Opinion | A victory for the IRS is a victory for America


Placeholder while article actions load

During their first debate in 2016, Hillary Clinton suggested that Donald Trump was refusing to release his tax returns to the public because they would reveal that he paid no income taxes despite his considerable wealth. Trump leaned into the microphone and said, “That makes me smart.”

As far as Trump is concerned, paying taxes makes you a sucker, a loser, a chump. While there are few other Republicans who will say it so forthrightly, many of them think that too, and they’ve spent years trying to make sure only the little people have to pay.

But with the pending passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, we may finally begin to turn the tide in a war only one side has been fighting, a war against not just the Internal Revenue Service but the very idea that everyone should pay their taxes.

Naturally, Republicans are enraged. But this is something all Americans should celebrate.

The bill contains nearly $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service, in addition to its existing budget, spread out over the next decade. The biggest chunk is for enforcement, ie making sure people pay what they owe, but there’s also lots of money to update systems and improve customer service. Right now, the agency struggles with outdated equipment, insufficient staffing and overwhelming backlogs of paperwork.

The Opinions Essay: Why does the IRS need $80 billion? Just look at its cafeteria.

The desperate and demoralized state of the IRS is no accident. It’s the result of a purposeful campaign by congressional Republicans to gut the agency so it can’t do its job, particularly when it comes to ensuring that the wealthy meet their tax obligations. If the GOP had a slogan to describe its stance toward the IRS, it would be “Defund the Police.”

The result has been fewer audits, a shrinking staff and a much larger federal deficit. Hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes go uncollected, by some estimates as much as $1 trillion a year, that ought to be used to fund necessary programs. And the agency is woefully outmatched when it tries to make the rich and super-rich, who can employ squadrons of accountants and lawyers, pay what they owe.

The IRS estimates that over the next decade it will need to hire 52,000 employees just to maintain its current inadequate staff levels, because of retirement and attrition. With this bill, it would be able to hire as many as 87,000 new employees over that period. So of course, Republicans are saying falsely that the IRS will hire 87,000 agentswho are going to bust down your door and root through your underwear drawer.

They’ve even spun out fantasies of IRS violence, pretending that bringing the IRS into the 21st century and hiring enough employees to make sure the agency operates well will in practice mean that heavily armed agents could literally be coming for you and your family.

“STOP BIDEN’S SHADOW ARMY!” cried a tweet from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) “How long until Democrats send the IRS ‘SWAT team’ after your kids’ lemonade stand?” asked Ronna Romney McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee. “Are they going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s [sic]already loaded, ready to shoot some small business person in Iowa?” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).

Trust me, these elite Republicans know they’re lying when they spin out such deranged fantasies. They also know how out of step they are with public opinion on taxes. The top complaint people have about the system isn’t that they pay too much or that they might get audited, let alone that the IRS is going on a bloodthirsty killing spree through the heartland. It’s that the wealthy and corporations don’t pay their fair share.

In other words, Americans don’t mind paying taxes, as long as they believe the system is fair. And if fairness is a key principle the tax system ought to embody, you can’t do it without adequate funding.

Here are three things we should all be able to agree on, no matter our politics:

  1. We need a government. We’ll always argue about what it should do and how to do it, but we all have things we want government to do, whether you’re a conservative who likes a strong Border Patrol and military or a liberal who loves Medicare and food inspections .
  2. In order to have a government, we need to collect taxes. Even the most fervently anti-tax conservative admits there will have to be some taxes, even if we disagree about how high they ought to be.
  3. If we’re going to collect taxes, the agency that does it should operate as efficiently and effectively as possible.

If we can agree on those principles, it’s obvious that we ought to give the IRS the funding it needs to do its job. The Inflation Reduction Act is finally going to do that, even if it will take years to rebuild the agency after the pummeling it has been taken. It’s long overdue.




Source link

Jorge Oliveira

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marketing-online-ireland/ https://muckrack.com/jorge_oliveira

Leave a Reply