According to Joe Biden, America faces a massive tax gap, defined as the difference between what Americans owe in taxes and what they actually pay in taxes. And this gap, Biden says (when you can understand him) can only be addressed by an $80 billion increase in the IRS enforcement budget.
Biden goes on to say that if we could close the gap, we could sieze as much as $700 billion in additional government revenue.
This claim manages to be both utter nonsense AND entirely irrelevant at the same time. Quite a feat for Slow Joe.
That number ($700 Billion) is B.S. because Joe, or more accurately the Government functionaries who came up with that number and told him to recite it, really have no idea how much an increased enforcement effort would net. That’s because every time the Government changes tax policy, the free market (individuals and coporations) change their behavior in ways that cannot be predicted by anyone. So the IRS looks at what they think they are owed, they imagine a policy change and then they take a guess at how much they’ll be able to sieze via that policy change. But of course ten thousand private sector tax experts are much smarter, as a group, than a bunch of unionized government functionaries and so the best we can say about the $700 Billion estimate is that it’s… rosy (I call it cattle excrement but I’m trying to be kind).
But while it’s relatively easy to see that these numbers are B.S., it’s much more difficult to understand why they are irrelevant. That difficulty is a function of the way politicians talk about budget numbers. Whenever they talk about deficits or the debt, they do so in a way that makes them sound smaller than they are. They always tell you what the deficit will be this year or next, they never say what the total deficit will be over a ten-year-period because that would scare the pants off everyone.
Similarly, whenever they talk about tax revenue, they talk about it in a way that makes it sound larger than it actually is. And you can see exactly how they work the con in this latest missive from the Biden Junta. They tell you they will be able to sieze as much as 700 billion dollars! and your eyes pop so wide that you don’t hear them add, almost in a whisper, “over the next decade.”
So the fantasy of $700 billion very quickly becomes a sobering reality of $70 billion per year.
Guys… Joe Biden wants to spend 6 TRILLION dollars this year adding it to a National Debt that will soon be more than $30 Trillion on its way to the moon. $70 Billion is a rounding error.
And he wants to give the IRS $80 Billion in addiitonal funding to try and sieze that money. The annoucement is not clear on whether the $80 Billion would be an annual increase or a one-time bump spread out over a decade, but either way, at least the first year of $70 billion tax revenue increases (which we’ve already shown is a B.S. number anyway) is a total wash.
This is not about revenue, this is about control. They want more funding to hire more government enforcement agents (who immediately become Democrat voters/donors so they can protect their jobs and salaries, by the way) to make your life miserable. That’s all this is. Don’t fall for it.
One last point. We all remember, or at least we should remember, the Obama-era scandal where the IRS was weaponized against Conservatives trying to create tax-free entities to fight for tax Liberty and the goals of the then-Tea Party. And now we are in the middle of another scandal where the IRS has been weaponized, this time by illegally leaking the tax returns of rich people to a media source (ProPublica). And again, it’s happening under a Democrat Adminstration. So the question is why would anyone want to help the Democrats increase the enforcement budget of an agency that seems to get weaponized against innocent American citizens every time the Democrats control the Government? Personally I think we ought to pass a law that every time a Democrat wins the White House, the IRS enforcement budget automatically shrinks by 25%.
THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO “HMMMM” – You can increase the IRS enforcement budget as much as you want, but how will we arrrest tax scofflaws if we “defund the police”?