How and why Republicans crippled the IRS

The rich get richer by not paying their taxes...

To the surprise of (let’s check the figures) absolutely nobody, Republicans in Congress are big supporters of law enforcement…right up until the laws being enforced are tax laws.

Social justice protestors need to be drawn and quartered (which according to the internet is not having someone doing their caricature and then cutting it into four pieces like I thought it was at first), but rich people who do not pay their taxes should be left in peace because maybe one of those grateful rich people will make a political donation to the Republican of their choice.

If Republicans said that out loud, people who aren’t rich might take exception, so instead Republicans got sneaky about it and cut funding to the IRS.

According to a recent Washington Post story, the Internal Revenue Service lost roughly 18,000 full-time positions after 2010 mostly because of budget cuts pushed by Republicans in Congress. The number of IRS auditors has fallen to lows unseen since the 1950s and since pretty much nobody in their right mind wants to get audited, that might seem like a good deal for everybody.

Au contraire, which is French for:

“Yew dew not know what de ‘ell yew are talking about, mon ami.”

(And as always that French accent is based on Pepe Le Pew.)

Because the IRS doesn’t have enough auditors to take on the big complicated cases presented by rich people who can afford lawyers, accountants and the occasional witch doctor, the IRS has focused on auditing people on the other end of the financial spectrum. According to an Associated Press story I read back in October, people with an annual income under $25,000 are audited at a higher rate than people with an income up to $500,000.

The earned-income tax credit (which mainly benefits low-income workers with children) might sound like a good deal until you find out the people who claimed it in 2018 were audited at a rate ten times higher than the people in the upper income brackets.  

Turns out, the shortage of IRS auditors means you’re more likely to get audited, assuming you’re not lighting cigars with $100 bills and if you are we should really hang out more often.

So the underfunded IRS is like Roy Scheider in Jaws who saw that Great White Shark and instead of saying:

“We need a bigger boat.”

Said:

“We need to go after smaller fish.”

Speaking of great movies…

Yesterday I re-watched Network because I hadn’t seen it since it came out and it turns out a lot of what we thought was over-the-top parody in 1976, is reality now.

The scene where Ned Beatty explains to Peter Finch that there are no longer countries, only corporations, is for my money (unless the IRS audits me and takes it and I’m not rich so that’s a real possibility) one of the greatest scenes in the history of movies and just in case you never saw it or want to see it again here it is:

Real politics: who gets what  

According to the White House, budget cuts have caused the IRS to perform 80% fewer audits over the last decade of people making more than $1 million a year. The administration has estimated that better enforcement could raise $700 billion with a ‘B’ over 10 years in taxes that are owed but are now going unpaid.

This is what politics are actually about: who gets what.

Gender-neutral language bills and keeping transgender students from playing women’s sports and arguments about whether or not Dr. Seuss was a racist are distractions (and I’m part of the problem because I wrote about Dr. Seuss) that keep us occupied and outraged about the wrong stuff while underneath the public radar people do crap like cut funding for the IRS so the rich people that give them political donations do not have to pay their taxes.

I’d say, “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” except that slogan is already taken so I’m going to have to settle for:

“I’m mad as Hell so I’ll probably do another cartoon like the one at the top of this column and then watch a baseball game on TV.”

We should all remember that (spoiler alert, but the movie came out in 1976 so I’m not going to take the blame because you’re 45 years behind on your movie-watching) Howard Beale got shot.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/