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GOP now trying to incite violence against IRS agents [1]
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Date: 2022-08-12
Like this:
x The right is prepping for civil war. I’d report them all to the @FBI, but I literally don’t have time to sit report the hundreds of videos like this I’m seeing on my alt tiktok. (And they didn’t check Twitter.) so here’s a 🧵/1 pic.twitter.com/4zttJLxCaf — Shell_Seas (@LivingBlueTX) August 9, 2022
And this:
x Kaytee thinks the IRS is going to bust in her house and she’s going to pew pew them /18 pic.twitter.com/jF2YGAIR8t — Shell_Seas (@LivingBlueTX) August 10, 2022
Someone is going to get shot, possibly a lot of someones, because Republicans are taking the IRS as one of their government boogeymen coming to get you.
The wild claims about the IRS are pulling together a couple of different threads. One is, Philip Bump explains, recent stories about IRS ammunition purchases and a job listing for an IRS criminal investigation special agent. The IRS spent $725,000 on ammunition so far in 2022, according to a report touted by Rep. Matt Gaetz in June—but what Gaetz didn’t add is that the IRS spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on ammunition every year. That’s disturbing, because basically everything about the scale of gun use in the United States, absolutely including in government, is disturbing. But it’s not unique to 2022. Similarly, the criminal investigation special agent job listing makes clear that this is a law enforcement position. Because it is. But it's not some new job category invented by President Joe Biden to torment Republicans.
Another accusation Republicans are harping on is that the Inflation Reduction Act creates “87,000 new IRS agents,” implied to all be criminal investigation agents. In reality, the bill provides for the hiring of new staff in a range of areas, including customer service workers (so when you call with a question, there’s someone to actually answer the phone) and auditors who will be specifically tasked with pursuing wealthy tax evaders, not small businesses or families making less than hundreds of thousands of dollars a year—in fact, households with earnings of less than $400,000 a year “will likely see the chance of an audit decline,” according to the Treasury Department. The criminal investigation division of the IRS, which currently has 300 vacancies for criminal investigation agents, has a total of 3,000 employees, 2,100 of whom are agents. To the extent that there’s a kernel of truth in the IRS hiring 87,000 people, that’s part of a multi-year plan, and in many cases, the new hires will replace people who retire or quit, at an agency where the number of enforcement staff has dropped 30% since 2010 despite the population continuing to increase.
Republicans are mostly looking to whip up their base against any federal agency during a Democratic presidency, and the IRS is convenient because of the funding it gets through the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s incredibly dangerous, as we saw on Thursday with the attack on the Cincinnati FBI office following strikingly similar Republican rhetoric about the FBI and the IRS. As a side matter, Republicans whose major donors will face increased risk of an audit as the IRS renews its staffing levels are also cynically convincing people whose chance of an audit will decline that armed agents are coming for them.
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[1] Url:
https://dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/12/2116152/-Republicans-succeeded-at-inciting-violence-against-the-FBI-Now-it-s-on-to-the-IRS
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