A new report from The Atlantic and ProPublica reveals how GOP efforts to slash the IRS budget are depriving the federal government of badly-needed revenue.
Other than “downplaying federal crimes committed by the president,” the modern Republican Party cherishes nothing more than finding innovative ways to lighten the financial burdens of the millionaires and billionaires who support it. This is most evident, of course, in its signature accomplishment of the 115th Congress: a $1.5 trillion tax cut for very wealthy people, propped up by the usual gamut of vague, Reaganomics-type assurances that the gaping new hole in the federal deficit would “pay for itself.” During campaign season, after it became clear that this promise was a lie, Paul Ryan and company promptly pivoted to running ads about MS-13 instead.
An astonishing new report from The Atlantic and ProPublica, however, reveals that the party’s most prominent display of corporate generosity is not necessarily the most lucrative one. Thanks to the GOP’s decades-long war on the Internal Revenue Service, the federal government’s ability to collect legally-owed taxes has reached a historical nadir, as deep budget cuts have hamstrung efforts to fulfill basic responsibilities—like, among many others, hiring professionals to catch people who might be good at evading taxes.
And guess who stands to benefit the most from the agency’s slow-motion failure?
Corporations and the wealthy are the biggest beneficiaries of the IRS’s decay. Most Americans’ interaction with the IRS is largely automated. But it takes specialized, well-trained personnel to audit a business or a billionaire or to unravel a tax scheme—and those employees are leaving in droves and taking their expertise with them. For the country’s largest corporations, the danger of being hit with a billion-dollar tax bill has greatly diminished. For the rich, who research shows evade taxes the most, the IRS has become less and less of a force to be feared.
