HOT AIR
The Biden administration has some exciting news for all of you who have been complaining about the state of the country and the failures of this presidency thus far. There’s one area where they are Getting Things Done for the nation and that’s at the IRS. Thanks to all of the money that was sandwiched into the hilariously named Inflation Reduction Act, the tax agency has been able to hire many additional agents. They had originally estimated that this expanded workforce would generate an additional $390 billion in revenue over the next ten years. But recently revised estimates have more than doubled that assessment to as much as $850 billion. Isn’t that awesome? (Government Executive).
A funding and staffing surge at the Internal Revenue Service could lead to as much as $850 billion in new revenue over the next decade, according to a revised estimate by the Biden administration, which said its previous projections left out key drivers of improved tax collection.
Original estimates factored only the direct impact of hiring thousands of additional revenue agents within IRS, which Treasury Department officials now say neglected revenue-generating factors such as service improvements that make it easier for taxpayers to pay what they owe, boosted certainty for those with complex filings and efficiency gains by improving IT and data analytics. Using the old accounting system, IRS projected it would bring in $390 billion in revenue assuming elevated funding for the next 10 years.
The White House is crediting improvements in “technology, data and services” for the expanded revenue stream. But before anyone breaks out the party hats and noisemakers, we should probably keep one important thing in mind. The IRS does not simply print money or make it appear out of thin air. This is all your money that they are vacuuming out of your wallets and purses at a time when half of the country is living paycheck to paycheck. And thanks to all of these “improvements” they will be grabbing a lot more of it.
You might also recall Joe Biden assuring everyone that the army of new tax agents they wanted to bring in would be focusing on making America’s ultra-wealthy “pay their fair share.” They repeated that claim in this week’s announcement. But 85 billion dollars per year would quickly bankrupt all of our billionaires combined. The reality is that the lion’s share of money will be coming from the accounts of regular working-class people who will have their returns scrutinized even more closely by agents looking to squeeze every last penny possible out of them.
The new estimate also focuses on what they refer to as “specific deterrence.” That’s a fancy way of saying that audits make people more likely to pay more than they may have originally estimated or anticipated. With that many new agents, they will be able to engage in a much larger number of audits. And you can once again rest assured that not all of the people being audited will be found at cocktail parties with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Most will be people like you.
The one potential upside to all of this additional revenue might have been the possibility that we could reduce the national debt or at least slow down its growth. But does anyone honestly believe that’s going to happen? You’ve seen members of both parties in both Congress and the White House spending like drunken sailors for decades. If the IRS gifts them another trillion or so dollars over the next ten years, they’ll just find a way to blow that as well. In the year 2000, well within the lifetime of most readers, the national debt was 5.6 trillion dollars. Today it’s 34.2 trillion. We are on the verge of spending more each year on the interest owed on that debt than we do on the military’s budget. This ride isn’t going to go on forever, in case you were wondering…
