Here Come The IRS Shock Troops
The Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction Act,” approved Sunday by the Senate, is primarily known as a climate and health care bill. It also includes $80 billion for the IRS, more than six times its current annual budget, increasing the agency’s enforcement funding by 69% through fiscal 2031, and adding as many as 87,000 new employees to its overall workforce.
This is not what the country needs
Our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity pointed out last week that the Democrats are prioritizing IRS enforcement and bureaucracy over securing the leaky border and addressing the shortage of military recruits.
So while the Democrats will spend “$80 billion to double the number of IRS agents and auditors, the Army is falling far short of its recruitment goals for our national security. Meanwhile, the Border Patrol is running short of agents in Arizona and Texas.” In fact, after a generous injection of other people’s money, the IRS will “employ more bureaucrats than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.”
We are also reminded by the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard that, “according to a new congressional analysis, the pay for those 300 could be as high as the $235,100 given to Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Why are the Democrats re-arming an IRS that, mercifully, “went down early … went down hard,” and hasn’t “come back” from the pandemic? Is the federal government hurting for money? Not at all.
“Total federal tax collections, including payroll and other taxes, reached an all-time high in nominal terms of $4.05 trillion in fiscal year 2021, amounting to 18.1% of GDP, well above the long-run average of 17.1% over the 20 years prior to” the passage of 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, says the Tax Foundation. What’s more, “total collections are running 25% higher in fiscal year 2022.”
In April, Roll Call reported that “surging federal tax revenue” for the month “led to the largest monthly budget surplus on record.” A headline in The Hill last fall declared that federal tax receipts had seen the “biggest one-year jump since 1977 despite” the pandemic.
So if buttressing the IRS is not about revenue, then what is it about?
It’s about the left’s obsession with wealth redistribution, its naked lust to leverage other people’s money for its own gain, and the growing thuggishness of Democrats. It’s about the progressive-socialist political complex’s craving for more and more raw political power. As Ayn Rand famously wrote in “Atlas Shrugged,” government can flex its power only by cracking down on criminals, so “one declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws,”
The Internal Revenue Code, with its complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty, is perfectly suited for just that.
Continued Dr. Floyd Ferris, a weasley government gangster in “Atlas Shrugged.”
Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. … We’re after power and we mean it. … But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.
We understand that due to the IRS backup, taxpayers are waiting on refunds they deserved to receive long ago. But that is resolvable without hiring a small army of supercharged enforcement agents who will audit taxpayers who can’t afford representation; hound tens of millions without evidence as if they’re tax cheats; invade Americans’ privacy (unless they’re aligned with the ruling class); and cheerfully take orders from the Democratic Party, as it did when Barack Obama was in the White House.
If the House passes the “Inflation Reduction Act” as expected, voters should be disgusted. It should repulse them enough that, come November, they throw out the bums who forced this junk law on the country. With extreme prejudice.
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