Letter: What might we lose in 2024

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I write this throughout election week 2023, whereas pondering election 12 months 2024. Latest polls present Donald Trump as a powerful candidate. However what have we acquired to lose if Trump and different MAGA candidates win in 2024? MAGA Speaker of the Home Mike Johnson reminded us. Whereas hundreds of thousands are struggling in struggle zones, Mike Johnson made  reducing IRS funding a precedence. Certainly one of Kevin McCarthy’s first actions as Speaker of the Home was additionally a name to chop IRS funding. In reality, the Republican Celebration has a historical past of reducing IRS funding, together with calls to eradicate the IRS because the Nineteen Nineties.

Starting in 2010, the IRS has had funding lower by 100s of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}, decreasing its enforcement finances by 23 % and buyer help by 4 %. Defunding enforcement impacts technological advances, assortment efforts, monitoring down non-filers, and auditing for fraud and errors. Within the 2015-2017 biennial, $9 billion much less was collected by enforcement in comparison with the 2008-2010 biennial.

However what will we, common residents, lose if MAGA politicians proceed to chop funding for the IRS. We lose a tax authority that doesn’t have workers to assist common taxpayers with questions and submitting points. We lose the idea that all of us pay our justifiable share. Unchecked, tax evasion breeds repeat tax evasion. Revenue inequality is at an all-time excessive, enormously diminished audits of complicated tax returns widens America’s wealth disparities. As a nation, collectively, all of us lose billions of {dollars} that go uncollected.