29 BILLION?!?!

Now imagine that happening to all of the corporations

@a-captions-blog

[Image description: Tweet by Rober Reich @RBReich that says:

With its extra funding, the IRS has…

- Collected $500 milion from millionaire tax cheats (so far)

- Audited Microsoft and charged $29 billion in back taxes

- Made it easier to file taxes through free-filing programs in 13 states

Remember this as the GOP tries to gut the agency. \End description]

[Reblog plain text: 29 billion [two interrobangs] \End PT]

Reagan not only massively changed the tax structure (dramatically decreasing the taxes paid by rich people), he also defunded the IRS such that they did not have the personnel or the money to go after rich people who were cheating the system. Rich people can hire really good lawyers; to win, the IRS needs to also have really good lawyers an agents working on the problem.

This is part of a core Republican strategy since the Reagan era for preventing, defunding, and eliminating social welfare programs and anything else they don't like.

1. Convince people that all taxes are bad for everyone, and that taxing the rich will destroy the economy.
2. Lower taxes (but mainly taxes on rich people, not taxes on ordinary people).
3. Point out that the budget is now unbalanced--we're spending more than we're taking in. Convince people that the national debt is a huge problem and the nation will crumble if we have too much debt. Call Democrats stupid and ignorant for claiming that we could pay for social programs through taxes. Cut social programs.
4. Paint Democrats as being pie-in-the-sky idealists who have no idea how anything works in the real world and will lead America into disaster by trying things we can't afford and racking up huge debts we can't pay. This scares people who like Democratic social policies into voting Republican because "that would be nice, but we can't afford it."
5. Of course, the above only applies to social services. There will always be money in the budget for police and military things; these are billed as "essential" while social welfare and infrastructure things are billed as "nice things if we can afford them (and we can never afford them, because the Republicans make sure we can't)"

This is the Republican operating playbook and has been highly effective for the last forty years. Why are poverty reduction and drug treatment and mental health and public health and DEI programs so hard to get funded on a federal level? Why are social services so underfunded? It all goes back to Reagan defunding the IRS and teaching Republicans how to use that to defund everything else.

And Democrats have spent the last forty years wringing their hands and saying "oh, if only there was something we could do!" and not actually. doing anything to address the root cause.

Biden is the first Democrat in forty years to actually do something about it. He managed to get a bill properly funding the IRS through congress despite Republican control of the House. It's only been in place for about a year, and this is what it's already accomplished.

If you want there to be a chance of getting any social welfare programs funded in the US, the IRS needs to keep this funding.

If the Republicans regain the Presidency, this goes away. And with it, any hope of increased funding for anything that might actually help deal with poverty in this country.