The helmsman comes.
Photo: CPAW
Today’s GOP is a working class party that values law enforcement and fiscal responsibility. It is for this reason that Republicans come together to defend the Supreme Empire’s sacred right to cheat their taxes with impunity. That claim adds $ 175 billion to the deficit every year.
Over the past decade, Conservatives have waged an extremely successful campaign to disappoint the tax police. After retaking Congress in 2010, Republicans slashed the IRS budget, which fell from $ 14 billion this year to $ 11.5 billion in 2020, despite the number of individual tax returns in the U.S. increased by more than 7 percent.
Meanwhile, the GOP put pressure on the agency to step up enforcement of the working poor, even though Uncle Sam doesn’t make a lot of money pinning low-income people for misappropriating EITC services. As a result of these austerity measures and regressive priorities, the IRS has been forced to cut its prison staff by nearly a quarter, and the audit rate among the ultrawealthy in America has dropped 78 percent. With only a few tax cops left on duty, the rich plundered the federal treasury: the top percent of earners now hide more than a fifth of their taxable income from the IRS each year.
Graphics: ProPublica
Joe Biden wants to change that. One of the pay-fors in the president’s infrastructure plan is an $ 80 billion investment to hold high earners and corporations accountable for US tax law. Given the high evasion rates among these groups, Biden’s reimbursement to the tax police is expected to generate $ 70 billion a year in revenue – money Democrats want to invest in jobs for manual workers and home care for the elderly, among other things. Many of the tax measures proposed by Biden have sparked internal party opposition on Capitol Hill. However, his IRS plan was received positively by progressives and moderates alike. Last month, Joe Manchin complained that “$ 400 to $ 1 trillion in tax revenue” is “not even being collected” because “we gutted the IRS. They don’t have the courage or the firepower that they had before. “Meanwhile, Republican Senators Shelley Moore Capito and Susan Collins praised Biden’s proposal with the earlier adage,” Ordinary taxpayers can’t stand it if someone doesn’t pay their fair share. “
But Capito and Collins are establishment elites too contactless to understand that ordinary workers like when the super-rich steal from the government. Fortunately, Donald Trump’s former Legislative Director Marc Short founded an organization to advocate for the interests of the working class – and the Coalition to Protect American Workers is making defeat of Biden’s IRS plan their top priority. As Politico reports, the group has just launched a six-digit cable and local TV commercial flash focusing on competitive House districts.
The 30-second spot shows an army of shadowy IRS agents – all seemingly clones of the same man with glasses – stalking fearful middle-class taxpayers with surveillance drones. This is “the new America,” warns the spokesman, “where Congressional Democrats want to disappoint the police and Biden wants to add thousands of IRS agents.” To prevent their nation from turning into a dystopian hellscape where criminals murder with impunity – while IRS agents arrest small business owners for miscalculations – viewers must now call their agents. (How this organization wants the US to fund the police is unclear as it views tax enforcement as a near totalitarian enterprise.)
Incredible adhttps: //t.co/6SyNLwMETD
– James Medlock (@jdcmedlock) May 24, 2021
Short believes this line of scrimmage could kill Biden’s infrastructure plan in its entirety. “Since we surveyed several districts with several different messages, the idea of opposition to hiring more tax collectors worth $ 80 billion was best for us,” he recently told Politico. “So I say, I still think this is an Achilles’ heel to the overall plan.”
One should never underestimate the ability of the conservative movement to convince the median voter that if the billionaire class is molested, she will be impoverished; After all, the abolition of inheritance tax often wins a majority in opinion polls. And the gift of the right to spread one’s lies in the mainstream media remains tremendous: Politico’s article on Short’s ad purchase repeatedly provokes the Obama-era “scandal” in which the IRS reinforced conservative groups for one Targeted Auditing – without ever informing readers that the IRS did not target Conservative groups that should be scrutinized.
Even so, Short’s claim here is dubious.
A super-majority of Americans keep telling respondents that “the rich” and “corporations” “don’t pay their fair share of taxes.” Presumably, these voters would see “rich people who pay even what they legally owe under a tax system that is skewed in their favor” as an example of the rich failing to pay their “fair share”. But there is no reason to suspect. Late last month, left-wing pollster Data for Progress asked voters if they would “support $ 80 billion in increased enforcement and scrutiny of the IRS by wealthy Americans to ensure they pay the full taxes they owe” . 60 percent of the voters said yes.
Short’s group is not alone in waging war on our nation’s hardworking tax cops. Tax Reform Americans and Heritage Action for America have both rallied against Biden’s plan in the past few days. “The best way to ensure compliance with the law,” Heritage wrote in a recent report, would be “to reduce incentives to avoid by reducing the tax burden.” In other words, since a tiny minority of malefactors refuse to obey our laws, we should rewrite those laws to make them more convenient for criminals.
In particular, Heritage takes a slightly different perspective on tax fraud when it comes to poor people. In 2016, the Heritage Foundation released a report claiming that low-income Americans frequently used EITC benefits that they did not actually deserve. The think tank failed to conclude that lawmakers need to reduce the incentive to illegally use the EITC by guaranteeing a basic income for all low-income households. Rather, it asked the IRS to subject EITC applicants to automatic mini-audits. (Conservatives will insist this does not reflect hypocrisy. After all, the Superrich are just trying to keep a higher percentage of their own money while EITC applicants try to get a taxpayer-funded handout. However, this perspective is based on the idea that The pre-tax distribution of income and wealth is inherently fair. This is difficult to reconcile with a myriad of realities in how that distribution came about, centuries of slavery among them. In truth, the US government offers far more advantages to the super empire than she does to welfare recipients; the former’s wealth would not exist without the legally constructed economic order that Uncle Sam’s monopoly of force maintains.)
The conservative movement’s reverence for law and order is therefore strictly limited by its commitment to the plutocracy. Republicans’ empathy for super-rich super-predators and disdain for the humble tax cops who form the thin blue line between civilization and anarchy make them incapable of governing. The GOP could oppose the “broken mob”. But they want the cooking mob to rule us all.
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