“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
These were the words of Thomas Jefferson from the Declaration of Independence. He was referring to King George III’s predation. The sentence was part of a long list of grievances that bolstered the argument that England’s king and Parliament were becoming tyrannical.
Two and a-half centuries later, elected officials from the Democratic Party are in lockstep with each other to create swarms for our substance.
The Senate on Sunday passed the Inflation Reduction Act, on a 50-51 vote along party lines, legislation that has little to do with reducing inflation and much more to do with funding progressive spending priorities and—more ominously—doubling the size of the Internal Revenue Service.
The IRS currently has 93 654 employees. Senate-passed legislation would add87,000 new employees. The bill is expected to increase the IRS’s revenue by $80 billion by 2031.
Interesting that the Biden administration is focused on doing this when the nation’s southern border is a sieve and military recruitment is catastrophically low.
This massive expansion of IRS is the most worrying aspect of Senate legislation. In fact, I’d bet that six months or a year from now, it’s all the average American really will remember from it.
Democrat officials and media allies insist that the IRS expansion is about monitoring the wealthy and that there is nothing to be concerned about if you follow the law.
IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig said Thursday that the additional funds wouldn’t lead to additional audits of households earning less than $400,000 a year.
The White House doubled down on this message Tuesday.
I have a bridge in Brooklyn for you if you believe that.
Sen. Mike Crapo of R-Idaho put Democrats on the spot offering an amendment to the Senate bill stipulating that the new IRS funding and agents couldn’t target those making less than $400,000 a year. It was voted down unanimously by Democrats.
Biden and Democrats in Congress are aware of where the big money is located in this country. It isn’t with the rich. No, it’s in the hands of America’s vast, though perhaps shrinking, middle class. The Wall Street Journal explainedWhat the legislation is really all about:
The main targets will by necessity be the middle- and upper-middle class because that’s where the money is. The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78% to 90% of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4% to 9.9% would come from people earning more than $500,000.
Also, who doesn’t have a story about some government agency—the IRS or the DMV, for instance—making a mistake and putting you through misery while the cumbersome, bumbling bureaucracy slowly untangles the mess?
The IRS is about to go “beast mode,” as the Journal explained. It will unleash an army of agents—larger in number than the armies of most NATO countries—to harass and eat out the substance of the poor and middle class, to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence.
Of course, the new overlords in the ruling elite probably aren’t huge fans of the whole Declaration of Independence thing. According to their media friends, the American Revolution was a success. was a mistakeThomas Jefferson was a racist slaver and the country was founded on white supremacy, not liberty. Even displaying the symbolsYou might be placed on a terrorist watchlist by the FBI for your views on the American founding.
Speaking of the FBI, the IRS expansion pairs nicely with the FBI raid Monday on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Already, grave warnings had been raised that the FBI was becoming politicized and being used to target political foes and ineptly fail to address serious crimes.
We get no assurance from the so-called experts, who are in lockstep with the agencies and tell us that everything is fine.
Dozens of crisis pregnancy centers around the country have been targeted and vandalized since someone leaked the Supreme Court’s draft majority decision in the abortion case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
So far no arrestsIn connection with these violent incidents, several investigations have been launched. The Justice Department apparently has more pressing concerns than just investigating parents who attend school board meetings to voice their discontent.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that the Biden administration would use an expanded IRS as a weapon to threaten, intimidate, and investigate political foes.
And that’s the bigger issue at stake here. Our federal agencies, which are not accountable, are becoming deeply politicized.
Now, one might think it’s reckless to target political foes. You might think that this power can be reversed and used in the opposite direction after an electoral victory. Wrong.
As we’ve seen, these agencies obey and operate along only one side of the political spectrum. It was all about Trump when he was in the White House, and Republicans controlled Congress. “Resistance.” Now that Democrats are in charge, it’s about focusing all that government power to reward allies and punish enemies.
That’s what the power of the unaccountable administrative state has led us to.
It’s not just the FBI. The IRS’ own recent history brings to light the danger of a government agency being turned on domestic political opponents. Lois Lerner was wrongly appointed director of the IRS unit responsible for overseeing tax-exempt applications under the Obama administration.
After years of hearings & investigations, the only thing that came out was an empty apologyThe IRS. Lerner, who pleaded for the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying to Congress, facedShe was not charged with any criminal charges and received her retirement bonuses and retirement benefits.
Imagine what would happen to you, fellow citizen, if you’d lied to the IRS or were even just accused—rightly or wrongly–of impropriety by the federal agency? Your life would be destroyed by the IRS.
Oh, but these government employees are doing it all for “democracy,” so don’t you worry about the implications.
The bottom line is that Americans are right to be concerned about the IRS expansion. Rapidly expanding the agency’s size and scope at this moment, while pretending it’s only about targeting the “rich,” doesn’t pass the smell test.
As Americans get poorer due to inflation and the “don’t call it a recession” recession, Democrats eagerly are expanding the government and spending more taxpayer money to do it.
When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, he was touted as a “uniter.” If the Biden administration goes through with this outrageous engorgement of the IRS, it just might succeed in uniting most Americans after all. United in outrage.
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