Budget Deal Shows Billionaire Criminals are only Constituency GOP Really Cares About
They also don't give a s--- about the debt either, since cutting the IRS budget will increase the deficit
Speaker Mike Johnson has a budget deal with Senate Democrats - and what it shares with those of his predecessor Kevin McCarthy is a laser focus on cutting IRS funding.
Defunding the tax police and protecting their billionaire donors’ tax havens from scrutiny is clearly their real concern, whatever their rhetoric on the border, abortion or other social concerns.
None of the hot-button social issues were part of the final deal, but slashing IRS money was, as it was in budget deals last year:
President Joe Biden added nearly $80 billion in new IRS funding to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, money set aside to collect unpaid taxes from the wealthy and to improve the agency’s customer service, among other uses.
Congressional Republicans have been chipping away at the windfall. In the latest deal, a bipartisan budget agreement announced Sunday, the IRS would lose $20 billion of the new funding in 2024, Politico reports.
And the true believer MAGA reps are incensed. As Marjorie Taylor Greene said, denouncing the deal:
“This $1.6 Trillion dollar budget agreement does nothing to secure the border, stop the invasion, or stop the weaponized government targeting Biden’s political enemies and innocent Americans.”
The GOP House leadership is trying to buy off the disgruntled far right by promising to attach separate “riders” to restrict abortion rights, but everyone knows if they aren’t in the initial deal, “the speaker will either need to drop the policy provisions to secure Democratic backing or face a shutdown.”
Slashing the IRS Budget Shows Emptiness of GOP Rhetoric on the Deficit
Not only does the deal show GOP leadership doesn’t really care about abortion, immigration or any other social issue compared to protecting rich people from tax investigations, it also shows they don’t really care about the deficit either, since cutting IRS funding will increase the deficit.
When the Inflation Reduction Act was enacted, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the $80 billion increase in IRS funding over coming years would bring in $200 billion - ie. about 2.5 dollars for every dollar spent on the IRS. CBO admits that its methodology is extremely conservative in that estimate. Former IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti has estimated that, combined with deploying new technology on better reporting, the returns from IRS funding could be 15 to 20 times the cost. So slashing the IRS budget by $20 billion may increase the federal debt by as much as $400 billion.
Why this is true is pretty obvious. Estimates are that somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion in legally owed taxes go uncollected each year. Given current federal revenue is $4.4 trillion, that means that as much as 20% of legally owed taxes are being evaded, largely by the wealthiest Americans and corporations.
This is not an accident but the essence of deliberate GOP policy.
When the GOP “tea party” Congress won in 2010, they began slashing IRS funding - which was underfunded to begin with - and audits on the wealthy plunged 70% as the decade went on- with the very wealthy rarely being audited with the skeleton staff the IRS now has.
The GOP is the Party of Crime
The Inflation Reduction Act funding increases for the IRS were meant to help reverse this - and hopefully will still partially do so - but the GOP strenuous efforts to protect white-collar criminals evading taxes reflects their core values
That the only successful effort to defund the police in our nation has been by Republicans defunding the IRS is not irony, but the essence of projection. The whole reason the GOP exists - and is funded by its donors - is to protect our corporate criminal class.
Corporate crime via pollution kills an estimated 200,000 people yearly, ten times more than the 21,000 annual homicides. And corporate tax evasion dwarfs the total of all robberies, shoplifting, and grand theft larceny by orders of magnitude.
GOP leaders rant about shoplifting and street crimes while protecting its criminal corporate donors. The recent budget deal is just the most recent example.