Joe Biden wants to effectively double the size of the Internal Revenue Service. His plan is to add $80 billion in spending on the tax agency over the next 10 years with the supposed goal of increasing tax enforcement in order to collect more revenue for the government. According to Biden, his IRS expansion would net the government $700 billion more in taxes paid. However, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s calculations, Biden’s bolstered IRS would likely only produce $200 billion in additional tax revenue, and that would be a quickly diminishing amount.

Is tax cheating such a massive problem that doubling the size of the IRS is the solution to crack down on these cheats? If so, where’s the evidence?

Notably, Biden touts an increase in government revenue as his rationale, not the enforcement of tax laws that few people are breaking. Furthermore, as every American who has ever attempted to file taxes knows, the ridiculous complexity within the tax code can leave a taxpayer with a sense of uncertainty and doubt, hoping that everything was done correctly and that the IRS won’t perform a random audit and ding them for some minutia of the code that was missed or misapplied. That’s why there’s a cottage industry of tax preparers to specifically cater to middle- and low-income Americans.

If so much tax revenue is being missed, why isn’t Biden’s first suggestion a call to simplify the tax code rather than spending billions more to further squeeze taxpayers? With all the government waste, which amounts to billions of dollars every year, why isn’t Biden calling for a serious accounting of government spending? Of course, the answer is simple: Biden’s not looking out for American taxpayers, he’s looking for means to expand the size and power of the federal government.

Why else is the Biden administration seeking to empower the IRS with greater authority to step all over Americans’ privacy rights via a new policy requirement for financial institutions to report all personal and business transactions valued over $600? The current threshold on transactions that incur such reporting to governmental authorities is $5,000. Why the massive decrease, especially in light of the fact that growing inflation is only leading to prices increasing? Logically, based upon the original rationale of the policy, the Biden administration should be looking to increase the threshold accordingly, so as to avoid as much as possible any further intrusion on Americans’ privacy rights.

The real reason behind Biden’s plan to massively increase the size of the IRS is increasing the government’s ability to monitor and control the American populace. The rationale is ultimately not about fighting crime or increasing government revenue. Rather, for authoritarian socialists, the real goal is the accumulation of power.