The IRS is about to wage war on the middle class
It’s April 18th so your taxes should be all paid up for the year, but don’t think that leaves you in the clear.
Last year, Congress granted the IRS $80 billion in new funding under the Inflation Reduction Act—a measure supported solely by Democrats. They’ll use those funds to hire tens of thousands of more people, upgrade their technology, and most importantly, increase data and analytics capabilities so they can carry out more audits.
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1582491715772071936
If the first rule of Fight Club is not to talk about Fight Club, the first rule of politics is not to name your bill anything related to the actual contents of the bill. (The Inflation Reduction Act was a trojan horse that had more to do with climate policies than inflation. According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan, research-based organization, there’s low confidence the legislation will have any impact on inflation).
And who do you think is going to pay for all those climate policies? Why you, you silly goose. Hence the expansion of the IRS under this bill, the more agents to come after you with, my pretties.
Though the Biden administration has claimed these agents will only harass people with guns and jail time if they make over $400,000 per year, even the NYT has had to admit that’s unlikely. There are only 770 billionaires in the US. They don’t need all that extra cash to go after “the rich” guys.
https://twitter.com/HannahDCox/status/1556637243628036104
More than half of the IRS’s budget increase will go towards enforcing the US government’s overly complicated and needlessly moronic tax code. According to Biden’s estimates, these efforts will garner an additional $7 trillion over the next decade that it’s currently leaving on the table due to their inability to properly shake down Americans during tax season each year.
For progressives who want to keep spending like a patient that just got a two-week terminal diagnosis, these kinds of money-generating efforts are imperative because no matter what slogans they use, they don’t have the votes to actually raise taxes on “the rich” any further. That’s probably because rich people already pay the bulk of all taxes. In fact the top 1% pay 42.3% of all federal income taxes.
According to National Review, “Those who make over $207,350 now pay 35 percent in income tax. Those who make $518,400 or more pay a 37 percent income-tax rate.” ….And I’d hardly argue $200,000 for a family of four makes you “rich” these days (thanks in large part to that progressive spending that has created inflation).
Democrats need rich donors too, remember. So what’s left to do but squeeze the middle class?
And that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
One, the Biden administration can hardly keep a promise to not increase audits on those making under $400,000 when their whole premise is they’re going to use audits to identify people who are underpaying. How will they know if one is underpaying before they audit you?
Secondly, let’s be frank, it’s a lot easier and cheaper to go after middle income earners for audits than it is the wealthy. The wealthy have teams of lawyers and accountants (lawyers and accountants that are usually much smarter than those working for the government) to defend them and put up barriers for the IRS. They’re a lot of work, but your average small business owner? Not so much.
The IRS has been weaponized against Americans since my grandparents were little kids. Franklin D. Roosevelt (arguably our worst president of all time), used the IRS to go after his political opponents. So did Richard Nixon. Under Bill Clinton, the IRS was given more leeway to audit low-income Americans, leading to congressional hearings where multiple individuals testified to the abuse they were facing at the hands of this agency. During the Barack Obama years it was revealed the IRS was targeting political opponents of his administration. In 2019, reports showed the agency audited poor people at the same rate as the 1%.
Why would anyone believe the assertion that an expansion to the IRS is meant for anything other than to badger average Americans?
The Left has to pay for their runaway spending one way or another. They aren’t going to get much more out of the rich, and spending has already grossly eclipsed revenues. They’re going to take these funds out of the middle and even lower income brackets.
You’re not going to eat the rich. They’re the rubber lure on the hook.
You are the prey.
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