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23
I’m sorry, my Democratic friends, but you have put some of the most destructive, selfish, and power-mad people in charge of our Union, and we’re all paying the price, and will literally pay even more should the latest proposed legislation passes.
Of course we all know the effects of 9% inflation, which has increased the average household’s monthly expenditures by about $500 and wiped out any wage gains over the past 2 years. We’re officially poorer now than when Biden took office in January of 2021, and the ones to suffer the most are, in fact, the poor.
If you think it’s hard to pay $4 for a gallon of gas or 20% more for groceries, imagine how it is for people who were barely subsisting on their incomes before this rash of higher prices. That may be why food bank lines are longer than ever and government dependence is increasing.
And yet, when’s the last time you heard a major Democratic politician address the plight of the poor? Instead, you hear them blithely tell the American people that the best way for them to deal with higher gas prices is to just buy an electric vehicle…. The tone-deafness and obtuseness are amazing to behold.
So what do the Dems do? After the merciful defeat of the ridiculous $4 trillion Build Back Better bill of 2021, they come up with the Inflation Reduction Act, which at only about $400 billion seems like a bargain.
Besides being a massive green energy boondoggle and badly-timed tax increase on businesses at a time when they’re struggling with ever increasing costs, the bill also contains an $80-billion allotment for the IRS in order to chase down tax cheats, or so they say.
This, to me, is one of the greatest affronts of the recent legislation to come out of Congress for several reasons.
First, the current annual budget of the IRS is $12.7 billion, which means this extra funding is more than 6 times as big. Some have said this will enable the IRS to go into “beast mode,” which sounds frightening to me, but which in any case represents a warped and insidious expansion of one of the most intrusive and punitive federal agencies there is.
Second, the new agents won’t be going after the rich because they can defend themselves with high-priced lawyers, who almost always win their cases against the hapless IRS bureaucrats.
No, they will go after the middle class and small business people. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that 78-90% of the money raised from this effort will come from those making less than $200,000 a year. And those folks generally do NOT have the resources to defend themselves legally and so are sitting ducks.
That means they’ll be coming after you, and me, and anyone else who may have prepared their own taxes to save on the multi-hundred or even -thousand dollar tax preparation bill.
In 2019 the IRS was able to obtain an additional $1.7 billion out of $4 billion in disputed taxes, so even if they sextuple that number, you’re looking at a measly $10 billion in additional revenue in return for putting thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Americans through the torture of the auditing and legal processes.
Make no mistake. Rather than being smart about spending, or thinking about making cuts, or making the tax code simpler and easier to comply with … in other words, rather than Democratic politicians taking responsibility for their own fiscal irresponsibility (like fostering inflation with the unnecessary, profligate spending of the $1.9-trillion “American Rescue Plan”), they are setting their sights on average Americans who are currently struggling to cope with the increasing costs created by their massive mismanagement of the economy.
In the end, what the Democrats seem to be striving to do is to increase federal power over Americans, use taxpayer money to buy votes, tear down the institutions that limit centralized power (like the Electoral College and the Supreme Court), and force all Americans into sacrificing their incomes and opportunities to fund a climate change agenda that simply does not have popular support (or much chance of succeeding anyway).
But, our dear leaders in the Democrat Party care very, very little about the complaints and concerns of average Americans, or even poor Americans. They are focused on gaining power through demagoguery and guilt-shaming in order to over-turn the foundational principles of our nation and replace them with their utopian view of humanity, one where everyone is equally poor and only they have the power. (That’s what the Bolsheviks also tried to accomplish.)
I, on the other hand, would like to see the power of the federal government reduced as much as possible in order to allow for a more efficient and effective application of the people’s will to their communities. That is the opposite of the Socialist mentality and is, in fact, the bedrock principle of Jeffersonian democracy and our constitutional republic.
But, my friends on the other side seem content with letting these fools in Washington, D.C., take ever more money, sometimes at gunpoint, in order to enrich their left-wing special interests (teachers unions, government unions, activists, regulators, etc.) while squandering the rights and prosperity of honest, hard-working people.
If allowing the IRS to go “beast mode” sounds like a good idea to you, you’re either naive or mendacious, but in either case, you’re entrusting yourselves and your neighbors to the predations of the bureaucratic state. What good could come from that?
Trey Hoffman
Peachtree City, Ga.
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