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Enforce the rich

Conservatives are rather selective about the kind of crime they want punished. But you knew that.

Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post takes note:

If you care about “law and order,” if you think unpatriotic hucksters are getting away with scamming Uncle Sam or, heck, if you don’t want your own taxes to increase, you should demand to beef up the Internal Revenue Service.

Yet for some reason the leading lights of the conservative movement are trying to block tax cops from enforcing the law.

Federal tax enforcement has fallen through the floor. IRS budgets have been slashed by more than 20 percent over the last decade (adjusted for inflation) and the number of enforcement positions has fallen 40 percent. Audits of the wealthy and large corporations are vanishingly low.

The tax fraud prosecution pending against the Trump Organization is only one of many brazen cases of the rich flaunting the law with abandon. Now that no one is checking their math, they are even safer from being held to account.

This is important right now because increasing funding for IRS tax enforcement is a key part of the pending bipartisan infrastructure deal. Closing the “tax gap” (the difference between what is owed and what is paid) could offset some of the infrastructure spending without increasing taxes on Americans who already pay theirs.

“… it would not be outlandish to believe that the actual tax gap could approach and possibly exceed one trillion dollars per year.” — IRS Commissioner Charles “Chuck” Rettig

Rampell continues:

And yet: The pseudointellectual brain trust that has long powered the GOP is now lobbying against adequately funding the IRS. Which proves that these anti-tax crusaders are (and have long been) a bunch of unserious grifters — less interested in “generating economic growth” than in lining their own pockets.

Among the backers of the lobbying effort are billionaire Robert Mercer and notorious charlatan Stephen Moore, both of whom have previously run into trouble with the IRS for alleged tax dodges. They’re part of a consortium that once claimed to care about cutting tax rates to supercharge the economy but has apparently dropped the pretense. Making sure taxes legally owed are actually collected is not only fairer; it also helps keeps rates down. When tax compliance is higher, the government can set rates lower and still collect the same amount of revenue.

Donald Trump built his identity around dodging taxes (as did his father), and only after a lifetime of evasion is the law about to catch up with him, maybe. What Trump, Mercer, Moore and Associates don’t pay in taxes they legally owe, you do for them.

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the Conservative Action Project, the Coalition to Protect American Workers, and the Leadership Institute are determined that things stay that way. They will spend tens of millions in lobbying fees to secure the ability of the rich to violate tax laws unimpeded.

The broader point in the age of George Floyd is how glaring is the presence of the two-tiered system of injustice foisted in this country on the weak by the strong.

“The people fighting to starve the IRS are the people who imagine the law doesn’t apply to them, only to the little people,” writes Rampell. “If you want these thugs to pay what they owe, put more tax cops on the beat.”

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Thursday night offered a monologue/rant on the topic of Republican opposition to increasing IRS enforcement funding. Republicans wail about rumors of Democrats defunding police while they defend defunding the tax police.

“To the institutional Republican Party, the idea that rich people should be able to cheat on their taxes and get away with it is as core and central them as any other principle with the exception that only certain people should vote,” Hayes observes.

He concludes:

Defending the rights of Donald Trumps of the world to not pay taxes while you do is one of the last unifying projects of the morally and intellectually desiccated Republican Party. They have pioneered a certain kind of defunding the police, and defending that is a hill they will absolutely die on no matter how much it costs. Because when it comes to a certain class of criminal there is no one softer on crime than the Republican Party.

My closest brush with that kind of class privilege came decades ago after an old friend with a military background told me how he’d been charged with resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer, and possession of a concealed weapon. His lawyer got him off (IIRC) with probation and community service.

“How the hell did you manage that?” I asked, stunned.

“Because my daddy’s rich and my momma’s good looking,” he replied, grinning.

Both were true. I’ll bet today he votes Republican.

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