Thomas Zimmer: The IRS, Fake Populism, and the Conspiratorial Right on the Beach

[Nevilledog]

https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-irs-fake-populism-and-the-conspiratorial


Last August, during our family vacation at an overly expensive sea resort on the New Jersey coast, I had a personal encounter with MAGA America. It was quite unexpected and more than a little unsettling. While chasing seagulls on the beach with my two little boys, we ran into two elderly ladies who were delighted at the sight of the human cubs: “Oh, they are adorable!” (They really are. And considering that one was a preschooler and one was a toddler, they had also gotten quite good at working together to get closer to the seagulls.) I expected some pleasant small talk, and that’s indeed how it started. But within maybe four minutes, one of the ladies had launched into a tirade about the impending doom of the Republic and rattled off one rightwing conspiracy theory after another. She was particularly alarmed about encroaching government tyranny: Outraged about the FBI having “raided” Mar-a-Lago just a few days earlier, and utterly convinced that the IRS was about to unleash 87,000 new agents – which she seemed to imagine as a heavily armed special ops force – on her and her fellow supporters of “President Trump” (she kept saying that: President Trump – very much in contrast to “Biden,” just Biden, or “the Clintons”).

87,000 IRS agents, out to destroy the lives and livelihoods of real Americans.

That number has been everywhere lately. In his first speech as Speaker of the House, the night he was finally elected, Kevin McCarthy proudly announced: “I know the night is late, but when we come back, our very first bill will repeal the funding for 87,000 new IRS agents” – thunderous applause from his caucus, the camera then focused on Marjorie Taylor Greene, and she was so, so happy.

McCarthy kept his word. The first legislation Republicans passed in the House would repeal funding, over $70 billion, for the IRS, basically cutting all the resources Biden provided in the Inflation Reduction Act from the summer. To make sure those 87,000 new IRS agents would never haunt and harass American patriots.

Show me your first piece of legislation and I’ll tell you who you are – in this case: a party that’s almost completely untethered from empirical reality. Because no one was planning to hire those 87,000 new agents in the first place. The idea that the IRS was about to more than double its current personnel has been widely debunked over, and over, and over again. The additional funding in the Inflation Reduction Act was intended to strengthen the IRS’s enforcement capabilities, especially the capability to audit wealthy people, which simply is more difficult, takes longer, is therefore more expensive. It would mostly replace funding Republicans had previously cut, allow the IRS to revert some of the dramatic decline in the number of full-time employees over the past decade, and compensate for staff retiring over the next ten years. This was also, according to the Congressional Budget Office, going to raise revenue significantly.

*snip*