Dems Weaponize the IRS to Silence Critics
The Left's hit squad magnifies.
21 comments
[Read the free download of our IRS Ebook: Internal Radical Service.]
The public should be frightened that Democrats are passing new legislation to weaponize the already abusive Internal Revenue Service.
For nearly a century, the IRS has been used by presidents and members of Congress to harass and incriminate political foes. In addition to collecting revenue to fund the government, the IRS is a hit squad that destroys reputations and criminalizes dissenters.
A lot of pain can be inflicted under the guise of tax “auditing.” The bill passed by Congress last week, erroneously labeled the Inflation Reduction Act, will mean more audits and investigations. The bill roughly doubles funding for the IRS enforcement division, adding an estimated 49,600 agents and auditors.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is starving the Defense Department, requesting too little funding to even keep up with inflation, despite Russian and Chinese aggression. Yet his bill will make the IRS three-quarters the size of the U.S. Marine Corps. Who’s Biden making war on?
It’s true the IRS needs funding to improve services to taxpayers, including getting phone calls answered and returns processed, and moving from antiquated paper files to modern technology. The bill allocates a minuscule amount to those priorities and puts the lion’s share — over $45 billion — into “enforcement,” including hiring and arming agents.
As much as 90% of the funds raised through beefed up audits will come from people making less than $200,000 a year, according to the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. Audits can bring a tsunami of government document demands and repeated visits from IRS agents over months or even years. Most people don’t have accountants and lawyers to insulate them from the pain.
While the bill increases IRS muscle, it fails to impose serious criminal penalties for leaking confidential taxpayer information and political targeting. History shows how dangerous that will be.
In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who opposed his New Deal and adversaries like Huey Long and Charles Coughlin.
Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, the IRS gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover access to its files, allowing tax information to be weaponized against the National Council of Churches, the NAACP and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
President John F. Kennedy set up the Ideological Organizations Audit Project to target right-leaning groups, including the think tank American Enterprise Institute and the John Birch Society.
President Richard Nixon’s counsel, John Dean, admitted the administration used “the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” The IRS was Nixon’s weapon of choice. The article of impeachment against Nixon included charges that he ordered “income tax audits or other income tax investigations” in “a discriminatory manner.”
President Bill Clinton sicced the IRS on accusers Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones.
President Barack Obama’s IRS targeted tea party groups and other conservative nonprofits leading up to the 2012 presidential election, delaying their tax status to keep them from raising money. That scandal blew open in 2013 when IRS official Lois Lerner admitted the targeting. Yet no charges were brought against Lerner or any other IRS official, and she retired with full benefits.
And the abuse continues. Biden’s IRS leaked confidential tax information from Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and other billionaires to left-wing publication ProPublica. Tax information is supposed to be kept confidential. We Americans have no choice but to provide it. But the IRS was playing footsie with left-wing media to help Democrats push their false claim that a tax crackdown is needed.
NPR praised the bill passed last week for “going after rich tax dodgers,” while Slate magazine cheered the “supercharged” IRS.
Don’t buy the rhetoric. Tax evasion is not a serious problem in the U.S., as it is in many other nations. Americans deplore tax cheats, according to the polls. The U.S. has one of the highest voluntary tax compliance rates in the world — about 84%.
In truth, the agency’s magnified clout will be used to muzzle and punish political critics. That’s a serious blow to our freedom.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey.
Tax Delinquent Dem Backs Plan To Hire Army of New IRS Agents
Matt Cartwright, who has a history of tax delinquency, endorses bill that more than doubles agency's size
Congressman Matt Cartwright has a history of tax delinquency. That isn't stopping the Pennsylvania Democrat from backing a plan that would sic an army of nearly 90,000 new IRS agents on the American people.
Cartwright last year owed $436.63 in penalties and interest that stemmed from late property tax payments on his Washington, D.C., condo, the Washington Free Beacon reported last week. The incident was not his first tax-related mishap—from 2013 to 2018, the Democrat racked up thousands of dollars in penalties and interest related to his tax delinquencies. Still, Cartwright on Monday announced his support for the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats' $430 billion spending bill that does little to fight inflation and gives the IRS $80 billion to hire up to 87,000 additional employees.
Cartwright's history of tax delinquency and subsequent support for the bill could haunt the congressman as he faces a difficult reelection bid against GOP challenger Jim Bognet. Cartwright trails the Republican by 1 point with 9 percent of voters undecided, internal polling obtained by the Free Beacon shows.
Cartwright will also have to overcome Joe Biden's historic unpopularity, which has even extended to the president's hometown of Scranton. In Cartwright's eighth district, which includes Scranton, just 38 percent of voters approve of Biden, compared with 60 percent who disapprove, the Free Beacon revealed Wednesday. Despite Biden's hometown woes, Cartwright is standing by the president—unlike some of his House Democratic colleagues, the congressman has publicly backed Biden to run for reelection in 2024. Cartwright was also a staunch Biden supporter during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, having said in 2019 that he was "honored" to endorse his "friend, northeastern PA hometown boy, Joe Biden for president."
Cartwright did not return a request for comment. His Monday statement voicing support for Democrats' latest spending bill did not include a comment on its IRS-related provisions. Should that bill pass the House, the IRS will receive $80 billion to hire as many as 87,000 additional employees. The hiring spree would more than double the size of the agency's workforce, making the IRS larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined, the Free Beacon reported. Bognet has railed against the proposal, arguing that the Inflation Reduction Act should instead be called the "Audit America Act."
"With that many new IRS agents, every small business can expect to be audited," Bognet said Monday. "We must stop this spending spree, and we must stop this auditing spree."
Beyond the Cartwright-backed bill's proposed IRS expansion, even liberal economists don't believe the $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act will reduce inflation. Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, whom Biden himself routinely cites, said in a new report that the legislation will cause no change in inflation until the third quarter of 2023, when Americans can expect to enjoy a .01 percent decrease.
Cartwright is nevertheless touting the bill as a win for Democrats. In his Monday statement, he called the bill "landmark legislation" that "the American people have been waiting for."
Cartwright's race against Bognet is not his first. The Democrat narrowly defeated Bognet by roughly 3 points in 2020, a result that marked the tightest reelection bid of his career. Bognet has thus far raised $1.2 million to Cartwright's $3.5 million.
No comments:
Post a Comment