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Does anyone actually not know why Trump wanted to defund the IRS? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-16

Items bolded by me for emphasis.

Article from 2017

Trump Budget Continues Multi-Year Assault on IRS Funding Despite Mnuchin’s Call for More Resources

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) budget has been cut by 18 percent since 2010, after adjusting for inflation, and the agency has lost roughly 13,000 employees — around 14 percent of its workforce. President Trump and congressional Republicans intend to propose a broad revamp of the tax code that could create new opportunities for tax avoidance — and an even greater need for IRS resources to ensure compliance. In particular, GOP tax plans call for preferential treatment of pass-through business income that would invite massive tax avoidance by wealthy taxpayers, costing hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade, according to the Tax Policy Center (TPC).

Isn’t that a surprise? It’s called “conservatism”.

An under-resourced IRS would be poorly positioned to enforce the new statutes and regulations that would accompany a tax overhaul. The combination of increased avoidance opportunities and weakened IRS enforcement capacity would further reduce revenues and undermine the integrity of the tax system. The decline in enforcement has reduced the IRS’s ability to go after tax cheats. The IRS audited just 1 of every 140 individual returns in 2016, down from 1 of 90 returns in 2010

Loss of tax income along with tax cuts for billionaires is the Republican formula for increasing the wealth of the one percent at the expense of 95% of the citizens in the US. Then, in order to “balance the budget” we just cut Social Security and Medicare, make “woke” illegal and defund public schools by shifting public support to private, especially Christian school systems. After all, that’s the problem, don’t you know.

However, since Biden has been elected, the IRS is now adequately funded.

IRS: $38M collected from tax delinquents

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/16/2181582/-Does-anyone-actually-not-know-why-Trump-wanted-to-defund-the-IRS

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