Republicans Have Taken a Brave Stand in Defense of Tax Cheats
America’s tax cheats continue to have no greater ally than the Republican Party.
That once again became clear over the weekend, when Rob Portman, the GOP senator from Ohio, announced that the bipartisan infrastructure package that lawmakers have been haggling over for months would not include a proposal to raise revenue by boosting funding for the Internal Revenue Service. The deal’s original outline would have provided $40 billion to help the financially beleaguered agency collect more of the taxes that Americans fail to pay each year. But after a rebellion by conservative activist groups, Republicans got cold feet about the idea. Now, they have officially nixed it.
In a healthy two-party system where both sides believed in basic good government, financing new spending by improving tax enforcement would be an uncontroversial and common-sense proposal. It is, after all, a more or less free lunch that merely involves enforcing the laws as they exist. It’s a potentially large meal, too. Though estimates vary, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig testified earlier this year that the government may be failing to collect more than $1 trillion of the taxes it is owed annually, up from the previous official estimate of $441 billion per year on average between 2011 and 2013. Even a portion of the missing revenue could pay for a lot of new roads.
But, alas, we do not live in a healthy two-party system where both sides believe in basic good governance. Part of the reason so much tax revenue slips through Uncle Sam’s fingers every year is that Republicans have spent two decades waging an on-and-off war of attrition aimed at limiting the IRS’s powers and starving it of resources, which has ultimately crippled its ability to conduct tax audits on all but the poorest filers. As New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait has explained at length, conservatives have justified this assault based on a series of literally made-up scandals.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/republicans-have-taken-a-brave-stand-in-defense-of-tax-cheats/ar-AAMkHjb
= new reply since forum marked as read
