earnings unless there is any fault with you...
Please look at what I reported a bit earlier. It seems there is something going on. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1384855