Commentary: Schumer-Manchin Inflation Reduction Act Supercharges the IRS to Go After Middle-Class Income Earners

The newly passed Inflation Reduction Act will unleash the IRS to become a major threat to millions of lower and middle-class Americans just as they are already being crushed by inflation, high gas prices, soaring local taxes, and stagnating wages.

This from westernjournal.com.

The Washington Free Beacon noted:

In fact, this budget deal [will] make the IRS bigger than the Pentagon, or the FBI, or U.S. Border Patrol.

Tucked down into the budget ushered through the Senate by democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin is a provision to hire up to 87,000 new IRS auditors whose job will be to target the middle classes for a massive campaign of audits to take more of their money.

This has increased the agency’s budget by more than 600 percent.

The funding will make the IRS the biggest government agency of them all.

According to the Beacon:

The Pentagon houses roughly 27,000 employees, according to the Defense Department, while a human resources fact sheet says the State Department employs just over 77,243 staff. The FBI employs approximately 35,000 people, according to the agency’s website, and Customs and Border Protection says it employs 19,536 Border Patrol agents.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

The bill earmarks $45.6 billion for ‘enforcement,’ including ‘litigation,’ ‘criminal investigations,’ ‘investigative technology,’ ‘digital asset monitoring’ and a new fleet of tax-collector cars. The result will be far more audits, civil suits and criminal referrals.

And that is correct. But it is also, simply put, an added measure of control over the masses.

The democrats need to target the middle class because that is where the most money actually is — not “the rich.” And this is where the left needs to go to grab as much money for all their new spending as they can get.

According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation:
The majority of these new revenues will come from Americans making less than $200,00 a year.
So, clearly, the new IRS agents will be tasked with fanning out and scrutinizing the middle class.

So, far from going after “the rich” or “tax cheats,” Senate Republicans also note that Schumer and Biden’s IRS would be coming after us.

A Monday news release noted:

According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the brunt of any new revenue from hiring an army of IRS auditors will overwhelming hit low- and middle-income earners, people already struggling with high gas prices and 9.1 percent inflation.

CBO scores the $80 billion for mandatory IRS funding as spending only and gives phantom credit for potential enforcement revenue that might be generated in ‘future baselines.’

In June of last year, the USSC noted:

[I]n fiscal year 2020, there were 324 tax fraud offenders sentenced under the guidelines. The number of tax fraud offenders has decreased by 45.5 percent since fiscal year 2016.

House Republicans also reminded Americans:
[T]he IRS already has a long-long history of abusing its power as it is and that this bill will only “supercharge” an already out-of-control agency.

House Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee recently said:

Overly broad IRS targeting spanning decades has claimed many victims, and Democrats are trying to revive it.

The House GOP said:

Lois Lerner notoriously targeted conservative nonprofits for special scrutiny in 2013.

ProPublica, the left-leaning website, obtained and published the confidential tax information of private citizens in 2021—conveniently when Democrats were debating whether to impose a new wealth tax.

The IRS has promised to investigate the illegal leak but has so far come up empty.

The Republicans also pointed out that the new funding isn’t helping to fix the major failures the IRS is wallowing in already.

The Republicans said:

Despite all this new money, Americans shouldn’t expect better IRS service.

The agency in the 2022 filing season answered a mere 10 percent of its phone calls.

The Taxpayer Advocate Service revealed in June that as of May 31 the IRS was still sitting on 21.3 million unprocessed paper tax returns, with millions of taxpayers ‘waiting six months or more to receive their refunds.’

Yet the Schumer-Manchin bill devotes only $3.2 billion for ‘taxpayer services.’

 

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