"The pro-tax evasion, pro-deficits party strikes again"

[applegrove]

The pro-tax evasion, pro-deficits party strikes again

by Jon Perr at Daily Kos

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/20/1314710/-The-pro-tax-evasion-pro-deficits-party-strikes-again

"SNIP..........................


After their successful 1990s crusade to gut the Internal Revenue Service, the GOP is once again slashing its budget, demonizing its employees and even questioning the legitimacy of its mission. With its funding cut by Congress for five years in a row, the agency now has 10 percent fewer agents and officers than five years ago and fewer agents auditing returns than at any time since at least the 1980s. Even as congressional Republicans have blocked Obama administration efforts to end inversions that enable American corporations to move overseas to avoid paying taxes, the Government Accountability Office reported an epidemic of tax dodging by small businesses. The result is that the tax gap—the difference between what the American people and U.S. businesses owe the federal government and what they actually pay—has mushroomed to an estimated $500 billion from $195 billion in 1998. To put that in context, that's roughly equal to the entire projected federal budget deficit for this year.

Before looking at the frightening numbers behind today's sad state of the IRS, it's important to recount the history of how the GOP became, as Jonathan Cohn aptly put it, the "pro-deficits, pro-tax evasion" party.

For starters, the GOP's best and brightest have ridiculed the very notion that the richest Americans can even be asked to pay higher taxes. "It's really American to avoid paying taxes, legally," South Carolina Sen.Lindsey Graham declared in defense of Mitt Romney in 2012, adding:

It's a game we play. Every American tries to find the way to get the most deductions they can. I see nothing wrong with playing the game because we set it up to be a game.




..........................SNIP"