Republican hostility to government and democracy intensifies

The fascist Republican Party hates any government function that does not protect rich people and powerful special interests. They want to get rid of most or all of public schools, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the Departments of Education, Energy, Environment, Housing and Transportation, and etc. The powerful Republican Christian nationalist movement very much wants to see heterosexual White people at the center of and dominating federal, state and local governments, commerce, society and whatever else there is. The fascist Republican Party also hates and wants to eliminate democracy, the rule of law (except laws that protect them and their friends), labor unions and civil liberties.

The fascist Republican Party also hates, hates, hates the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), the accounts receivable department of the federal government. Fascist Republican anti-IRS hate is now crystallizing into opposition in congress. The Washington Post writes in an article, Conservative groups mount opposition to increase in IRS budget, threatening White House infrastructure plan:

Conservative political groups are mobilizing against a key element of a bipartisan infrastructure deal, and their opposition could make it harder for the U.S. government to collect unpaid taxes.

Congressional Democrats and Republicans have agreed to increase funding for the Internal Revenue Service so that the agency can bring in more tax revenue, hoping the money can help pay down some of the infrastructure package’s expected price tag. The early contours of the infrastructure blueprint have won the White House’s support, but the IRS provision in particular is drawing opposition from well-funded conservative groups, which are strongly opposed to expanding the reach of a tax-collection agency that they long have alleged is politically motivated.

Among the conservative groups spearheading the opposition are the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (~the Trickle Up Committee), FreedomWorks (~the Tyranny Fascist  Movement), the Conservative Action Project (~the Raging Ideologue & Conspiracy Cult), and the Leadership Institute (~the Fascist Indoctrination and Tax Evasion Promotion Committee). They are preparing a letter that warns Republicans should not negotiate with the White House unless they agree to “no additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service.”

The letter, obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its release, is expected to gain support from at least a dozen other conservative groups this week, with plans to send it soon to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Senate GOP leaders. 

“Republicans are going to double the IRS budget? That’s crazy. There’s very strong opposition to this,” said Stephen Moore, a former outside economic adviser to Trump who is leading the effort. An op-ed on the measure that Moore wrote with Steve Forbes also has circulated in Congressional Republican offices.

The bipartisan infrastructure deal reached last month by the White House and a group of Democratic and Republican senators proposes $40 billion for heightened IRS enforcement, with an expectation that it would result in around $140 billion in new revenue. In theory, at least, the idea has broad support among Democrats and Republicans alike, who in recent years have pointed to weaker IRS enforcement and estimates of the nation’s persistent “tax gap,” or the difference between what taxes are owed to the government and what is actually paid.  

Over the past decade, persistent budget cuts have hurt the IRS’s ability to conduct audits, including those targeting wealthy and large corporations. Tax experts have expressed alarm that the weakening of the IRS has helped fuel the increase in U.S. income inequality, in part because the rich have more tools to dodge the increasingly weak tax collection agency.

 

Why does the fascist GOP hate the IRS so much?

Because the fascist GOP hates government and democracy, both of which require money to operate, it also hates the IRS. The amount of money the IRS is losing to tax cheats each year is astonishing. Increasing the IRS budget to enforce tax law would increase tax revenue the government has to spend and decrease the tax cheat theft. Although tax evasion is a significantly bipartisan sport, a lot of tax cheats are wealthy Republicans who donate to the GOP. Their donations include a demand to keep their freedom to cheat on their taxes and not get caught. 

The latest estimate of the tax gap that I am aware of puts it at ~$1.4 trillion/year. As discussed here repeatedly, the tax gap has been huge for years, starting at least as early as 2001, when it was only ~$295 billion/year. And, as the IRS budget has been cut repeatedly by Republicans, the annual amount that tax cheats keep from paying increases. In this case, there is a good basis to argue that the low IRS budget correlation with increased tax evasion has a non-trivial amount of causation buried in it somewhere.

Question: Are average, honest tax paying Americans screwed, or should the IRS be eliminated and most or all government privatized of, by and for rich people and major special interests, which is the GOP's fondest dream?

Hint: Regular people are screwed.