Nobody lies with more shameless alacrity than the MAGA saboteurs who now run the U.S. House. They’ve kicked off their reign with a red-meat whopper so untethered from reality that only their fact-free followers could possibly swallow it.
SINO Kevin McCarthy (Speaker in Name Only, hostage to the extremists) proudly announced last night: “House Republicans just voted unanimously to repeal the Democrats’ army of 87,000 IRS agents. This was our very first act of the new Congress…Promises made. Promises kept.”
In truth (for what that’s worth), there is no such “army.” There are no “87,000 IRS agents” poised to audit the tax returns of “hardworking American families…making $75,000 or less.”
Lies spewn. Lies sustained.
It will be a long two years with these MAGAts, which excel at conjuring phantom enemies. It will be impossible to keep pace with their BS, much less fact-check them in real time. But just to give you a flavor of what the future holds, let’s take apart their agitprop about IRS bogeymen – because their rhetoric says so much about how they plan to operate.
Where to begin!
1. Their “repeal” will never actually happen because the Senate would block it. The money in question – $78 billion to the IRS – was already appropriated in the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act that President Biden signed last year.
2. That money enables the IRS to hire roughly 87,000 total employees – mostly tech support and customer service people, not “agents” – over the next 10 years.
3. Most of those new hires will replace current IRS employees who are expected to retire in the next five to 10 years. The overall goal is to return total IRS staffing to a level last seen in the early 1990s.
4. Of those 87,000 projected new hires, less than one percent (only 6,500) would actually be “agents.”
5. Republicans have also lied for months that the “87,000 agents” would be “armed,” perhaps with “AR-15s.” In truth, less than one percent of all the new hires would be armed.
6. The new money for tech support is crucial, because the IRS is still using technology from the 1960s to process individual tax returns. The new money for customer service is crucial because right now there’s a massive backlog of unanswered citizen inquiries. As John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner, recently told Time magazine, “The people who are significantly disadvantaged are average taxpayers who have a simple question and can’t get through. Those are Republicans as well as independents and Democrats.”
7. The House MAGAt claim that an agent “army” will harass “hardworking” modest-income Americans is just a figment of their calculated paranoia. The Treasury Department says that when overall IRS staffing is beefed up with the new money, only 0.5 percent of modest-income returns (under $75,000 a year) would be audited. Indeed, a key purpose of the new money – more sophisticated tech support – is to crack down on super-rich tax cheats. That’s where the audit energy will go.
Ah ha! Now we’ve arrived at the real reason for the House MAGAts’ anti-IRS fervor.
Three ex-IRS commissioners, appointed by presidents of both parties, said last summer that the new money is designed to boost the IRS’ “capacity to enforce the tax laws against sophisticated taxpayers who today evade their tax obligations freely because they know that the IRS lacks the tools it needs to pursue them.”
And that’s the last thing Republican leaders want to happen.
Hence their strategy to stoke anti-government paranoia, to feed pap to their saps, in order to protect tax cheats at the top of the income scale. And they figure that maybe they can best protect their true constituency later this year by insisting that the IRS money be canceled as the price for agreeing to raise the U.S. debt ceiling. Lying about a non-existent IRS “army,” on behalf of the rich, is just the House Republicans demonstrating that they are true Marxists.
As in, Groucho Marx. Who once said, “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”