The Biden administration is boasting on social media about the IRS’s recovery of unpaid taxes from millionaires:
UPDATE: The IRS has now recovered over $500 million in taxes owed by 1,600 millionaires.
Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS is ensuring large corporations and high-wealth individuals pay the taxes they owe.
Here’s what that money could mean for hardworking families: pic.twitter.com/cZKqxWPm9O
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 12, 2024
This just shows how nonsensical the emphasis on extra IRS funding always was.
First, the Biden administration wanted to raise $400 billion over the next ten years with greater tax enforcement. Some Democrats in the press were talking about up to $1 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office has evaluated proposals for greater tax enforcement for over a decade and never found an estimate greater than $120 billion. Now it’s supposed to be some great victory that, over a year after the IRS expansion was passed into law, they’ve raised $500 million.
Second, the purpose of extra revenue from the IRS was supposed to be to balance out the extra spending from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. But the administration’s post is all about how it wants to spend the extra $500 million. Democrats want to use the money to expand government even further, not reduce the deficit.
As I have noted before, it’s important to remember that IRS employees are some of the only federal workers who are unionized. When in power, perhaps the primary purpose of the Democratic Party as an organization is to direct taxpayer money to unionized government employees. The influx of cash for the IRS will expand membership in the National Treasury Employees Union, which donates almost entirely to Democrats. It was never primarily about the extra revenue. When the IRS comes up well short of the $400 billion Democrats wanted, they won’t care much at all, and they’ll gleefully try to spend any extra revenue without reducing the deficit.