GOP lifts only yachts

While Newt Gingrich deserves much of the blame for the
modern Republican Party — an assemblage of anti-
democratic, obstructionist, belligerent contrarians and
kooks — Grover Norquist ought to get his due. He is the
rightwing anti-tax activist who famously stated, “I don’t
want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to
the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it
in the bathtub.”
His fantasy has solidified into conservative orthodoxy,
which helps to explain the GOP’s refusal to raise any
taxes. Despite Republicans’ insistence that they want to
decrease the federal debt, they won’t raise taxes even on
the ultra-rich who pay nothing. And in recent years,
rightwing partisans have gone further, actively seeking to
enable tax fraud among the more affluent.
That helps explain why Republicans have spent
considerable energy to limit the effectiveness of the
Internal Revenue Service. If they could handicap the
agency, they’d accomplish two of their goals: helping the
rich get richer and ensuring that government is too broke
to work well.
It’s no surprise, then, that one of the concessions that
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wanted in debt ceiling
negotiations was to cut a multi-billion increase that
Democrats passed last year to modernize the IRS. He
succeeded. The final bill cut about $20 billion from the $80
billion in new funding for the agency.
If that sounds as though the IRS still has gobs of money
for its overhaul, it needs every penny of the billions
President Biden had promised. For decades, the agency

has suffered cutbacks and staff shortages. Its technology
is grossly outdated.
The rich are already coddled with tax laws that favor them
unfairly. With the IRS hobbled, they can get away with
cheating on what little they owe. Ten years ago, the IRS
audited 40, 965 returns filed by millionaires. That had
fallen to just 11,331 audits of millionaires in fiscal year
2020, according to research from Syracuse University. As
much as $130 billion owed in taxes went unpaid from
2014-2016, and the amount that wasn’t paid in
subsequent years may be much higher, according to The
Hill.
Yes, Republicans do want to enable tax cheats. It’s as
simple as that. They’ve already revealed the glaring
hypocrisy of their claim to be the party of “law and order”;
their responses to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol
gave that away.
It’s also increasingly clear that the only people who can’t
get away with cheating on their taxes are poor people. IRS
chief Daniel Werfel recently acknowledged that black
people are three to five times more likely to be audited,
apparently because the agency has focused on those who
claim the earned-income tax credit, which supplements
the incomes of the working poor.
The good news is that Werfel plans to change the way the
agency operates to make it more equitable. He should be
able to accomplish that even after significant cuts. The
agency can still hire specialists to go after the complex
business partnerships that are so often the culprits in
cheating on taxes. The agency can also get started on

updating its technology with programs that can catch
scofflaws.
The rightwing campaign against the IRS will continue, of
course. In the next budget negotiations, Republicans are
likely to press for more cuts to the agency. It doesn’t
matter to them if more revenue would help reduce the
federal deficit. (They only care about the deficit when a
Democrat is in the Oval Office. A combination of
necessary COVID-related
spending and reckless tax cuts for the rich under
President Donald Trump resulted in an increase of $7
trillion to the federal debt, about 22 percent
of the total.)
Even if conservatives can’t strangle the government, they
want to hobble it. If they can do that, they may be able to
persuade Americans that government doesn’t work.
Apparently, they want a return to feudalism, with a rich
overclass and the rest of us serving them.