What do Republicans really care about? Cutting the deficit, or cutting taxes on rich people? The AP reports, you decide:
The IRS has dramatically increased its pursuit of tax cheats in the past decade: Audits are up, property liens are up and asset seizures are way up. President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress see stepped up enforcement as a good way to narrow the nation’s staggering budget deficit without raising tax rates or cutting popular spending programs.
….IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman told the committee Tuesday that the $600 million cut in this year’s budget would result in the IRS collecting $4 billion less through tax enforcement programs. The Democrat-controlled Senate is unlikely to pass a budget cut that big. But given the political
climate on Capitol Hill, Obama’s plan to increase IRS spending is unlikely to pass, either.
That $600 million cut is part of the Republican budget plan, and even if we assume that Shulman is talking his book, it’s a dead certainty that cutting the auditing budget will be a net loser for the deficit. However, it’s also a dead certainty that cutting the auditing budget will primarily benefit rich people who are cheating on their taxes.
The AP dispatch also reports that Republicans are planning a retro-style blast from the past: a reenactment of the infamous Roth hearings of the 90s, in which IRS agents were portrayed as jackbooted thugs who waved guns around and extorted money out of innocent, hardworking small businessmen. Virtually none of it turned out to be true, but it didn’t matter: the Roth hearings led to budget cuts that crippled the IRS’s auditing capability for years. The rich cheered then, and they’re cheering now too.
But the budget deficit? That’s a worry for another day.
