News flash! The IRS estimates that giant corporations and
the super-rich get away with dodging their taxes to the tune of 1 trillion
dollars per year!
They aren’t talking about the deductions that
corporations and the wealthy can take advantage of since they use their wealth
to write tax laws that benefit them. This is money they owe under the current
tax laws and just don’t pay. How do they get away with it??? Because the IRS
does not have the resources (read “budget”) to audit them.
For the last 40 years, mostly under Republican
administrations, the budget for the IRS has been cut, cut, cut. But this move
to “save” money and keep the deficit down has the exact opposite effect because
it makes it impossible to catch these tax cheats. In fact, it encourages them.
And now, these same folks who cut the IRS funds are
fighting to remove even a modest increase in the IRS budget that was proposed
in the infrastructure bill in Congress, even though this spending would pay for
itself many, many times over.
It’s time that the rich pay their fair share. One
trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,0000) can go a long way. Collecting the taxes
that the rich and their corporations owe would benefit working Americans in
three ways: it could allow the government to reduce the taxes of middle class
Americans; it could provide funds for services and programs that benefit all of
us; it could reduce the federal budget deficit.
Collecting these taxes from the tax cheats would go a
long way to fix our country and reduce the huge wealth gap produced by runaway
inequality.
