The IRS has long been at the top of the list of government agencies Republicans have hoped to abolish or at least defund — both because they believe it discriminates against churches and other Christian nonprofits by refusing to exempt them from the rules about nonpartisanship that all 501(c)(3)s are required to follow in order to maintain their tax-exempt status, and because they believe it discriminates against rich people by expecting them to pay taxes, as if they are peasants or some such.
To be fair, they may be entirely right about the latter!
The IRS — bolstered by funding from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — reported this week that it collected $1 billion in taxes and penalties from “hundreds of” wealthy households that until now simply didn’t feel like paying their taxes. Hooray!
Now, you may be asking yourself, “Okay … that’s great, but why didn’t they do that before?” Well, that would be because they were criminally underfunded and simply didn’t have the staff and resources available to bother rich people about their taxes. And again, we’ll note that the billion collected so far is just from “hundreds of households.” Even if that were 999 households, they would have owed one million each!
Via the Washington Post:
The push that IRS officials described this week targeted people who filed tax returns but hadn’t paid. The agency is also pursuing a far larger group: wealthy people who haven’t filed returns at all.
The IRS stopped sending letters reminding people that they hadn’t filed in 2017. It resumed the practice this year, notifying as many as 25,000 people who formerly reported annual income above $1 million, as well as up to 100,000 people whose income was above $400,000 a year, that they had skipped filing in one or more recent years.
Take a minute and just consider the fact that there even were 25,000 millionaires in this country that decided they didn’t need to pay their taxes. That is so many people! And it’s not as though there were in a situation where they simply couldn’t afford to pay their taxes, like some freelance and 1099 workers I have known. They’re actual freaking millionaires! And the IRS, under Trump, stopped even sending them a gentle reminder!
And as much as “a million isn’t what it used to be,” most people are still not millionaires and many are struggling just to get by — at least partly because these people don’t feel like they should have to pay their taxes!
Let us note here that the $1 billion was generated under our current tax code, which is very, very nice to rich people, from people who actually bothered to file their taxes. Imagine what we could pull in from those who didn’t. Imagine how much we could pull if the IRS were able to fully investigate hidden offshore accounts. Imagine how much we could pull in if the wealthy were actually paying their fair share.
Something’s nagging at my memory, what is it, it’s right there … oh:
Last year, the Republican-controlled House’s first vote was to rescind nearly all of the $80 billion [in new IRS funding]. The House GOP later approved a bill to abolish the IRS altogether and replace the entire federal tax code with a national sales tax.
The wealthy have been coddled for enough decades by now that if there were any societal benefit from doing so, it would have manifested by now. It has not. Instead, we have people with more money than they, their children, or their children’s children could possibly spend in their lifetimes and everyone else has to barely scrape by.
If we divided all of the wealth of this nation up evenly, every adult in the United States would get $532,713 — and even if we only divided up all of the liquid wealth, it would still be $259,388. That is how much wealth there is in this country where 56 percent of us cannot afford a $1,000 emergency.
Part of the reason “we can’t have nice things” is that even in a situation where the tax code is very, very nice to rich people, many rich people don’t want to pay their taxes. And it’s not because they are worried that the hit would affect their lifestyles in any meaningful way. They could pay their taxes and still have their superyachts and their mansions and their Rolexes and their $1300 Adidas x Gucci parasols and their own private islands … perhaps even their own private Idahos, if the mood takes them. It’s because they don’t feel like it.
Giving the IRS the ability to go after the wealthy means having the public funds available to take care of ourselves and our citizens just a little bit better. Given that they would never be able to have the money they have, have the goods or services they spend that money on without us, I’d say that’s pretty fair.
PREVIOUSLY!
What rich people do not do when they receive another wink from the Repubs, is start companies.
No, they already have a lot of money.
What they do is stash money in the Caribbean or Switzerland.
They keep it out of the economy.
Fuck that.
I wonder if this is the reason behind the President Biden is old and should step down nonsense.