Tea at Trianon: IRS Overwhelmingly Targeting Low-Income Taxpayers for Audit

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

IRS Overwhelmingly Targeting Low-Income Taxpayers for Audit

From Human Events:

Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released data on Wednesday provided by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on audits conducted by the IRS in the 2022 fiscal year that found the agency prioritized the harassment of the poorest households. Reason magazine reported that despite receiving additional funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the data indicated that the IRS primarily focused on auditing low-income taxpayers, while fewer audits were conducted on millionaires and billionaires.
"The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates—five and a half times virtually everyone else—were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit," reported TRAC, adding that the poorest taxpayers are "easy marks in an era when IRS increasingly relies upon correspondence audits yet doesn't have the resources to assist taxpayers or answer their questions."

"If one ignores the fiction of auditing a millionaire through simply sending a letter through the mail, the odds that millionaires received a regular audit by a revenue agent (1.1%) was actually less than the audit rate of the targeted lowest income wage-earners whose audit rate was 1.27 percent," the TRAC continued.
The revelation comes six months after Congress passed the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated $80 billion in funding to the IRS over the next 10 years in order to hire 87,000 new employees. This funding was supposedly intended to allow the IRS to effectively target wealthy individuals who were not paying their fair share of taxes. The bill's supporters in the left-wing media argued that this would not result in an increase in audits for those making less than $400,000 per year, although these assurances were not explicitly stated in the bill. Supporters of the Act also insisted that the increased capacity at the IRS would only be used to target the wealthy. (Read more.)