Well, that didn’t take long.
For years Republicans have campaigned on the claim that our growing national debt had to be addressed. That Democrats and their “tax-and-spend” ways were driving us over a fiscal cliff.
Forget the fact that this is the same GOP that added $2 trillion to our debt with a tax scam skewed to benefit the rich and corporations. Forget the fact that former president/unindicted criminal Donald Trump tacked on nearly $8 trillion to what we owe in just four years as the Republicans cheered his every move.
It turns out that if you had one day in the pool for how long before the GOP’s rank hypocrisy would rear its ugly head in the newest version of the House of Representatives, you win.
On Monday House Republicans voted to strip about $71 billion from the Internal Revenue Service approved in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act to help it pursue tax cheats. The 221-210 vote was along party lines.
The original appropriation was $80 billion. It was earmarked for things like boosting taxpayer services to quicken agency response time, upgrading its computer system, and increasing enforcement to help find and collect unpaid federal taxes, particularly from high-earning individuals and businesses, the Washington Post reported.
“High-earning individuals and business” is the operative phrase here. Republicans are dedicated to protecting the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class. It’s the foundation of their “small government” lie.
Republicans have lied about the bill from the start, claiming it was aimed to hurt average citizens and that there were plans to hire 87,000 tax auditors (something the GOP is still lying about). The truth is this figure was the total hires in all positions across the entire agency over the next 10 years.
Also, the National Treasury Employees Union said the agency already “stands to lose 52,000 current employees over the next five years to regular retirement and attrition.”
Here’s the kicker, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting this funding and the negative effect on enforcement capabilities would add about $114 billion to the deficit over the next decade, the Post reported. Our debt currently stands at about $31 trillion.
Remember that in the coming months when the GOP goes after Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the social safety net, and maybe defense spending. Those are all possibly on the cutting board, while protecting their rich friends and donors was given priority.
In reality, the House bill will probably be as far as this initial effort goes. It’s not expected to pass in the Democratically controlled Senate, and would face a veto by President Joe Biden if it got past there.
Still, this will be the underlining theme for the GOP over the next two years. After all, it’s already threatened to shut down the government and, even worse, not raise the debt ceiling, which would cause the United States to default on its debt and trigger a global economic calamity.
The Post’s report noted other steps Republicans are taken in this regard by placing them in the rules package approved on Monday. They include:
*Restored a policy known as “cut-as-you-go,” which requires Congress to pay for new mandatory spending with offsetting cuts rather than tax increases.
*Mandated that it will take a vote of three-fifths of all sitting members to raise taxes.
*Reinstated an old rule that allows them to reduce salaries or fire specific federal employees, or cut whole programs, through amendments offered during floor debate.
This isn’t the first time Republicans have taken the ax to the IRS. Past efforts have led to realities like these reported by the Post:
*The IRS had a backlog of more than 21 million paper tax returns, delaying many Americans from receiving their refunds on time,
*The agency also could barely answer most of the roughly 73 million phone calls it received during the 2022 filing season, with only one of every 10 of those calls actually reaching an IRS employee.
You can read the Post’s story here.
Here’s a very good column by the Post’s Catherine Rampell on the subject.
It’s been written here before that we’re facing a war between the rich and the rest of us. This version of Congress will raise those stakes even more. Once again, it will be up to Democrats to save the country from the damage the GOP is willing to cause to increase the wealth gap.
Sure, our national security may be endangered, a lot of senior citizens might struggle even more to make ends meet and receive adequate health care, and more poor kids could have too little to eat. But at least happy millionaires and billionaires paying less taxes will have more to contribute to their favorite Republican candidates.
We rightly talk about how the Republican Party has convinced millions of white, poor and middle-class citizens to vote for the GOP and against their own best interests. But don’t forget there’s also a bunch of rich people and corporations backing the party that serves at their beck and call.
The events of this week do nothing to disprove that fact, and they ensure that our class warfare will continue.
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Thank you for reading my blog. You can see my other writings on my blog: Musings of a Nobody.