IRS FOOLISHLY BARRED FROM PURSUING RICH TAX CHEATS
Tax cheats are important to union officials because their theft is one of the major reasons feds do not get proper annual pay increases or enough staffing to do the job. The Dept. of Treasury has reported that 879,415 “high income” Americans did not even file tax returns recently, costing the government $45.7 billion in taxes. The reason this happen is that IRS’ staff has been systematically reduced by those in Congress who consider it their primary duty to take care of the rich beyond excessive direct tax cuts. For example, in 1995 IRS had 113,643 employees to tend to the filings from 265 million citizens. But after a lot of rhetoric attacking IRS without a single proven allegation of wrongdoing, Congress has reduced the IRS staff over two decades to 73,519 in 2018 despite the population having grown by 62 million Americans. These fictitious attacks on IRS were led by Sen. Roth, (Rep. DE) and Congressman Darrell Issa, (Rep. CA). In a perfect world, all unions would ban together with other organizations hurt by this theft to insist that Congress restore IRS funding. Not only would that slash tax cheating by the rich who do not even bother to file returns, but it would also boost funding for the many federal programs that help the people at the income levels of their union members. Unions are not going to get this problem fixed if they continue to do in the future what they have done in the past. Someone needs to make forming a large alliance for change a passionate project.