The "Populist" Party For The Wealthiest People

 

The ridiculous canard that the Republican / Forced Birth / Shooters party has become the "working man's party" can be punctured by examining Republican tax policy for the past half century. Using trickle down economics as their lodestar, Republican lawmakers habitually protect the highest income earners (i.e. their donors) in the tax code, sticking it to the middle class when it comes to income taxes. A favorite tactic of theirs is creating loopholes for the very wealthy to slip through in avoiding taxes. But the newest game by right wing Republicans is to keep the Internal Revenue Service back on its heels, and not provide funding sufficient to go after high income tax cheats through audits and enforcement. From Greg Sargent writing in the Washington Post:

"Republicans have been amplifying the claim lately that their party has undergone a 'populist' makeover, rendering it both anti-elite and pro-working class. One way Republicans purport to illustrate this is by attacking President Biden’s expanded funding for the Internal Revenue Service, insisting that it empowers a strike force of bureaucrats to prey on ordinary Americans.

But new data on tax avoidance by the ultrarich badly undermines GOP claims to being an anti-elite, pro-worker party. It shows that if Republicans get their way with regard to the IRS, a nontrivial number of very rich Americans would continue to underpay taxes they owe, effectively making out like bandits — some literally so.

Nearly 1,000 tax filers who earn more than $1 million per year have still not filed federal tax returns for at least one year from 2017 to 2020, according to IRS data provided to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

What’s more, the 2,000 people who represent the highest-income non-filers in one or more of those years owe a total of more than $900 million in federal taxes, the data shows.

'These are people who essentially blow raspberries at the IRS,' Wyden told me. 'They’re sophisticated people. They know this is wrong, wrong, wrong. And they do it anyway.'

The data underscores that when the IRS is underfunded, wealthy tax cheats benefit in a big way. An underfunded IRS is what Republicans are advocating for."  (our emphasis)

The lying Republicans know that by expanding funding to the IRS, it's their donors that will be forced to pay their fair share in taxes, not the Republican-voting small business owner in Lincoln, Nebraska. They have to lie, because undermining the IRS actually hurts that Republican-voting small business owner, who eventually has to pay higher taxes to make up for the wealthiest income earners who are avoiding theirs.

(image: Psychologs.com)