The Schumer-Manchin tax bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed the Senate on Sunday, thanks to a Harris deciding vote, raises taxes and will give the IRS billions to go into what the Wall Street Journal called “beast mode.”
Forbes says:
In all, the meant-to-be-inflation buster bill will dole out about $80 billion to the IRS for increase enforcement, operational improvements, customer service, and systems modernization. Think big, really big. That $80 billion is more than six times the current annual IRS budget of $12.6 billion.
How can the IRS spend all of that? You guessed it, the bill says a whopping $45.6 billion will be for enforcement, and make no mistake, enforcement is the main directive from Democrats to the IRS. Get bigger, tougher and faster at collecting, and make them pay. Meanwhile, the IRS could be ramping up its police power too. The IRS is a key part of the government, but not one you usually associate with law enforcement and guns.
Democrats passed a bill in the House last week to keep US citizens from owning what democrats call “weapons of war,” but the same bill specifically allows IRS agents to have those types of guns.
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) August 8, 2022
This week they’re adding 87,000 IRS agents to the roster. pic.twitter.com/4wAyGpi5Ls
Interestingly, between March 1 and June 1, 2022, the IRS ordered $696,000 in ammunition. “At the point of a gun” suddenly looks very real.
SENATE DEMOCRATS BLOCK CRUZ AMENDMENT, INSIST 87,000 MORE IRS AGENTS ARE NEEDED TO AUDIT MIDDLE CLASS AMERICANS
Senate Democrats blocked U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) amendment to the Schumer-Manchin Tax-and-Spend Bill to strike the $80 billion dollar slush fund to prevent the hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents.
Sen. Cruz’s amendment would remove funding for a new army of IRS agents who will surveil innocent Americans and small businesses with 1.2 million additional audits, half of which will target Americans making less than $75,000 a year.
“There are a lot of bad things in this bill. But few are worse than the proposal by Democrats in this bill to double the size of the IRS and create 87,000 new IRS agents. I guarantee you citizens in every one of our states, if you ask them, what do they want, they don’t want 87,000 new IRS agents. And they’re not being created to audit billionaires or giant corporations. They’re being created to audit you. The House Ways and Means Committee, the minority, has put out an estimate that under this bill, there will be 1.2 million new audits per year, with over 700,000 of those new audits falling on taxpayers making $75,000 or less. I believe personally we should abolish the IRS. But at a minimum, we shouldn’t make the IRS larger than the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI and the Border Patrol all combined. That’s what the Democrats are proposing here. It is a terrible idea. If you don’t want 87,000 new IRS agents, vote yes.”