The Patriot Post® · Dems Just Armed the IRS

When the taxman comes knocking on your door, maybe now with gun drawn and at the ready, you can thank the Democrats for creating this situation. The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act includes an $80 billion windfall for the Internal Revenue Service, in part to hire 87,000 new employees, some 70,000 of whom will be armed agents. That answers the question as to why the IRS was purchasing millions of rounds of ammunition.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) noted: “Democrats are making the IRS bigger than the Pentagon, the Department of State, the FBI, and the Border Patrol COMBINED! Those IRS agents will come after you, not billionaires and big corporations!”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) also observed, “What a lot of people may not realize is last week, the Democrats through our Judiciary Committee passed a ban on the AR-15. They call it a weapon of war, but they made sure that their ban exempted every federal department including the IRS, the Department of Education and the USDA.”

Meanwhile, Democrats and the Biden administration are trying to gaslight the American public again over the effect of nearly doubling the size of the IRS, claiming that it won’t lead to an increasing number of audits for middle-class taxpayers. Yet Senate Democrats specifically voted against adding a clause that would have expressly prevented their bigger IRS from targeting taxpayers who make less than $400,000 annually.

Furthermore, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculated that at least $20 billion of the expected $204 billion tax revenue from the expanded IRS would come from taxpayers making less than $400,000 annually. So much for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s claim last week that a bigger IRS “shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited.” So much for Joe Biden’s oft-repeated pledge to not gouge anyone below that income level.

But the cost of paying taxes has gotten more burdensome for the middle class, as it will take even more of their time, effort, and money for tax preparation in an effort to avoid a now bigger and hungrier tax-tiger.

“The Inflation Reduction Act adds or expands a slew of special interest tax breaks and creates a parallel corporate tax structure based on financial statement income,” contends Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute. “Those misguided changes would also increase tax compliance costs on the private sector.” He further observes that taxpayers currently spend 6.5 billion hours a year on federal tax paperwork, which equates to 3.6 million workers working full-time — or, rather, needlessly wasting time — on an overly complex tax code. Now that the IRS has essentially doubled, just think how many more man hours will be wasted in seeking to ensure that one’s tax return is done in compliance with ever-more-complicated laws.

As much as Biden and the Democrats will try to deny it, the realty is they have just dramatically increased and militarized the IRS, simply because they want more of your money to spend on their pet programs, such as their green energy boondoggle. So, get ready to start paying.

(Updated with Massie’s quote.)