In perhaps the most hilarious episode of Trump Derangement Syndrome yet, the media is now going crazy over President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to reform the Internal Revenue Service.
Yes, that IRS — the one that, according to a recent Pew Research Center study, is the least popular agency in the entire government, with just 38% of respondents approving.
While they may disagree on how high tax brackets should go, Democrats and Republicans have always agreed concurred the IRS is a big, fat, mess — a merciless, anti-consumer agency that treats everyone (especially the less well-to-do) poorly.
Well, all it took for the mainstream media and The Left to seemingly flip their position on this matter was for the Trump administration to start going after it, dismissing some of its extraneous unaccountable employees and acting to make the agency more accountable to the taxpayers it serves.
Take The Hill, for example, which recently ran a “news” story on how the White House’s actions “would likely contribute to a longer-term trend at the agency of diminished audit rates, minimal tax enforcement for the most sophisticated taxpayers and the use of outdated technologies that’s been going on for decades” — according to “experts.”
Talk about disingenuousness!
Real experts know that the IRS has no one to blame for these shortcomings but itself.
You see, the IRS is socialist by design, and it is always trying to expand its power. The problem is that, in so doing, it all too often gets distracted and loses sight of its core mission, which makes the agency fail at doing just about anything well — even tax collection.
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A perfect example of this is the IRS’ annoying dogmatic insistence on not only collecting our taxes but also on preparing them for us! That’s right — the IRS is already taxpayers’ jury and executioner but now it wants to be their judge too.
After years of insistence that the federal government, not the private sector, should be performing this job, the Biden administration greenlit the agency’s wish. It allowed for a pilot program, Direct File, to move forward, in which the IRS prepared the taxes of a select group of Americans for free.
But, as the great Milton Freedman once said, there is no such thing as a free lunch. A March 20 report released by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that some of the just over 140,000 taxpayers who allowed the IRS to do this for them lost out big time.
The report outlined how some of them may have unknowingly given up the ability to claim certain tax credits. Direct File, for example, did not allow taxpayers to include education tax credits, which is the most important credit that many young Americans claim and a critical one for the mothers and fathers of young students.
According to the inspector general, 669 taxpayers were potentially eligible to claim an education credit, which Direct File did not allow them to do. When it sampled these returns, the inspector general projected that “271 of the 669 returns were eligible to receive education credits totaling $220,184.”
Nearly half a quarter million dollars were siphoned from taxpayers and given to the IRS — par for the course. And that’s the analyzed cost of just one single tax credit screw-up in the over 140,000 returns that the IRS prepared through Direct File. Imagine how many other mistakes there were with other tax credits during this program. And worse, imagine how much worse the problem will become if Direct File expands, and all 160 million-plus Americans begin using it. It’s almost as if — gasp — the IRS should just “stay in its lane!”
And that’s precisely the problem — the IRS is always trying to do too much. It’s like the worst kind of Type A student you found in all your college classes. The only difference is that the IRS can’t handle the workload it puts on itself, and the more it tries to take on, the more inefficient and bloated it becomes.
This is precisely the reason the agency has the “diminished audit rates, minimal tax enforcement for the most sophisticated taxpayers and the use of outdated technologies” — all the things The Hill cited in its recent article. These problems aren’t because of President Trump, and to use him as a scapegoat in this scenario is downright laughable and below the belt.
Rather than continue to play the Trump Derangement Syndrome game and point fingers, Democrats should support and work with the Trump administration to fix the many issues with the IRS that even they have complained about for decades. This has always been a bipartisan issue. It’s time The Left begin treating it like one again.
J.D. Hayworth represented Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995-2007, where he became the first Arizonan in history to serve on the Ways & Means Committee
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