Republicans Declare Number One Priority: Protecting Tax Cheats

Very on brand.

If and when the Republicans ever manage to quit shooting themselves in the dick and pick a new House leader, they'll be ready to get down to the number one issue of the day: gutting the IRS so it can't stop people from cheating on their taxes. That's right, having wrested back control of the House, the GOP's top priority is a pointless vote to cancel a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that provides $80 billion in funding for the IRS over the next 10 years. Because what could be more American than cheating on your taxes?

Naturally the GOP kicked off the festivities with an epic round of whoppers. The gist of their bullshit is that the agency is hiring 87,000 more agents to audit middle class taxpayers. (It's not.)

"Do you make $75,000 or less? Democrats' new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you—with 710,000 new audits for Americans who earn less than $75k," tweeted Rep. Kevin McCarthy back in August.

First of all, a lot of these new hires will not be "new." If the agency is able to fill these putative positions — a big if in an economy where there are currently two job openings for every unemployed person — lots of them will be replacing employees who will either retire or leave for other positions. Today the agency has 82,000 employees, down from 90,000 10 years ago when the country had 20 million fewer people. Natasha Sarin, Treasury counselor for tax policy and implementation, told the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler that 50,000 of those employees are eligible to retire in the next five years.  

Second, many of these new hires will not be "agents." They'll be doing customer service and IT — you know, so you don't wait four hours on hold to ask why your refund took six weeks to appear in your account.

Third, that 710,000 figure comes from a blog post that extrapolated current audit rates and assumed that they'd remain constant with the infusion of cash, conveniently ignoring the fact that then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, who was appointed by Trump, told Congress that the new money was to fund audits of households making more than $400,000 per year. As did Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin.

Because it costs a lot more to audit a rich person's complicated return than it does to send a middle class family a letter asking them to document their mortgage interest deduction. But the GOP has systematically starved the IRS of funding, reducing its staff to the same number it had in 1973, when the nation had just 212 million people. And so between 2010 and 2019, the audit rate for taxpayers making more than $5 million plunged from 1 in 6 to 1 in 50.

Predictably, this has resulted in a lot of people cheating on their goddamn taxes, to the tune of $381 billion a year , according to the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. Leaving aside the reality that the increased funding under the IRA doesn't even backfill the decades of starving the agency, the $80 billion will pay for itself by clawing back money owed to all of us by people who are currently getting away with stiffing Uncle Sam.

Fourth, why the hell aren't Democrats shouting this from the rooftops? The Republican Party's most important order of business is to stick up for rich tax cheats, and we're not making them eat it? What the everloving fuck? We just found out that the IRS couldn't even be bothered to perform its internally mandated presidential audits under Trump, and we're still letting Republicans make political hay out of defunding the IRS?

They think this is actually good messaging! Just look at that rat bastard Rep. Dan Crenshaw, on Fox this morning complaining that the House Freedom Caucus is "making it look like Republicans can't govern and don't deserve any gavels whatsoever."

"If I didn't know any better, it's like the Democrats paid people off," he joked. Which is far too modest really, since the GOP is perfectly capable of shitting the bed on its own without help from the Blue Team.

“lol what a hilarious shitshow”

— Matthew Gertz (@Matthew Gertz) 1672754277 

And fifth, Democrats control the upper chamber and the White House so whatever bullshit these losers vote on is DOA in the Senate. They're just engaging in an act of public onanism, as per usual. 

In summary and in conclusion, these fuckers are liars, and if we don't come out swinging, we're going to get punched ... eventually, when these goobers finally get finished punching themselves in the dick and choose a new House speaker.

[ WaPo / Snopes / NBC ]

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