In the Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema-- with the whispered backing of conservative Democrats Mark Warner, Tom Carper, Jon Tester, Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen and perhaps others-- are doing the Republicans' job in threatening to derail Biden's domestic agenda in an attempt to protect the richest Americans from paying even a tiny percentage of their fair share of taxes. TINY!
These are the people who finance the political careers and lifestyles of conservative politicians. These are also the people who don't pay their already too low taxes. Yesterday Alan Rappeport reported that "The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans are the nation’s most egregious tax evaders, failing to pay as much as $163 billion in owed taxes per year, according to a Treasury Department report released on Wednesday. The analysis comes as the Biden administration pushes lawmakers to embrace its ambitious proposal to beef up the Internal Revenue Service to narrow the “tax gap,” which it estimates amounts to $7 trillion in unpaid taxes over a decade. The White House has proposed investing $80 billion in the agency over the next 10 years to hire more enforcement staff, overhaul its technology and usher in new information-reporting requirements that would give the government greater insight into tax evasion schemes. The proposals have been met with deep skepticism from Republicans and business lobbyists who argue that the I.R.S. cannot be trusted with more power and that the proposals are an invasion of privacy."
Biden is so conservative. A much better way to get these people would be to have a commercial-free TV extravaganza where a gallows has been erected and the countries 3 or 4 or 5 or 10 worst tax evaders are hung, with much fanfare about their crimes, one after the other. Maybe musicians could be asked to wrote songs specially for the occasion and then perform them on stage between hangings. Hangings are too harsh? Lethal injections? No? Floggings? In any case, the idea would be to send a message-- no more cheating. Oh, and did I mention anything about 100% confiscation of their estates? Or 99% so they don't wind up using food stamps and getting welfare.
The department’s report, which was written by Natasha Sarin, deputy assistant secretary for microeconomics, makes the case that narrowing the tax gap is part of the Biden administration’s ambition to create a more equitable economy, as audits and enforcement actions will be aimed at the rich.
“For the I.R.S. to appropriately enforce the tax laws against high earners and large corporations, it needs funding to hire and train revenue agents who can decipher their thousands of pages of sophisticated tax filings,” Ms. Sarin wrote. “It also needs access to information about opaque income streams-- like proprietorship and partnership income-- that accrue disproportionately to high earners.”
The report combines academic research on how the tax gap has historically been distributed across the income scale with 2019 tax data.
Tax compliance rates are high for low- and middle-income workers who have their taxes deducted automatically from their paychecks. The rich, however, are able to use accounting loopholes to shield their tax liabilities.
Meanwhile, far right Republicans Ted Budd (NC), Warren Davidson (OH), Scott Perry (PA) and Barry Loudermilk (GA) went yesterday writing a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona demanding the administration rule out any kind of significant federal student loan debt forgiveness program. They were wailing about the "will of the people," presumably the very rich people who oppose student debt forgiveness.
let me agree somewhat with hiwatt11 also. I remember the Rs of the '70s as being much less conservative, in deeds, than today's democraps. If you measure the current democraps against the proto-nazis of, say, 2005, you're closer to a dead heat... but the democraps refuse to prosecute corporate criminals (from the 2008 mortgage fraudgasm, for instance), which makes them WORSE than the admin of cheney/w.
The tax problem has 2 parts, one of which is nicely covered here.
Part 2 of the problem is the amount that the rich and corporations have not been taxed since reagan's first massive tax cut in '81 (which was largely bipartisan, btw). This is not cheating. This is them buying policy that lower…
Today's Democratic Party is as conservative as the Republican Party of my 1970s childhood. That Republican Party would have never done the right thing on taxes so I can't see today's Democratic Party doing the right thing now.