It’s simply a good-government, law-enforcement measure designed to catch wealthy tax cheats not “the good capitalists” we all depend on for jobs. First, because it does not address the structural class inequities embedded in the tax code, it might not offend the Democrats’ donor class. Short of that, however, beefing up the IRS to fight “waste, fraud, and abuse” by high-income earners has a number of features that should be useful to Clinton Democrats. Prosecuting Bernie’s class war, on the other hand, would have produced at least $250 billion in annual revenues. That’s better than throwing money at rich people, but it’s too small to have much of an impact on the economy or on our still increasing levels of income inequality. Her “fair tax” plan is composed of several little wrinkles that add up to a total increase in revenue of $50 billion a year, all of it from the top 2%. Clinton does that a little bit, both rhetorically and in her economic program, but she has eschewed prosecuting the kind of real class war in the tax code that Bernie Sanders advocated – to tax “unearned” investment income at the same rates as the income people work for and to impose a sales tax on buying stocks and bonds that is miniscule compared to the sales tax we pay for a meal at Burger King. ![]() The GOP is that party, and it wouldn’t take much opposition research to “brand” it as such. It’s part of a theory that the only road to economic growth is to throw money at rich people and corporations in hopes that they will use some of it to create jobs – a theory that has not only been refuted by historical experience backed by hard data, but which is highly unpopular with voters.īut the harder question is why Hilary Clinton and the Democrats don’t use a program like this as a rhetorical stick to beat Republicans mercilessly as the party of the 1%, for the 1%, and by the 1%. ![]() But along with the huge tax cuts for the wealthy that are part of every Republican platform, the GOP attack on the IRS has the practical fundraising effect of benefiting its donor class. ![]() Indeed, the Republican House has been cutting the IRS budget as part of its strategy to reduce the size of government (“starving the beast”). In the first instance, “we” wouldn’t do any of that because the Republican Party, which currently controls both houses of Congress, won’t allow it. This would create 1.3 million jobs a year, mostly in manufacturing and construction. With that additional revenue, the government could invest in a 10-year infrastructure program like the one Bernie Sanders wants, including investments in producing and installing green energy technology. To hire 50,000 new IRS workers to focus on getting the rich to pay what they legally owe, I figure, might cost about $3.5 billion but could produce some $150 billion in new revenue. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in their recent book American Amnesia report that for every dollar spent on tax law enforcement the government gets $6 in additional revenue – and even better, if the new auditors were told to focus on high-income groups where most outright fraud and evasion occurs, the return is $47 for each $1 spent on hiring tax collectors. Why? Because something like $400 billion in business and personal taxes go uncollected each year, and with more employees to do more audits, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would collect a big chunk of that missing money. I’m guessing that tax collectors have never been a popular group, but we need thousands more of them, probably about 50,000 more. ![]() He is a former President of the Working-Class Studies Association. His research interests include labor politics, working-class voting patterns, working-class culture, and popular and political discourse about class. Jack Metzgar is a retired Professor of Humanities from Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he is a core member of the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies.
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