House Republicans have passed their first messaging bill.
“The House voted 221-210 to claw back more than $70 billion — or nearly 90 percent — of new funding for the IRS, underscoring Republicans’ opposition to the agency expansion and a desire to keep tax enforcement issues in the public eye.
The legislation will certainly die in the Senate over staunch opposition from Democrats. But debate over the bill gives the GOP an opportunity to relitigate what the party views as one of the most unpopular provisions in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, which provided $80 billion in new funding to the IRS over 10 years to bolster a wide range of agency functions, including customer service, taxpayer assistance and criminal investigations. …
“The last thing [Americans] need is more IRS agents knocking on doors to conduct audits, yet this IRS funding is part of the broad Biden administration strategy to tax, audit exponentially more Americans,” Smith said in his speech introducing the the bill. …”
This will go nowhere in the Senate, but it is better than what came out of the House over the past two years under Democrats: +$100 billion dollars for the war in Ukraine, comprehensive immigration reform, gun control, Juneteenth as a federal holiday, DC statehood, the Equality Act, codifying gay marriage and interracial marriage into federal law, the George Floyd Justice In Policing Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the “Inflation Reduction Act” aka the climate change act, the $1.7 trillion Porkulus, etc.
Zeeshan Aleem is back this morning to explain how hiring 87,000 new IRS agents is “real populism.”
“After a bruising battle over the speakership, House Republicans kicked off their legislative agenda on Monday. It was a farce.
The GOP’s first policy bill would defund President Joe Biden’s efforts to help the Internal Revenue Service crack down on tax cheats. It’s a bill that’s predicated on disinformation, whose only real constituency is wealthy people who don’t want to pay their fair share. And it underscores how the Republican Party’s so-called populism isn’t about empowering the working class — it’s about exploiting them.
After a historic struggle to become House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy immediately tried to rally the troops on Saturday by promising to “repeal funding for 87,000 new IRS agents, because the government should be here to help you, not go after you.” It was classic red meat for the base: For months, Republicans have messaged that the new agents would be recruited into a heavily armed “shadow army” designed to weaponize the IRS against the middle class. Conservative activists and media, which have frequently and wrongly accused the IRS of bias against the right, enthusiastically encouraged these claims. …”
Real populists would have sided with the British in the American Revolution and supported crushing the Whiskey Rebellion. Americans felt so strongly about the issue for a variety of reasons – the memory of how the Scots-Irish were driven out of Scotland and Ireland, the American Revolution which was about taxation and the English constitution – that there wasn’t an income tax until Lincoln experimented with it during the War Between the States. The Sixteenth Amendment had to be adopted in 1913 to establish the federal income tax. It was used to pay for American involvement in the First World War.
>Zeeshan Aleem is back this morning
to worship Mammon
This will go nowhere in the senate because democrats have the majority. No IRS does mean no taxes, it means no refunds, child or earned work credits for families. It means letting “billionaires” continue to pay $750/year in federal income taxes. Literally riding on the backs of the working class, who pay much more.
Republicans are going to republican. We can be sure of that.
IRS code is over 2200 pages. Unless you can afford a sharp accountant and tax lawyer, you’re screwed.
Yep. This is only symbolic BS, but it’s meant to send a message to Republican donors that the party is still in their corner.
Vickey- your envy of the wealthy (whether they are wealthy by moral or immoral means) is PURE BOLSHEVISM. I made a comment on another forum, about a book perhaps you all should read.
David Chilton’s “Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators.”
Ron Sider is dead. Now if we can just kill the bolsheviks that keep the class envy going….
Of course, the first instinct of republicans is to attack the enforcement of tax laws.
There is no “populist right” or “dissident right.” It’s the same old republican party BS forever.
True Populism is supporting the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, codifying gay and interracial marriage into federal law, castrating 12 year olds and legalizing heroin. Also, funding all of our stupid programs for unemployable, downwardly mobile PMCs – Populist Left
And what have they done regarding any of this? Nothing and they never will.
There are more butt crunchers & pedophiles in the Republican Party than anywhere. They just lie about it.
Every single House Republican just voted to establish a select committee to investigate the FBI and other government agencies. Every single Democrats opposed it. Just like every single Democrat in Congress voted to spend over $100 billion dollars on Ukraine and to codify gay and interracial marriage into federal law. That has happened over the past two months.
“But the democrats…”
The standard boomercon response.
We wouldn’t want to criticize Democrats.
That’s the target audience of the Alt-MSNBC brain trust. We should be sucking up to the most hostile and anti-White people in the country, working to empower them in every election and defending Joe Biden and all the institutions like the IRS, FBI, CIA, DHS which have been weaponized against us. Oh, and we should attack Christianity and support NATO and put Ukraine flags in our avatars.
So they accomplished, well, nothing at all.
Don’t the democrats know the biggest tax cheats of them all are all these Asians, Hindus, and Middle Easterners they imported here? It’s all these cash based family businesses where the easy fraud occurs and since the white family has been largely destroyed over the past 60 years these are all run by fresh off the boat foreigners. Forgetting the Wall Street .com and big box store decimation of Mayburry’s Main Street businesses like hardware stores, etc. Look at the existing niche of small businesses. How would the atomized individual start up a family restaurant, buy a motel, own a gas station, liquor store? You have no family anymore nearby and willing to help you staff the thing and not steal, goof off, or not show up for your shift. What are you going to do? Call the temp agency and have them send over a bunch of black ex conns straight out of the penitentiary? Might as well just burn it down in that case. That’s why this niche has these extended clan networks of eastern hemisphere foreigners running them, some old hindu grandma isn’t going to be like some modern anglo family member who ran off to the big city to live like the hipsters on TV, are getting fleeced for Mercedes Benz level debt at the post secondary school education racket, are hooked on weed, have a bastard to look after, or simply think they are “too good” to help out in the family business. So trust me, these Patel, Abdul, Chang run small businesses have their booked cooked like your Thanksgiving Turkey.
History repeats itself. Republicans out of power make all kinds of gesture but when they’re in power, i.e. controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, they do nothing except wage wars on the other side of the world.