USA 2024 Elections Thread

[grarpamp]

Democrats plan on massively increasing taxes and Socialist
programmes so high they'd make even Europe blush, "hiring"
and armament spree needed to support that. Else they would
have just cut programs and pork spending, but no good corrupt
Socialist ever does that.


IRS Hiring Spree Is The Biggest Police-State Expansion In US History

https://www.theepochtimes.com/irs-hiring-spree-is-the-biggest-expansion-of-the-police-state-in-american-history_4683196.html

The Democrats’ new reconciliation bill isn’t just going to be the
largest-ever expansion of a government agency. It’s going to be the
largest expansion of the domestic police state in American history.
Only a statist could believe that a federal government, which already
collects $4.1 trillion every year—or $12,300 for every
citizen—supposedly needs 80 battalions of new IRS cops.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre answers questions
during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington on Aug. 5,
2022. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The average American has less reason to be concerned about cops with
guns—though the IRS is looking for special agents who can “carry a
firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary”—than they do
bureaucrats armed with pens who are authorized to sift through their
lives. If you pay your taxes you have nothing to worry about,
Democrats claim. But most law-abiding citizens know they have
something to fear from a state agency that doesn’t concern itself with
your due process, has no regard for your privacy, and is empowered to
target anyone it wants without any genuine oversight.

And, please, spare us this nonsense about the IRS expansion focusing
exclusively on “high earners.” White House press secretary Karine
Jean-Pierre promised that the IRS wouldn’t engage in new audits of
anyone making under $400,000—a claim she has no authority to make and
could not possibly predict even if she did. Connecticut Sen. Chris
Murphy also said that the bill was passed to stop an “epidemic of tax
cheating amongst the millionaires and billionaires” and promised that
“audit rates won’t increase for anyone making under $400K.”

This is a lie. Nothing in the bill that Democrats passed through the
Senate limits audits. Murphy, along with every other Democrat in the
Senate, voted against a Republican amendment that would have prevented
new agents from auditing individuals and small businesses with less
than $400,000 of taxable income. Not long ago, Democrats passed the
American Rescue Plan Act—which had as much to do with rescuing as the
Inflation Reduction Act has to do with reducing inflation—and changed
tax code so that mobile payment apps like Venmo and Cash App were now
required to report transactions totaling $600 or more per year to the
IRS. Does that sound like a party aiming fire exclusively at
high-earning Americans?

Indeed, poor and middle-class Americans are far more likely to do
their own taxes, and thus more prone to making mistakes. In 2021,
those making $25,000 or less (often the young and elderly) were
audited at a rate five times higher than everyone else. The wealthier
you are the more likely it is that you can hire lawyers and
accountants to work within the system. There aren’t enough
millionaires and billionaires in the world to keep a potential new
87,000 IRS employees busy.

There are other overlooked aspects of the Democrats’ IRS expansion.
The bill, for instance, strengthens the federal public-sector union
monopoly that funds Democrats’ political aspirations. IRS and Treasury
Department employees spent 353,820 hours engaged in union
activism—their PAC gives every cent to the Democrats—in 2019. One can
imagine what another 87,000 employees would do for that effort. In the
real world, laundering taxpayer funds through unions and using them on
political campaigns is called racketeering.

None of this is to say that everyone who works for IRS is corrupt or
power-hungry or an ideologue. The unassailable rules of giant
bureaucracies, however, are that they always experience mission creep,
they always do enough to justify their funding, and sooner or later,
their leaders become political operatives.

With that said, it’s worth remembering that the IRS doesn’t simply
collect taxes. It enforces speech codes. This is what empowered former
IRS official Lois Lerner to target conservative groups—“crazies” and
“a–holes”—who used words like “Tea Party” or “patriots” in their
names. But, even at the time, leftists at The New York Times editorial
board praised the IRS for going after conservative groups because they
did not “primarily” engage in “social welfare,” and so did not deserve
an exemption under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. Has anything in
the evolution of the Democratic Party given you confidence that such
power would not be abused or that an engorged IRS would be immune from
political pressure?

Wrestling with an insanely complex tax code—nearly 8 million
words—costs Americans billions every year. Rather than flattening and
simplifying this astonishingly convoluted code, which not only would
have saved citizens but the government money, Democrats decided we
needed up to another 87,000 people to enforce it.