The political left applauds class-warfare street theater. Mobs with mock guillotine chanting kill the rich or eat the rich. It justified their giving the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) another 80 billion (with a ‘b’). More “b” oots on the ground to go after millionaires and “b” illionaires.
Related: Sandy Cortez (AOC) Shows Off Her ‘Tax the Rich Dress’ at $30,000.00/Ticket Met Gala
But the IRS appears to have the same staffing issues as everyone else. Despite the pile of fiat money, the result of this dearth of bodies is to fill its audit quotas by picking low-hanging fruit. They are taking a bite out of poor and low-income Americans at a higher rate than the rich they are meant “to eat” (emphasis, mine).
On Wednesday, Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released data provided to it by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on audits performed by the agency in fiscal year 2022. Despite the infusion of new funding earmarked for the IRS via last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, the agency continued historic trends of hassling primarily low-income taxpayers, with relatively few millionaires and billionaires getting caught up in the audit sweep.
“The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates—five and a half times virtually everyone else—were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit,” reported TRAC, noting that the poorest taxpayers are “easy marks in an era when IRS increasingly relies upon correspondence audits yet doesn’t have the resources to assist taxpayers or answer their questions.”
If you (trigger warning!) shoot an email or letter off to the wealthy, they forward it to the tax lawyers, who then eat the IRS or tie them up in expensive and time-intensive “talks” that might include some connected douche-bag in the bureaucracy or even congress.
Eating the rich takes a lot of time and money. It’s much easier to target people who can’t afford accountants or lawyers or know just one bureaucrat. The IRS agent that sent them the letter.
Related: Those 87,000 Armed IRS Agents Are Actually Coming for Your Free Speech
Fisking the peasants who have no castle walls behind which they can hide. Not much has changed. And as I’ve noted before, that is not the only purpose of this massive expansion. They will also be responsible for speech therapy.
Ending Free Speech and the protections enshrined in the First Amendment is both a journey and a destination for the Left. Message control is essential to any authoritarian rule. You must make examples of anyone who dares to contradict the approved narratives.
So, why not “hide” your ministry of truth inside the IRS? … We’re getting an additional 87,000 Lois Lerner’s with urban combat training. All, I posit, to establish the ministry of truth by other means. Sure, they’ll audit a few returns, but most of them will belong to people who lack the ability to remain silent.
Attack the lower and middle classes. Make a few examples of some upper-middle-class dissenters. Raid the odd former president’s home. Maybe a CEO here or there who donates to the wrong party or a doctor who said the wrong thing about vaccines on Twitter.
You might want to say, “it ain’t so,” but we’re already living it. It is funded on the backs of not just the poor and middle-class but their children and grandchildren.
I have my own tax reform plan. Let’s cut the IRS staff by 87000 before they add any more, even if it takes them below zero, then duplicate this recruitment plan in every agency. The US military will need to stay staffed. And we can debate a few other potential necessities.
But suppose you return all that money to the peasants who earned it and reciprocally eliminate all the future debt these agencies would have created. In that case, we’d find the states together or individually able to attend to the needs of the people.
I know. I should expect another letter from the IRS.
