“Congress wants more tax revenue because it can’t control its appetite for spending. That’s why it wants a tax agency in beast mode,” writes the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal in an editorial.
The new Manchin-Biden Build Back Better bill allots $80 billion in new funding for the IRS – more than six times the agency’s current annual budget.
Included in the $80 billion is funding to send 87,000 new IRS agents after you and your family-owned business on the belief that everyone is a tax cheat. The IRS has already been targeting lower and middle income earners, yet Democrats want to hire new IRS agents to audit individuals and small businesses. They’ve also promised to revive their invasive bank surveillance scheme.
READ: New Schumer-Manchin Bill Will Supercharge Long History of IRS Abuses
KEY EXCERPTS:
Lower- and middle-income earning Americans are the primary target in Democrats’ bill:
- “The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78 percent to 90 percent of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4 percent to 9 percent would come from those making more than $500,000.”
The IRS has a history of political targeting that threatens religious organizations and critics alike:
- “Lois Lerner notoriously targeted conservative nonprofits for special scrutiny in 2013. ProPublica, the left-leaning website, obtained and published the confidential tax information of private citizens in 2021—conveniently when Democrats were debating whether to impose a new wealth tax. The IRS has promised to investigate the illegal leak but has so far come up empty.”
Only $3.2 billion of the $80 billion total goes towards improving services for taxpayers:
- “Despite all this new money, Americans shouldn’t expect better IRS service. The agency in the 2022 filing season answered a mere 10% of its phone calls. The Taxpayer Advocate Service revealed in June that as of May 31 the IRS was still sitting on 21.3 million unprocessed paper tax returns, with millions of taxpayers ‘waiting six months or more to receive their refunds.’ Yet the Schumer-Manchin bill devotes only $3.2 billion for “taxpayer services.”
READ: Once Again, Biden Pushes to Supercharge an Increasingly Politicized IRS
READ: WRAP-UP: Victims of Politicized IRS Say Agency is Institutionally Incapable of Self-Correcting