Even if he paid the same share as the rest of us, he could still afford toys like his Blue Origin rocket to go joy riding on the edge of space. And he could pay thousands of his Amazon workers a living wage; instead, they got a quick thank you “because you guys paid for all of this.” Never mind that thousands of them get a minimum wage, depend on food stamps and pee in bottles because they don’t have enough time for bathroom breaks.
Astronaut Bezos had heat shields to protect him in space and back on Earth he has the Republican Party. Not only does the GOP boast about its tax cuts for the big corporations and the wealthy like Jeff and Amazon, but it is fighting in the Senate to protect the rich from paying what they already owe.
Senate Republicans are demanding a “pay for” to finance the proposed $1.2-tillion infrastructure bill, but they reject one of the most effective methods that does not requiring raising taxes and would be popular with the majority of their constituents, though not their big donors.
They have threatened to kill the legislation if it includes funding for the IRS to enforce tax laws to make people pay what they already owe. Instead, they prefer using unspent COVID-19 relief funds.
Nobody likes paying taxes. Donald Trump is the poster boy for tax cheats, boasting of being an expert on the tax code and how “smart” he was to pay no federal taxes in 10 of the past 15 years. His company and CFO are under indictment on more than two dozen charges of tax evasion.
The government loses about $1 trillion (with a T) in unpaid taxes every year, according to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, because the super-rich and the big corporations don’t pay all they should.
Rettig, a Trump appointee, is asking the Congress for $900 million so the IRS can beef up tax enforcement, making tax avoiders and cheats pay what they owe. But he ran into a stiff wall of Republican opposition.
You’d think Republicans who fancy themselves as law-and-order folks and opponents of tax hikes would be happy to avoid raising anyone’s taxes by making sure everyone paid what they already owed. But not if it hits the pockets of their big donors (yes, Democrats also have lots of big donors, but they’re apparently willing to have them pay up like everyone else).
Protecting the wealthiest of the wealthy – the mother lode of campaign financing for the GOP – is a core reason for Republican tax phobia. It’s greed: helping the wealthiest keep their money by cutting their taxes, creating lucrative loopholes and blocking tax collectors from enforcing the law.
THE JEFFERSONIAN ideal of limited national government is more an excuse than a GOP philosophy. Republicans have a long history of using that same government to serve the financial interests of the wealthiest. Trump’s signature achievement, the 2017 tax cut, was a bonanza for people in his income class..
Shredding the social safety net is the big reason they prefer not to mention.
The GOP’s longtime anti-tax guru, Grover Norquist, declared, “My goal is to cut government in half... to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” He is president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), which “opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle” and demands all Republicans seeking its endorsement take the no-new-taxes pledge.
George HW Bush took the pledge during his 1988 presidential campaign – “read my lips” – and the taxophobes contend violating it cost him reelection four years later.
The goal of “repealing and replacing” Obamacare was never a Republican plan to provide better and more affordable health insurance but to help big donors in the private insurance industry by effectively telling consumers “you’re on your own, don’t bother us.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) said collecting taxes means funding the government and that means “more waste, fraud and abuse.” Her Texas colleague, Ted Cruz, wants to “abolish the damn place.” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming), a multimillionaire like Cruz, said funding the IRS would mean “an army of bureaucrats snooping through bank statements” of “law-abiding Americans.”
IRS Commissioner Rettig estimated the “tax gap” between what people owe and what they actually pay is about a trillion dollars a year. The Biden administration is asking Congress for less than one tenth of one percent (0.1%) of that to help close the gap. Budget hawks like post-Trump Republicans now claim to be should call that a good investment.
Rettig said the rich and poor are audited at the same rate, but he admitted it is easier and less expensive to audit lower-income taxpayers than wealthier ones who have the means to fight back.
A former IRS auditor (who happened to be my father-in-law) told me that the underfunded IRS hires bright young lawyers fresh out of school, trains them and then they go into private practice to sell their skills at gaming the system for the big guys.
“The agency is increasingly unable to detect or address blatant tax cheating by high-income filers and the largest businesses,” said Chve-Ching Huang, executive director of the NYU Tax Law Center.
According to three former top IRS officials in Republican administrations, “Most of the people who don’t pay their fair share are upper-income people who use financial vehicles to avoid tax bills.” Closing the tax gap, they insist, means not having to raise taxes for honest businesses and law-abiding taxpayers who already pay what they owe.
If President Biden wants to begin closing the tax gap by strengthening enforcement and making tax cheats and dodgers pony up, Democrats will have to do it on their own by putting the needed IRS funding in the reconciliation bill, which can be passed without Republican votes (assuming Democrats remain united).
Here’s a simple message for the taxophobes on Capitol Hill: If you don’t want to raise taxes, just enforce present laws.