Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

This fight is for everything.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

“Joe Biden deserved better than he got from some folks in his own party.”

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Come on, man.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

FFS people, this was a good thing. take the win.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

I did not have this on my fuck 2024 bingo card.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: (Tax Cheats) Fear the IRS

C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: (Tax Cheats) Fear the IRS

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Backgrounder, from Dana Milbank at the Washington Post:

… Let’s consider the lie, endlessly repeated by Republicans and the Fox News-led echo chamber, that new legislation enacted by Democrats funds the hiring of “87,000 armed IRS agents.” Like the “death panel” fabrication during the Obamacare debate, this is a whole-cloth invention designed to stoke paranoia.

Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sent an open letter last week warning Americans not to work for the IRS. He falsely claimed that the Democrats’ climate, energy and tax bill would add “roughly 87,000 agents” at the IRS, creating “an IRS super-police force”:

“The IRS made it very clear that one of the ‘major duties’ of these new positions is to ‘be willing to use deadly force.’ … The IRS is making it very clear that you not only need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them.”

The IRS certainly isn’t adding 87,000 armed agents. It isn’t even adding 87,000 agents. In fact, it’s not even adding 87,000 employees.

When you figure in attrition (current funding doesn’t let the IRS fill all vacancies), Treasury officials tell me, the expected increase in personnel would be more like 40,000, over the course of a decade — which would merely restore IRS staffing to around the 117,000 it had in 1990.

Only about 6,500 of the new hires would be “agents.” The rest would be customer-service representatives, data specialists and the like.

And fewer than 1 percent of the new hires would be armed. (The IRS job posting Scott cited, which predated the new law, was specifically for such law-enforcement personnel.) Such officers, who go after drug rings and Russian oligarchs, have been part of the IRS for more than a century.

As for the IRS coming after “hardworking Americans,” Treasury says the new law will result in a “lower likelihood of audit” for ordinary taxpayers, because technology upgrades will enable the IRS to target the actual tax cheats — the super-rich — for more audits. The wealthiest 1 percent defraud the government, and fellow taxpayers, of more than $160 billion a year.…

(But the ‘wealthiest 1 percent’ is Rick Scott’s demographic, so it’s predictable that he’s very upset about it… and of course, lying as fast as his forked tongue allows.)

Reader Interactions

46Comments

  1. 1.

    Martin

    The simple answer to anyone concerned about hiring IRS agents:

    Every dollar the IRS can’t collect from people cheating the government is a dollar in new taxes the government needs to raise on people who do pay their taxes. IRS agents only ever lower your taxes or force you to pay them.

  2. 2.

    Mike in NC

    Imbecile Ted Cruz tweeted out some bullshit about defunding the IRS. Because who needs to collect taxes in his dystopia?

  3. 3.

    Jeffro

    The Grassley/Cruz/Scott murderous incitement shit deserves a Dark Brandon speech all its own.

    I’m quite serious.  Show the country that the GOP side of the Senate – the ‘cooling saucer’ we’re all supposed to revere on a par with the Founders – has gone completely bugshit insane, just like trump.

  4. 4.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Martin: Amen!  The IRS is the friend of every taxpayer without the scams (partnerships, real estate, tax shelters, interesting charitable annuities, trusts, it goes on and on …) it takes to  cheat on your taxes.  Every taxpayer whose main earnings are on their W-2, and in retirement/investment accounts at big banks (Vanguard,  Fidelity, etc): those (me too!) taxpayers have  no way to hide their money, so they pay what they owe.  The thieves who don’t pay what they owe force us to pay even more.  Go after the thieves, and we’ll pay less.

  5. 5.

    Cacti

    @Jeffro: When the postmortem on the American Republic is written, I think a lot of ink will go to the institutional corruption of the Senate.

  6. 6.

    danielx

    The Grassley/Cruz/Scott murderous incitement shit deserves a Dark Brandon speech all its own.

    It does indeed, addressed to “my former colleagues and former friends”. Though it’s nothing to the opprobrium they will richly deserve when somebody makes an armed assault or commits a bombing against a regional IRS office.​
    @Chetan Murthy: ​

    The IRS is the friend of every taxpayer without the scams (partnerships, real estate, tax shelters, interesting charitable annuities, trusts, it goes on and on …) it takes to cheat on your taxes.

    I don’t think I’d go quite that far – the IRS has no friends when it comes to tax collection.​

  8. 8.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Mike in NC:

    Imbecile Ted Cruz tweeted out some bullshit about defunding the IRS. Because who needs to collect taxes in his dystopia? 

    And fuck off winterized power grid!

  9. 9.

    danielx

    @Mike in NC: ​
     
    And it’s not like Texas ever has natural disasters and the governor NEVER howls for Federal aid…for anything besides immigrants, that is.

  10. 10.

    Cacti

    Since it’s an open thread…

    How long before the NYT offers a hot take that Republicans losing a House seat they’d held in Alaska since 1971 is actually bad news for the Dems?

  13. 13.

    Martin

    @mrmoshpotato: Gavin Newsom went off on Texas’ coal consumption in his speech today. Basically, if you are burning coal to run your AC, you are simply hastening your own destruction.

  15. 15.

    mrmoshpotato

    “Are they going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s … ready to shoot some small business person in Iowa?” — Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) speculates on what the IRS will do with their increase in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act

    Chuck, please retire. Seriously, you’re embarrassing yourself and misspending your remaining days.

    Having said that – every! – Republican can retire for the same reason.

  18. 18.

    Geminid

    Jimmy Dore and Ryan Knight might not just be clout chasing. I suspect those two are hit dogs hollering. They and other fauxgressives are raking in big money from rosie rubes to help “fight the system.” I bet if they ever get audited they’ll be giving a lot of it up, plus penalities.

  19. 19.

    bbleh

    rage fuel for the GOPs most paranoid, anti-government voters.

    I.e., anything that any Republican politician, spokesperson, surrogate, or media personality says.

    They’re rage junkies.  That’s it.  True or false, today or 50 years ago, doesn’t matter.

    The good news is, a lot of them can’t do more than rage unless it’s within golf-cart distance.

  22. 22.

    Tom Q

    @mrmoshpotato: Grassley openly referred to “Killing Grandma” during the health care debate in 2009, so this isn’t trashing his reputation late career — he’s been full of it for a long time.

  31. 31.

    different-church-lady

    Instead it’s serving as rage fuel for the GOPs most paranoid, anti-government voters.

    They know if they lose those voters their game is over.

  34. 34.

    Ken

    @mrmoshpotato: An army of accountants!  I’m shaking in my bones!!

    And well you should, because they absolutely will not stop, ever, until the books are reconciled.

    Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal has a lovely passage where Lord Vetinari’s clerks are analyzing a complex fraud, examining every record and every transaction, and finding every lie. Something like “It was the warfare of clerks. Hour after hour it went on, with a patience that first terrified, then bored, then terrified again.”

  36. 36.

    Martin

    Politico reporting that Christina Bobb was the likely original author of the executive order to seize voting machines.

    I don’t see many people suggesting that the retained documents by Trump were to hide evidence of his coup plot. Bobb is probably really fucked here.

  37. 37.

    Jackie

    @Cacti: I can only offer good news: Crist formally resigned from his Congressional seat to focus 100% on ousting DeSantis; her special election win negates the seat we lost in the House. McCarthy is NOT happy!😁

  38. 38.

    Jackie

    @HumboldtBlue: YAY for Dad’s who support their daughters!!!

    My Dad was an early supporter – he celebrated Roe way back when his three daughters were teens in ‘73.

  41. 41.

    Baud

    If people hadn’t identified some of those tweets as lefty, I would have assumed they were from the fascists.

  43. 43.

    ObedMarsh

    What?  You mean that I’m not getting a firearm?  Darn it.  I already had a FN FAL picked out….

    Oh, well.  Let them hate me, as long as they fear me.

    Seriously, though – there is an armed guard outside my workplace now.  They are tearing up the sidewalk to install more truck barricades.  I now have to take of my mask when I enter the building for full identification, as well as hand the guard my ID so that they can closely examine it.

    Many, many IRS employees work from home.  The GOP is making it so employees will not even be safe from their neighbors.  “Senators” like Rafael Cruz are being beyond irresponsible.  It was one thing when the GOP riled up their violent, slack-jawed base with baseless threats of evil socialism when the ACA passed. The only targets of the rage voters were Democratic politicians and some amorphous concept of ObamaCare.  Now it is a specific government agency with real people working at it.

  44. 44.

    Elizabelle

    @ObedMarsh:   I hope Biden addresses this situation.  News media fuckers would yell “partisan!”, although they sure allow their airwaves and papers to carry the GOP bullshit.

    It is dangerous.  Stay safe and productive.

  45. 45.

    DrDaveChemist

    Dead thread, but relevant: The refund from my paper return finally posted to my bank account today. Hopefully some of that funding goes toward hiring more people to process returns and to creating a free e-file service that a majority of taxpayers can use without enriching Intuit or H&R Block.

  46. 46.

    Tamospam

    I remember having dinner with History’s Greatest Monster, and having him GO OFF about how important it was for the IRS to be accessible, and have someone answer the phone when a taxpayer called.  Paying our taxes is a lot more stressful for everyone when they are perceived as a scary blob.

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