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If you haven’t heard, the U.S. Senate just officially passed the Democratic-proposed Inflation Reduction Act. Basically, it’s an overzealous and not so subtle way for the Democratic Party to get new funding for all the things on their agenda, with climate control at the top of the list – and right before an election cycle that is likely to take their power and majority from them.
Included in that would-be funding is an increased budget for the left’s beloved Internal Revenue Service or IRS.
According to the bill, the IRS will soon receive a whopping $80 billion in funding, increasing its current budget by over 600 percent.
So what is the money going to do for the IRS? The bill stipulates that about $46 billion will be spent on enforcement needs within the agency. The rest will be used to beef up technology, customer service, and general operations, including hiring more staff.
But all of this has more than a few questioning the move as a political one.
As I mentioned before, the Inflation Reduction Act is really all about fighting what the political left calls climate control and the supposed need to mitigate humanity’s footprint on our world. In total, the bill offers $370 billion for that cause and another $64 billion for the costs of the Affordable Care Act health plans.
However, someone has to pay for all that climate control funding, right?
And so, the bill designates that the IRS step up their enforcement efforts to better collect the billions owed to them each year, including what is estimated to be about $400 billion a year in the so-called tax gap.
As the head of tax at financial services firm Betterment, Eric Bronnenkant explains, this tax gap is the “gap between taxes collected and actual taxes owed.” Thanks to underreporting income or other methods of making one’s tax burdens seem much lower, the IRS rarely gets what is actually owed to them.
And so, the idea is to increase the enforcement of tax laws to close that gap, as well as get the federal government some much-needed funding.
Naturally, this means upping their game on auditing.
Now, of course, the IRS says that you don’t have to worry about the chances of you being audited increasing. According to IRS commissioner Charles Rettig, “audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000.”
Instead, the agency says that just high-earning individuals and businesses will be audited more. Oh, and anyone who is either self-employed, who operates a cash business, or who makes less than $25,000 a year.
Just to let you know, thanks to rising inflation and Biden’s ridiculous economic decisions, more and more Americans now fall into that “low-income” tax bracket than ever before. And, of course, those who are self-employed are also far more prevalent thanks to the use of the internet and gig jobs like Uber.
Additionally, as history has taught us, the IRS tends to go after those who lean a bit more to the right.
In fact, the biggest IRS scandal to have ever taken place occurred when the political left pushed the agency to target several Tea Party conservative groups while Lois Lerner was still the senior executive there.
Even now, the tax-exempt status of faith-based groups like the Family Research Council is targeted by the IRS, thanks to an early August letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commissioner Rettig by House Democrats.
Of other concern is that the bill will allow the agency to make an untold number of new hires over the coming years. At one point, it was estimated that over the next ten years, some 87,000 new employees would be added – to a staff that is already 80,000 strong. This would make the agency, officially, the largest in the land.
For a nation that began based on unfair taxation that seems a little ironic, wouldn’t you say?
Perhaps, if the agency wanted to save more money, they should think about spending far less on guns and ammunition.
Yes, you read that correctly. According to multiple sources, the IRS has spent a whopping $20 million on guns and ammo between 2006 and 2019. Currently, their stockpiles include more than 5 million rounds of ammunition.
What does the IRS even need that for?
And yet, they need more money to hire more enforcement agents and ensure you aren’t cheating the government out of its cut? Yeah, I’m not so sure about that.