GOP Rep. Cline: IRS Is Going After Regular People, They’re Policing $600 Transactions
On Tuesday’s broadcast of Newsmax TV’s “John Bachman Now,” Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA) said that Republicans took up repealing funding for increased IRS agents as their first act in the House majority because increasing the size of the agency, combined with the IRS requiring people to report transactions above $600 would create a massive amount of IRS intrusiveness into the lives of everyday people.
Cline stated, “They wanted to increase taxes on the American people and they want to increase the number of Americans taxed. And so, they’ve increased, by 87,000 staff and agents, the number of IRS employees, and they’re going to be increasing the number of audits. Those audits are going to be targeting not just the super-rich, but hard-working Americans, small businesses. And so, with that, combined with the new snooping that they’re going to have into your Venmo transactions, anything above $600 is going to have to be reported to the IRS. The combination of this intrusiveness is really, really resonating with the American people. They’re not going to have it. And so, that’s why the very first bill that we acted upon in the new Congress was to repeal funding for those 87,000 IRS staff and agents.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
Poor People Five Times More Likely Than Average Earner To Be Audited by Biden IRS
Just 1 percent of those making $1 million per year in income faced a regular audit
Poor people faced a significantly higher chance in 2022 of being audited by President Joe Biden's IRS than both rich and middle-class earners, according to a Syracuse University study.
In fact, no group faced as much scrutiny from the IRS as those who made below $25,000, the university's data-gathering center found. Among families that benefited from the earned income tax credit, a rebate on income and payroll taxes made available to the nation's poorest families, 1.27 percent were audited. The IRS in 2022 audited just 0.19 percent of the vast majority of taxpayers, meaning the poorest families were at least 550 percent more likely to have the IRS knock on their door than the average filer.
These families were also more likely to receive a regular audit by the IRS than families that reported over $1 million in income, of which just over 1 percent faced regular audits. In total, the IRS audited a total 626,204 taxpayers out of more than 164 million in the 2022 fiscal year. The bulk of those audits were of filers in the lowest income group.
The new data raise questions about the IRS's auditing strategy as it stands to benefit from $80 billion in new funding that the Biden administration plans to use for new hires. Republicans have alleged that despite White House promises to the contrary, middle-class and poor Americans will face more audits due to the 87,000 new IRS employees the agency plans to hire.
The agency does not publicly disclose its auditing data. Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan data gathering and distribution organization, went to court to obtain the information through a Freedom of Information Act request. How the IRS decides exactly whom it will audit is largely a mystery.
"Answering this question remains a key challenge that Danny Werfel faces if confirmed as the new IRS commissioner," the authors of the report write, referring to Biden's nominee to lead the revenue service. "One of his first orders of business should be lifting this secrecy curtain. He needs to put in its place a full and detailed transparency program to keep the public informed on how these new funds are being applied in the selection of taxpayers for stepped up audits."
"Republicans have attacked funding for the IRS for years in an effort to protect wealthy tax cheats, who are responsible for $163 billion in tax evasion per year," a White House spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon. "President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which is only beginning to rebuild enforcement for wealthy Americans, will finally force wealthy tax cheats to pay their fair share while making it easier for working Americans to get their tax refunds."
The IRS did not respond to a request for comment.
Then-IRS commissioner Charles Rettig testified before Congress last August that the IRS would not increase audits of households earning less than $400,000 if it received the additional funding sought by Biden. Democrats have long claimed that part of the reason the IRS audits poor households so frequently is because it lacks resources to go after wealthy tax cheats, who can afford lawyers and accountants.
"These resources are absolutely not about increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans," Rettig said at the time.
A Congressional Budget Office report last year concluded that the IRS will collect billions of dollars from auditing low- and middle-income Americans, thanks to the new staff funded by the Inflation Reduction Act. The report found that audits of taxpayers making under $400,000 will account for $20 billion in additional revenue.
The IRS has faced accusations, including from its own internal watchdog, that its auditing practices discriminate against low-income earners. The National Taxpayer Service stated in its 2021 annual report that the IRS is focused on sending as many audits as possible rather than customer service.
"Lower-income taxpayers … are not assigned a single point of contact and have a hard time reaching the IRS," the watchdog's report said. "The IRS often closes its audits without any contact from the taxpayer. This creates additional downstream consequences for these taxpayers and the IRS."
House Republicans Vote To Cancel Biden’s Billion-Dollar IRS Funding
House Republicans, in the first act of their tenure in the majority, voted on Monday to rescind nearly $71 billion of the $80 billion that the previously Democratic-controlled Congress allocated to the IRS through the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
The House passed the bill 221-210 along party lines, though the cancellation of funds will likely not make it past the Democratic majority in the Senate. The bill is part of House Republicans' campaign promise to "hold the administration accountable."
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August, allocated $80 billion to more than double the IRS workforce, which would make the agency larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined. Proponents of the bill argued that better IRS audits and scrutiny would target wealthy corporations that hide their income. According to a study from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, the majority of the new revenue gained from IRS audits will actually come from those making less than $200,000 a year.
President Joe Biden in a statement Monday dismissed the Republicans' act, calling it "a reckless bill." Democrats argue that vetoing the funds only aids large corporations and puts more of the burden on middle-class Americans.
"With their first economic legislation of the new Congress, House Republicans are making clear that their top economic priority is to allow the rich and multibillion-dollar corporations to skip out on their taxes, while making life harder for ordinary, middle-class families that pay the taxes they owe," the White House said.
A Syracuse University study found, however, that in 2022 those who made below $25,000 were at least 550 percent more likely to be audited by the IRS than the average taxpayer.
"The IRS does not need a raise—it needs a reckoning," Rep. Jason Smith (R., Mo.), the recently elected chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, said about the bill.
Rep. Jeff Duncan (R., S.C.) said the money Democrats provided to the IRS had one purpose: "to go after small businesses [and] hard-working Americans to try to raise money for … reckless spending that has caused $31 trillion in debt in this nation."
Published under: Biden Administration, Government Spending, House of Representatives, IRS,
cut and paste youtube links
Left-Wing Journalists Are Truly Some of the Worst People on the Planet
Protecting the powerful from the truth.
by
There is a great line in the great movie “Chasing Amy,” where one character tells another (who happens to be gay), “I feel a hate crime coming on” after they have an amusing back and forth. While writer/director Kevin Smith would likely hate my use of that line and everything about my politics, I don’t really give a damn because it’s funny and it fits how I feel when I watch leftist journalists operate in a post-Trump world (and I’m still a fan of Smith’s work anyway).
Think what you will of Donald Trump – personally, I could use a break from hearing about and from him – no one did more to expose the hypocrisy of the left than he did, and he didn’t actually do anything to cause it except to exist. Hillary Clinton was supposed to win in 2016, breaking the “glass ceiling” and ushering in an era of GOP destruction. Instead, she lost to this “monster,” setting off Democrats, both with and without press passes, into a rage-spiral that not only hasn’t stopped, but has only sped up. That included “conservatives” who seem to resent political victories they claimed they always wanted simply because they were done on his watch.
Donald Trump didn’t make them insane, his existence simply sped up the process – pulling back the curtain, or actually pulling the curtain and the rod off the wall completely. I truly despise them.
The reason for the title is watching these people “cover” the revelations of Twitter’s internal deliberations and actions on the Hunter Biden story before the 2020 election is something to behold that should make everyone sick, I know it does me. I won’t go so far as to say it would have changed the outcome of the election, but to pretend it couldn’t have is asinine. And the people pretending otherwise deserve a swift smack across the face with the cold, dead fish of reality, if only metaphorically.
But viewers and readers of the leftist media wouldn’t have any idea of the story at all. CBS News didn’t bother covering it at all. The Washington Post and New York Times burned their calories downplaying collusion between government and soon to be government officials and the silencing of a media outlet’s major story because they’re on the other team.
The Times downplayed the whole affair, writing, “Mr. Musk and Mr. Taibbi framed the exchanges as evidence of rank censorship and pernicious influence by liberals. Many others — even some ardent Twitter critics — were less impressed, saying the exchanges merely showed a group of executives earnestly debating how to deal with an unconfirmed news report that was based on information from a stolen laptop.” (Emphasis added)
This is telling that it’s a rehash of an old line of attack on the story – that it’s “hacked” info from a “stolen laptop.” When not pretending it was the most elaborate Russian spy game ever, leftists insisted the material was “stolen” and, therefore, shouldn’t be reported on because “standards of professionalism” or something. This is an industry that dines out on leaked information, classified/personal/whatever. If it’s useful to the left’s narrative they are all over it like a rash.
Speaking of rashes, the Hunter Biden story was of no interest, so it was dismissed as “stolen,” even though the chain of custody of the laptop was never in doubt or the legality of the repair shop’s ownership after it was abandoned was irrefutable. Hunter was a junkie/drunk/prostitute frequenter, the only people who didn’t know this were people who didn’t want to know it. That a junkie wouldn’t be mindful of where their stuff is or concerned with forfeiting ownership of that property, especially when they have plenty of money and don’t need that property to sell to buy more drugs, surprises no one. Still, leftists pretended the idea that it was abandoned was insane.
The evidence of the Biden family’s involvement and benefitting from Hunter’s businesses was unhelpful and needed to be buried. When CBS News finally got around to “verifying” the laptop was real, their 5-minute story explaining how they contacted computer experts who (pretty easily) verified it’s real involved no mentions of any of the content on the laptop and no follow up reporting on it either. It’s gross.
Worse was the way MSNBC treated it. Watch this segment on the Symone Sanders show (I don’t know what it’s called, nor do I care) with Michael Steele, MSNBC’s token “Republican” (challenge: find one issue on which Steele is still conservative on. I’ll wait.) It is clear from watching it that neither host nor guest know anything about the story as neither remotely address details. What they do have is talking points, likely fed to them by producers via the DNC. I’m embarrassed for them.
If NBC News had standards everyone involved in this segment would be fired. It is in no way designed to inform an audience, it is designed to discourage the audience from consuming anything related to the story – meant to prevent curiosity or investigation and perpetuate ignorance. You can disagree with the conclusions of what the story means, but to be as stupid and lazy as Steele is (to say nothing of his wholesale sell-out of everything he once professed to believe) would embarrass a kindergartener. But Mike is just happy to hammer his easy money checks. Gross.
There isn’t a single left-wing outlet that did any honest reporting on the story. Armies of flying monkeys – Ben Collins, Brandy Zadrozny, etc. – were dispatched to make sure their audiences stayed, unquestioningly, on the Democrat thought plantation. Like the entirely to of the Biden family business scandals (how did a family with no skills or abilities make so many millions in industries they had no knowledge of, but political influence over?), no efforts were spent trying to refute the facts, only to discourage anyone from learning about them. It’s not “I read these documents so you don’t have to,” it’s “You don’t need to read these documents at all, nor do you need to investigate anything related to this story. Trust me, there’s nothing there.” If journalism had an opposite, that would be it.
If “journalism” were a protected class (not just a favored one by the left), the thoughts I have toward the people earning large sums of money allegedly practicing it would be a hate crime, were they acted on. As it stands, they aren’t practicing journalism, they engage in protection. They are engaged in actively keeping their audiences ignorant out of fear they might, with access to unapproved information, draw conclusions inconvenient to the power establishment. They’ve gone from “We speak truth to power” to “We protect the powerful from the truth.” It’s a hell of thing to watch and absolutely justifies my contempt for all of them.
HOW DID NANCY PELOSI GET SO FILTHY RICH OFF ELECTED OFFICE? FEINSTEIN? KAMALA HARRIS?
How Do Politicians Keep Getting So Rich?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3U6rhWT-QE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3U6rhWT-QE
New Hunter Biden revelation undermines president's comments: Turley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCk4RlPkFSQ
Bidens of all sorts are under federal investigation for tax evasion, money-laundering, and unregistered agent foreign ties, as this Politico report citing Hunter notes.
DID OBOMB USE THE I.R.S AGAINST THIS POLITICAL ENEMIES?
Bombshell report alleges Biden family had 150+ suspicious bank activity flags
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS4jobXECBs
After studying the documents on the Hunter Biden laptop, former
criminal prosecutor and New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani
concluded that: “What Hunter Biden is, is a bagman… I’ve
prosecuted many cases like this. He’s collecting Joe’s bribes that com
e to about $12 million from Ukraine and $3.5 million from Russia. Bu
t the big money comes from China. And the amount of money
involved is in the tens of millions of dollars.” Today, there is
documented proof that that the Biden family has received at least $31
million from entities controlled by the CCP, with greater Chinese
payoffs yet to come.
Rudy Giuliani sums up what ultimate elite capture looks like, stating: “The Biden Family is owned by the Chinese Communist Party.”
No comments:
Post a Comment