By Jason Smith, member of Congress
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Since day one, Joe Biden has carried out an agenda that does nothing but make life harder for the working class. Whether through his unconstitutional Executive Orders or his Washington Democrat allies in Congress, every single policy this administration has pursued has harmed the working class while benefitting the president’s wealthy friends and allies.
One of the ways the President proposed paying for his reckless Build Back Better tax-and-spending reconciliation bill was to turn the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) loose on the American people with 87,000 new IRS agents and banks reporting all accounts that exceed $10,000 in inflows and outflows annually directly to the IRS. The president claimed, however, that his plan would only target wealthy Americans.
I didn’t believe this claim for a second. The IRS is notorious for harassing Americans and has a documented history of targeting conservatives. So I wrote the Joint Committee on Taxation – the congressional scorekeeper – and demanded an official assessment of how the Biden Administration’s proposal to empower the IRS to spy on the financial activity of American citizens would impact hardworking American families making less than $400,000.
This week, the JCT confirmed my suspicions. 87 million Americans, or 59 percent of taxpayers earning less than $400,000, would have their account information reported to the IRS under President Biden’s proposal. Remember when Joe Biden promised the country that he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 per year? This report confirms that not only is the president’s promise being broken, but that the IRS is being unleashed in the worst way imaginable. In fact, working-class Americans who make less than $25,000 per year are 50 percent MORE likely to be audited by the IRS than those who make more than half a million dollars. This has nothing to do with making the wealthy pay their fair share – it’s Joe Biden’s war on the working class.
There is probably no acronym in the English language that provokes more fear for the average American taxpayer than the three letters I-R-S. In fact, polling recently showed a whopping 65 percent of Americans believe the Internal Revenue Service is already too powerful. But not Joe Biden. For him, the IRS is the key to advancing his radical, progressive agenda.
87,000 new agents would double the size of the agency. And the Biden administration is making this proposal to double the agency’s size all while the IRS has a massive backlog of unprocessed tax refunds. How on earth does anyone think it’s a good idea to allow the IRS to collect even more tax money when they can’t return what they already owe the American people in a timely fashion?
Our great President Ronald Reagan once said that “Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the Democrats believe every day is April 15th.” Joe Biden is proving this statement true, and it’s all at the expense of working-class Americans and their families.