Kevin McCarthy would rather help tax cheaters than honest Americans following the rules

Most Americans would think that if the government was owed $1 trillion per year that was not properly paid in taxes, the feds would be right to go after it.

After all, most people are law-abiding and pay what they are owed.

But that’s not how Kevin McCarthy sees it.

The Republican leader in the House of Representatives, McCarthy of Bakersfield posted a message on Twitter Tuesday raising dark suspicions over President Biden’s plan to go after tax cheats:

Note the use of key words: “Democrats are scheming ... hiring an army ... spy on Americans.”

Then, because McCarthy cannot do seemingly anything on social media without referring to the U.S.-Mexico border, he adds the line about the officers, not bothering to mention that the Border Patrol is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the nation. It has just under 20,000 officers, as McCarthy indicated.

Let’s separate McCarthy’s fear-mongering fiction and present the facts.

“Uncollected” taxes worth a lot

Last year President Biden proposed to double the size of the IRS by hiring 87,000 workers, not just “87,00” as the typo in McCarthy’s initial tweet showed. It would not happen all at once, but over a decade.

The reason? To capture uncollected taxes owed by corporations, partnerships and wealthy people.

“These unpaid taxes come at a cost to American households and compliant taxpayers as policymakers choose rising deficits, lower spending on necessary priorities, or further tax increases to compensate for the lost revenue,” the Treasury Department noted in a report.

Did you connect those dots? When less money comes in because of tax cheating, those who do it right cough up more because someone has to pay the bills.

The online news site Politico reported that uncollected taxes in 2019 totaled $554 billion. But the IRS commissioner more recently estimated that number could be a large as $1 trillion per year.

About 80% of that comes from people underreporting their incomes or taking too many deductions — both forms of cheating. “The rest is people either not filing returns at all, or doing their taxes correctly and failing to pay what they owe,” Politico said.

Whatever the form, it is clear that the government needs more resources to hold accountable those taxpayers who ignore or skirt the rules.

Stop the social media nonsense

What McCarthy characterizes as spying is simply a larger workforce for the IRS. So why does he choose a word like “spy” in his post? Because it will get a reaction out of his conservative supporters and fuels the GOP’s current mantra that a government led by Democrats cannot be trusted.

As the House minority leader and likely-to-be representative for Clovis and a good part of Fresno County come next year, McCarthy well knows that the IRS has been underfunded for years.

The IRS entered this past tax season with a backlog of 24 million unprocessed paper returns. Most of that huge pile dated to 2020. Taxpayer advocates and some members of Congress pleaded with the agency to reduce the backlog, if for no other reason than some people pay for basic living expenses with tax credits and refunds. So to get that mountain of returns processed, the IRS went on a binge to hire 10,000 workers last spring.

It faced a manpower shortage due to how the COVID pandemic sidelined staff, stymied customer service and gave way to a wave of retirements. All that came on top of underfunding due to GOP-caused budget cuts over the last decade, The Washington Post reported.

Seen in that light, the new staff Biden wants to hire is meant to fix problems the Republicans helped cause. It’s just that McCarthy chooses to characterize it as hiring an army of spies.

Such rhetoric is offensive, untrue and beneath the office the McCarthy so dearly wants to promote to, that of House speaker, the third-ranking position in the federal government. He should knock off the nonsense and post to social media information that will be helpful to Americans and his own constituents, not simply mislead and alarm them. The nation needs truth telling, not partisan fiction.