Last year, President Biden and congressional Democrats enacted $80 billion in new IRS funding for the next decade. During the debt limit debate earlier this year, Republicans successfully negotiated a $20 billion cut in that funding. And now, in the appropriations showdown, they’re going after the rest of it.
The IRS has long been an easy and popular target, because few of us enjoy paying taxes. And the agency has invited criticism with its history of overzealous audits, including a heavy-handed targeting of conservative nonprofit organizations during the Obama administration that fueled the latest round of GOP cuts.
However, defunding and weakening the IRS is not conservative. To the contrary, it will ultimately drive up deficits and raise middle-class taxes.
Between 2010 and 2021, the inflation-adjusted IRS budget fell by nearly one-quarter, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Tax enforcement staff declined by 31 percent, and the number of revenue agents collapsed to 1954 levels — even as the taxpaying population doubled, and the tax code grew vastly more complex. Thus, during the 2010s, audit rates fell by 54 percent for large corporations and 71 percent for millionaires.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Post (paywall)
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Brian M. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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