What could you do with $1 trillion?

 

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.