The new spending bill being debated in the Senate would unleash the IRS to become a major threat to millions of lower and middle-class Americans just as they are already being crushed by inflation, high gas prices, soaring local taxes and stagnating wages.
In fact, this budget deal would make the IRS bigger than the Pentagon, or the FBI, or U.S. Border Patrol, the Washington Free Beacon noted.
Tucked down into the budget being ushered through the Senate by Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin is a provision to hire up to 87,000 new IRS auditors whose job will be to target the middle classes for a massive campaign of audits to take more of their money.
The bill provides for an additional $80 billion in funding for the IRS, which would more than double the size of the agency. And it would also task the IRS with targeting the middle classes to raise an additional $200 billion in funding the Democrats want to use to fund government spending.
This would increase the agency’s budget by more than 600 percent.
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The funding would make the IRS the biggest government agency of them all. According to the Beacon, “The Pentagon houses roughly 27,000 employees, according to the Defense Department, while a human resources fact sheet says the State Department employs just over 77,243 staff. The FBI employs approximately 35,000 people, according to the agency’s website, and Customs and Border Protection says it employs 19,536 Border Patrol agents.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, “The bill earmarks $45.6 billion for ‘enforcement,’ including ‘litigation,’ ‘criminal investigations,’ ‘investigative technology,’ ‘digital asset monitoring’ and a new fleet of tax-collector cars. The result will be far more audits, civil suits and criminal referrals.”
As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, “The main targets will by necessity be the middle- and upper-middle class because that’s where the money is.”
That is correct. The Democrats need to target the middle class because that is where the most money actually is — not “the rich.” And that is where the left needs to go to grab as much money for all their new spending as they can get.
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The majority of these new revenues will come from Americans making less than $200,00 a year, according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. So, clearly, the new IRS agents will be tasked with fanning out and scrutinizing the middle class.
So, far from going after “the rich” or “tax cheats,” Senate Republicans also note that Schumer and Biden’s IRS would be coming after us.
“According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the brunt of any new revenue from hiring an army of IRS auditors will overwhelming hit low- and middle-income earners, people already struggling with high gas prices and 9.1 percent inflation,” a Monday news release noted. “CBO scores the $80 billion for mandatory IRS funding as spending only, and gives phantom credit for potential enforcement revenue that might be generated in ‘future baselines.’”
But even as the Democrats claim that they need to target cheaters and the evil rich, according to the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC), convictions for tax fraud actually went down last year.
In June of last year, the USSC noted that “in fiscal year 2020, there were 324 tax fraud offenders sentenced under the guidelines. The number of tax fraud offenders has decreased by 45.5 percent since fiscal year 2016.”
House Republicans also reminded Americans that the IRS already has a long-long history of abusing its power as it is and that this bill will only “supercharge” an already out-of-control agency.
House Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee recently said, “Overly broad IRS targeting spanning decades has claimed many victims, and Democrats are trying to revive it.”
The Republicans recalled the IRS operative Lois Lerner incident starting in 2013 when former President Barack Obama ordered her to harass conservative and religion-based organizations, the millions the IRS has taken from small businesses, not to mention the many instances of the IRS violating Americans’ due process.
“Lois Lerner notoriously targeted conservative nonprofits for special scrutiny in 2013. ProPublica, the left-leaning website, obtained and published the confidential tax information of private citizens in 2021 — conveniently when Democrats were debating whether to impose a new wealth tax. The IRS has promised to investigate the illegal leak but has so far come up empty,” the House GOP said.
The Republicans also pointed out that the new funding isn’t helping to fix the major failures the IRS is wallowing in already.
“Despite all this new money,” the Republicans said, “Americans shouldn’t expect better IRS service. The agency in the 2022 filing season answered a mere 10 percent of its phone calls. The Taxpayer Advocate Service revealed in June that as of May 31 the IRS was still sitting on 21.3 million unprocessed paper tax returns, with millions of taxpayers ‘waiting six months or more to receive their refunds.’ Yet the Schumer-Manchin bill devotes only $3.2 billion for ‘taxpayer services.’”
All this is aimed at taking as much money away from Americans as possible at a time when we are all already suffering from President Joe Biden’s massive mismanagement of the national economy.
