After Inflation Reduction Act Becomes Law, Republicans Side With Tax Cheats
Right-wingers decry strengthened IRS enforcement
Now that Democrats have enacted a key piece of their domestic agenda, Republicans have begun howling over a real reason that they were against the Inflation Reduction Act all along.
President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law Wednesday at the White House.
Aside from its provisions to make healthcare more affordable and to combat global climate change, it includes $80 billion in IRS funding for high-income and corporate tax enforcement, as well as IT modernization that will help with both tax enforcement and taxpayer services.
This has been a key priority for Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), who last year introduced the Restoring the IRS Act to provide the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax cheats and close the tax gap.
The federal government loses roughly $600 billion annually due to — largely very wealthy and corporate — taxpayers cheating on what they owe, according to a recent estimate by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) in Washington DC.
The IRS budget was cut sharply during the 2010s and remains about 20 percent below its 2010 level, after adjusting for inflation, according to a CBPP analysis.
Because of these cuts, the agency has lost more than one-fifth of its staff: the number of full-time-equivalent employees has fallen by 19,000 since 2010, even as the number of returns filed and the agency’s responsibilities have both grown, the analysis said.
This has not been an accident.
At the end of the day, the Republican Party services its highly wealthy donor class and this new infusion of resources into tax enforcement, courtesy of the Inflation Reduction Act, now threatens the ability of those wealthy Americans to continue cheating.
The result is now howls of outrage from Republican politicians.
Some, like Florida Republican Gov Ron DeSantis, are casting it as something somehow nefarious. But the end result is to defend and support the idea of cheating on one's taxes.
“Why would they do that? Because you’re not going to be able to contend with the audit. So they’re going to crush a lot of people by doing that. And I think of all the things that have come out of Washington that have been outrageous, this has got to be pretty close to the top,” said DeSantis, who is also a potential candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. “And I think it was basically just a middle finger to the American public that this is what they think of you.”
Meanwhile, Rep Matt Gaetz (R-Fla), who is under federal investigation, appeared Wednesday evening on Tucker Carlson's Fox News program to spin stepped-up IRS tax enforcement as some sort of conspiracy.
“Well, if you were wanting to go and forcibly take tax dollars from regular Americans while giving the richest elite a pass, you probably would arm up the IRS. Joe Manchin has gaslit this destruction of our country. He owns this decision,” Gaetz said, referring to the most conservative Democratic senator, who helped put this budget legislation together. “But the question is: When Republicans get power, we never decrease spending, but will we put a requirement for colorblindness in every bill? If they're going to put this woke social justice in every bill, we have to put in every bill that this government can never ever treat people differently based on the color of their skin.”
Do you find this post of value?
Please consider supporting our work by joining our Patreon for as little as $5…
Also, please subscribe…