Thanks to President Biden’s Inflation Recover Act the IRS reached a milestone this week collecting more than $1 billion from high income, wealthy tax cheats.[1] The campaign is focused on those with more than $1 million of income or have unpaid tax debts of more than $250,000.
“President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is increasing tax fairness and ensuring that all wealthy taxpayers pay the taxes they owe, just like working families do,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in a statement.[2]
Republicans have falsely claimed that the IRS would hire 87,000 new agents “to audit Walmart shoppers.”[3] It is safe to assume that 99.9999% of Walmart shoppers make less than $1 million per year so their audit risk is negligible.
[Note: The IRS has more than 50,000 open positions due to attrition and decades of funding cuts by Republicans.]
There's a gap between taxes collected and actual taxes owed that is estimated at about $400 billion annually under existing laws. [4] That’s revenue that the U.S. government could be collecting, but can't because wealth taxpayers, corporations, and complex partnerships (say the Trump organization for example) underreport income or use other tactics to lower their tax burdens.
Even with no tax increases, collecting taxes owed but not paid by wealthy tax cheats would extend the financial stability of social security and Medicare for decades.
But Republicans don’t want that.
[2] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-07-11/irs-collects-milestone-1-billion-in-back-taxes-from-wealthy
Comments