Stripping Funding from the IRS is a Tax Cut for the Wealthy.

[homersapien 11,440]

"Washington Examiner" spreading right wing propaganda??

Shocking!  (not)

Edited January 12, 2023 by homersapien

[AUFAN78 3,926]

3 hours ago, homersapien said:

"Washington Examiner" spreading right wing propaganda??

Shocking!  (not)

It's an opinion much like the OP. If you find it troubling you can certainly refute the data. Or can you not? Is that the real issue here? 

[homersapien 11,440]

4 minutes ago, AUFAN78 said:

It's an opinion much like the OP. If you find it troubling you can certainly refute the data. Or can you not? Is that the real issue here? 

What data?

[AUFAN78 3,926]

10 minutes ago, homersapien said:

What data?

That which you didn't read apparently. 

[homersapien 11,440]

8 minutes ago, AUFAN78 said:

That which you didn't read apparently. 

Well, apparently, neither did you.

 

[AUFAN78 3,926]

2 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Well, apparently, neither did you.

 

I read it and you cannot refute it. Quite clear the problem here.

[homersapien 11,440]

2 minutes ago, AUFAN78 said:

I read it and you cannot refute it. Quite clear the problem here.

Refute what? 

[AUFAN78 3,926]

Just now, homersapien said:

Refute what? 

King Weasel 

[CoffeeTiger 5,169]

18 hours ago, AUFAN78 said:

Biden's IRS army is not coming for billionaires — it's coming for you

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/bidens-irs-army-is-not-coming-for-billionaires-its-coming-for-you

Well #1 against this opinion is it keeps calling the estimated 87,000 hires as "agents", which as mentioned above is objectively false. These 87,000 new hires are to be for the entire IRS organization and only 13% of IRS employees are actual tax agents, and many of the hires are replacements for retirements and attrition. 

If the article can't get the basics correct, it immediately calls into question the rest of it's claims. 

 

It also quietly confirms that audits of the rich ARE the most lucrative, "It is true that audits of $5 million annual earners are marginally more lucrative than audits of the poor, but they only net about $4,800 per man-hour. That’s because those audits require, on average, 60 man-hours, and they are about four times as likely to result in no change to the taxpayer’s bill as are audits of households earning less than $200,000. It turns out rich people have lawyers and tax experts and are far more likely than anyone else to have a bulletproof tax return."

Yes....that's the entire point of extra funding to provide funding to provide resources to allow the IRS the ability to perform these more complicated and time consuming audits. 

The article also says "the IRS currently doesn't even audit 10% of the rich", while conveniently ignoring the facts...again provided in the OP...that decades ago when the IRS was better funded and had more employees than it has now, over 20% of higher earners were audited.

It's almost like the weaker the IRS becomes.....the fewer rich who gets audited. 

 

 

 

Edited January 13, 2023 by CoffeeTiger

[icanthearyou 4,463]

The attempt to portray the IRS as an "army", the attempt to create fear around the IRS is, on the surface, propaganda for dolts.

The problem is not the IRS.  The problem is the tax code.  The problem is a tax system more focused on taxing labor than income.  We have not had significant tax reform in decades.  We have merely shifted the tax burden.  In an environment in which income is increasingly concentrated, the only real alternative is debt. 

The people making most of the income, don't want to pay taxes.  They have the power to make that happen.  Even if they have to steal from those who have yet to be born.

 

Preying on stupidity, promoting anger and fear, are what propaganda does.  The WE article was written to frighten the stupid.

[Son of A Tiger 561]

20 hours ago, homersapien said:

"Washington Examiner" spreading right wing propaganda??

Shocking!  (not)

Seems only fair to have another paper to offset the left wing propaganda of the Washington Post😀

[AUFAN78 3,926]

9 hours ago, Son of A Tiger said:

Seems only fair to have another paper to offset the left wing propaganda of the Washington Post😀

The point is to present opposing views. You decide.

[DKW 86 7,440]

The Wealthy hire lawyers. They beat the IRS with their wealth and ability to fight back. 

The Middleclass? They are low hanging fruit for the IRS. They cant fight back.

[arein0 977]

13 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

The Wealthy hire lawyers. They beat the IRS with their wealth and ability to fight back. 

The Middleclass? They are low hanging fruit for the IRS. They cant fight back.

Isnt that why you need to hire more employees? When you are understaffed, you aren't going to go after the big fish because you cant afford to have what few employees you have locked up in court. While being understaffed,  you are going to settle for the low hanging fruit just to keep the lights on, because you cant afford to take those risks.

Regardless I think the current tax system should be overhauled for personal income tax. The IRS already receives a huge chunk of our tax information through mandated forms. I would bet 90% of tax returns could be automated to where all you have to do is verify your totals are correct and manually input any cash incomes or donations.

[JMWATS 104]

https://waysandmeans.house.gov/even-treasury-admits-potential-for-new-irs-audits-of-middle-class/

 Enforcement is by far the biggest line item in the new IRS funding. More than half of the spending, $46 billion, will go to monitoring and compliance.
 

That includes enforcement on the middle class taxpayer.

Edited January 14, 2023 by JMWATS

[DKW 86 7,440]

3 hours ago, arein0 said:

Isnt that why you need to hire more employees? When you are understaffed, you aren't going to go after the big fish because you cant afford to have what few employees you have locked up in court. While being understaffed,  you are going to settle for the low hanging fruit just to keep the lights on, because you cant afford to take those risks.

Regardless I think the current tax system should be overhauled for personal income tax. The IRS already receives a huge chunk of our tax information through mandated forms. I would bet 90% of tax returns could be automated to where all you have to do is verify your totals are correct and manually input any cash incomes or donations.

It’s not a staffing issue. It is a process issue. Hiring more powerless attorneys is going to do nothing against people with just as good legal help. 

[homersapien 11,440]

.....Steve Scalise is the ideal majority leader for the post-truth era.

Boasting to reporters about passage of “the bill to repeal those 87,000 IRS agents,” he claimed that the Congressional Budget Office “confirmed” that those agents would “go after people making less than $200,000 a year,” including “the single mom who’s working two shifts at a restaurant.”

In reality, the IRS is hiring only about 6,500 agents — and that’s over a decade. In reality, the CBO said that only “a small fraction” of revenue from increased enforcement would come from taxpayers earning less than $400,000 a year.

Here’s what else CBO said: The Republicans’ bill to cut funds to the IRS — the new majority’s first legislation — would add $114 billion to the deficit. So much for fiscal responsibility.

But Republicans spent the entire debate repeating the outright falsehood that 87,000 “agents” would “target American working-class families” (Jason T. Smith, Mo.) and “harass and spy on middle-class and low-income families” (Michelle Steel, Calif.). Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) falsely said the CBO had projected “as many as 700,000 more audits, [of] Americans making less than $75,000 a year.”

Beth Van Duyne (R-Tex.) added the inventive claim that the fake agents would “make the IRS larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI and Border Control together.” The Defense Department alone employs about 3 million people.....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/13/house-republicans-govern-lie-weaponization-committeee/

[arein0 977]

1 hour ago, DKW 86 said:

It’s not a staffing issue. It is a process issue. Hiring more powerless attorneys is going to do nothing against people with just as good legal help. 

I disagree. I would bet that the number of employees wouldn't change how much of the middle class gets audited. I would bet it is extremely easy to identify issues with the middle class tax returns since they receive all the information they need. If I'm the IRS, there are really only 2 obvious scenarios to audit the middle class. 1) # of forms we received is more than the # of forms they sent. And 2) anytime your charity and other deductions reduce your take home wage to unsupportable. An example would be claiming 60k in charitable contributions on a 90k paycheck. The middle class are low hanging fruit because our tax returns are so easy and straightforward, but more employees wont change how many are getting audited because they probably are already maxing that class.