The Democrats’ new reconciliation bill isn’t just going to be the largest-ever expansion of a government agency. It’s going to be the largest expansion of the domestic police state in American history. Only a statist could believe that a federal government, which already collects $4.1 trillion every year — or $12,300 for every citizen — supposedly needs 80 battalions of new IRS cops, perhaps with the assistance of recruiting services.
The average American has less reason to be concerned about cops with guns — though the IRS is looking for special agents who can “carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary” — than they do bureaucrats armed with pens who are authorized to sift through their lives. If you pay your taxes you have nothing to worry about, Democrats claim. But most law-abiding citizens know they have something to fear from a state agency that doesn’t concern itself with your due process, has no regard for your privacy and is empowered to target anyone it wants without any genuine oversight.
And, please, spare us this nonsense about the IRS expansion focusing exclusively on “high earners.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre promised that the IRS wouldn’t engage in new audits of anyone making under $400,000 — a claim she has no authority to make and could not possibly predict even if she did. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy also said that the bill was passed to stop an “epidemic of tax cheating amongst the millionaires and billionaires” and promised that “audit rates won’t increase for anyone making under $400K.”
This is a lie. Nothing in the bill that Democrats passed through the Senate limits audits. Murphy, along with every other Democrat in the Senate, voted against a Republican amendment that would have prevented new agents from auditing individuals and small businesses with less than $400,000 of taxable income. Not long ago, Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan Act — which had as much to do with rescuing as the Inflation Reduction Act has to do with reducing inflation — and changed tax code so that mobile payment apps like Venmo and Cash App were now required to report transactions totaling $600 or more per year to the IRS. Does that sound like a party aiming fire exclusively at high-earning Americans?
Indeed, poor and middle-class Americans are far more likely to do their own taxes, and thus more prone to making mistakes. In 2021, those making $25,000 or less (often the young and elderly) were audited at a rate five times higher than everyone else. The wealthier you are the more likely it is that you can hire lawyers and accountants to work within the system. There aren’t enough millionaires and billionaires in the world to keep a potential new 87,000 IRS employees busy.
There are other overlooked aspects of the Democrats’ IRS expansion. The bill, for instance, strengthens the federal public-sector union monopoly that funds Democrats’ political aspirations. IRS and Treasury Department employees spent 353,820 hours engaged in union activism — their PAC gives every cent to the Democrats — in 2019. One can imagine what another 87,000 employees would do for that effort. In the real world, laundering taxpayer funds through unions and using them on political campaigns is called racketeering.
None of this is to say that everyone who works for IRS is corrupt or power-hungry or an ideologue. The unassailable rules of giant bureaucracies, however, are that they always experience mission creep, they always do enough to justify their funding, and sooner or later, their leaders become political operatives.
With that said, it’s worth remembering that the IRS doesn’t simply collect taxes. It enforces speech codes. This is what empowered former IRS official Lois Lerner to target conservative groups — “crazies and “a—holes” — who used words like “Tea Party” or “patriots” in their names. But, even at the time, leftists at The New York Times editorial board praised the IRS for going after conservative groups because they did not “primarily” engage in “social welfare,” and so did not deserve an exemption under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. Has anything in the evolution of the Democratic Party given you confidence that such power would not be abused or that an engorged IRS would be immune from political pressure?
Wrestling with an insanely complex tax code — nearly 8 million words — costs Americans billions every year. Rather than flattening and simplifying this astonishingly convoluted code, which not only would have saved citizens but the government money, Democrats decided we needed up to another 87,000 people to enforce it.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books – the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.” His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.
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ABOLISH THE IRS !!!!!
When for DECADES we’ve known the IRS routinely hands out BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Fraudulent tax returns, by illegal invaders, jailed convicts, and others using STOLEN IDENTITIES, but do NOTHING TO combat that fraud, WHY EXACTLY should we NOT abolish them>??
THEY HAVE proven to be nothing but a tool to TARGET AND SCREW over americans (conservatives mostly).
If The IRS is Thought to be Too Powerful, “Let them eat cake”
… is the most famous quote attributed to Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France during the French Revolution. As the story goes, it was the queen’s response upon being told that her starving peasant subjects had no bread.Author Unknown
Author of Above Quote, ” LET THEM EAT CAKE, Unknown
Will the revenue gained with all these new hit men (why else would deadly force be a requirement for the job) actually pay the salaries for the 87,000 employees or will they be working on a bounty system?
AND one wonders, WHY do all those new folk, needs so much ‘armament’, when for YEARS the dems have been pushing “NO ONE NEEDS A GUN”…..
The start of the treasonous Democrat Party’s IRS Nazi gestapo.
The reign of the Socialist Democrat Party State Dictatorship is just getting started.
The “Socialist Democrat Party State” political officers, Gestapo, Woke and Cancel Culture are just getting started.
You will obey, be loyal and support the policies of the “Socialist Democrat Party State” or you will be classified as “Enemies of the State” and “Domestic Terrorists”.
If this doesn’t scare the helll out of voters, nothing will.
Won’t scare the Democrat voters and Gays, minorities, women, people of color who will be the recipients of the new revenue in more social programs that buy their votes with the taxes of the working people that earn them. This will not be a time to be white in America. All those illegal border jumping bussed and plane faired into Washington males will be the new hires trained in New York and D.C. fully armed for a rull fingered audit of the small business owners who they fear can afford to oppose them and their plans to turn America into the Socialist States of America. This is not Germany in the 1930s, an unlike the Nazi Anglo Saxons who got taken down by the American Anglo Saxons, we will not go gently into their “American Goodnight” but will rage, rage against the dying of our American lights.
Unfortunatley, that’s the truth of the matter i fear. WE WHITES (mostly conservatives) will be the ones targeted. WHILE ALL the other ‘woke status groups’, will be the ones BENEFITTING from the vote buying.
I figure they are on straight commission; actually, before all this is overturned there will not be time to interview qualified candidates for skills needed to be an IRS agent…. unless they expedite by simply hiring directly those cartel members who are already here illegally and have their own weapons…
That assumes we CAN overturn this…
Absolutely. But we MUST fight this and not just sit on our …er…hands and let the Progressives prevail.
I can only hope we get total veto proof majority control over congress in November. Go over the IRS budget and slash everything not needed to run it as a service, not as military overlords. That means no arms, no ammo, and no Storm Troupers.
HELL SLASH the entire bloody org.. AND THE DOJ/FBI too!!!