The New Republican Big Lie

There is something seriously wrong with America's income tax system when a middle class couple like the husband and myself paid more than 81 times in 2021 federal taxes than what Donald Trump reportedly paid in 2016.  Trump, of course, is hardly the only individual of super wealth who pays nowhere near their fair share in taxes.   The system is truly broken.  But like in so many other things the GOP pushes, the middle class - and even working class - get left holding the bag and treading water financially while the wealthy get exponentially more wealthy.  There's a reason "Old Europe" now has more social upward mobility than America.  In part to address this shameful situation the recent bill passed by Democrats in Congress provides funding to add staffing to the IRS to (i) provide better customer service - call the IRS currently and be prepared to hold on the phone for an hour or more, generally more - and (ii) add agentds totarget wealthy tax cheats like Trump. Despite this common sense approach, leading Reoublicans are spreading deliberate lies and acting as if the bill will unleash thousands of IRS agents armed with AR-15's to terrorize everyday citizens acting as Nazi storm troopers.  It's all a lie and they know it's a lie yet the paranoia of the lunatic GOP base is being stoked and it's likely only a matter of time before some deranged right wing nut engages in violence.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the new big GOP lie.  Here are excerpts:  

So many lies, so little time. It is impossible to keep up with the volume of disinformation churned out by the MAGA-occupied Republican Party. But sometimes it’s worth pausing to examine the anatomy of a particularly egregious fabrication, to understand the broader “alternative fact” ecosystem that misinforms tens of millions of Americans.

Let’s consider the lie, endlessly repeated by Republicans and the Fox News-led echo chamber, that new legislation enacted by Democrats funds the hiring of “87,000 armed IRS agents.” Like the “death panel” fabrication during the Obamacare debate, this is a whole-cloth invention designed to stoke paranoia.

Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.) [who made much of his great wealth through insurance fraud], head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sent an open letter last week warning Americans not to work for the IRS. He falsely claimed that the Democrats’ climate, energy and tax bill would add “roughly 87,000 agents” at the IRS, creating “an IRS super-police force” . . . .

The IRS certainly isn’t adding 87,000 armed agents. It isn’t even adding 87,000 agents. In fact, it’s not even adding 87,000 employees.

When you figure in attrition (current funding doesn’t let the IRS fill all vacancies), Treasury officials tell me, the expected increase in personnel would be more like 40,000, over the course of a decade — which would merely restore IRS staffing to around the 117,000 it had in 1990.

Only about 6,500 of the new hires would be “agents.” The rest would be customer-service representatives, data specialists and the like.

And fewer than 1 percent of the new hires would be armed. (The IRS job posting Scott cited, which predated the new law, was specifically for such law-enforcement personnel.) Such officers, who go after drug rings and Russian oligarchs, have been part of the IRS for more than a century.

As for the IRS coming after “hardworking Americans,” Treasury says the new law will result in a “lower likelihood of audit” for ordinary taxpayers, because technology upgrades will enable the IRS to target the actual tax cheats — the super-rich — for more audits. The wealthiest 1 percent defraud the government, and fellow taxpayers, of more than $160 billion a year.

So here we have a Republican Party leadership figure generating false hysteria about armed government agents, hysteria that has increased threats against the people who collect the funds for the U.S. military, among everything else. And he’s dishonestly fomenting antigovernment fury in the service of protecting filthy-rich tax cheats.

It isn’t just Scott.  Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), fantasizing about an “army of 87,000 IRS agents,” proclaimed that “we WILL NOT FUND these 87k armed new IRS agents who will target the American people.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) mused on Fox News about “a strike force that goes in with AK-15s [sic] already loaded ready to shoot some small-business person.”

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) warned that “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you.”

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel saw an “IRS ‘SWAT team’ ” invading “your kids’ lemonade stand.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) claimed “87,000 new IRS agents.” Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia alleged “87,000 armed IRS agents.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called it a “middle finger to the American public.”

Republican members of Congress tweeted the “87,000 agents” falsehood hundreds of times, while Fox News has repeated it more than 90 times this month, according to the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer — all unmoved by fact checks repeatedly debunking the nonsense.

[T]hey could have told the truth: that the administration plans to add a few thousand IRS agents over 10 years, and a few hundred armed officers, to go after super-rich tax cheats. But the lie is so much scarier.

Once again, average everyday members of the GOP base is being played for fools while the super wealthy sit back and laugh.  Nowadays, one cannot be a Republican without being a shameless liar and - in my view - morally bankrupt.