Michael Ramirez for April 07, 2024

The Middle Class is where all the money is. The fantastically wealthy can only be harvested once. Taxing the Middle Class is the taxman’s equivalent to harvesting chives. They grow back to be harvested again.

{o.o}

Let me tell you how it will be

There’s one for you, nineteen for me

‘Cause I’m the taxman

(The Beatles)

Of course. In the white ring there is nothing to collect, the red and the bullseye have the means to muscle up with lawyers in their moats to protect their castles. Winning against the rich often enough ends up as a Pyrrhic victory.

Based on what? The middle class virtually never gets audited. They very much focus on those with something to hide.

Did anyone expect any other outcome? When the President is corrupt, big business and the rich are the ones that line up to get their share after paying the 10% fee.

So let’s fund the IRS so they can actually prosecute billionaires tax dodgers. What you;re seeing is the fact that the IRS can complete audits against middle class tax evaders, but billionaires can hire enough attorneys to delay their audit outcomes indefinitely. THAT’S the unfairness conservatives fail to address.

I distinctly recall George W Bush (probably at the behest of VP Cheney) directing the IRS to cut back on corporate audits and increase personal audits. Since the 1980’s, it is well known and documented that the IRS suffered defunding, always during republican presidencies. Today, some even talk of doing away with it altogether, along with the EPA, SEC and EDU.

Believe it or not, Ramirez needs another reality check. Actually the reverse seems to be true. IRS stats indicate that folks with AGI’s far above the middle class level are the ones much more LIKELY to have their returns audited. (While the absolute number of audits may be performed on middle income folks’ returns, Remirez’s depiction here implies that the higher likelihood for middle class audits FAR, FAR exceeds that of rich folks. Indeed, the greedy rich basturds cheat the IRS — and EVERY other taxpayer — out of hundreds of billions every year. Clearly those are the ones who should be audited — that’s where, to quote Willy Sutton, the money’s at.) Most of the time that middle and lower income folks get that letter from the IRS it’s because there is a mistake or omission of information on their returns, not because they are candidates for an audit. In my own case years ago, I erred in reporting certain 1099 income. As a result I had to fix my mistake and file amended federal and state returns for two or three prior years. Although the error the IRS flagged was legitimate, I discovered another error I made in my favor, for which the IRS didn’t flag and, after I fixed it on the amended returns, actually received some re-reimbursement for the corrections.

Maybe Ramirez is PO’ed because he was audited? And this cartoon is his payback?

IRS can audit most Americans by computer. Auditing the rich takes skilled professionals to work through all the Byzantine evasions set up by expensive lawyers. For reasons they never explain, Republicans don’t want that to happen.

The whole idea of better funding the IRS has been so completely misrepresented that it’s breathtaking. One way the richest among us, including the orange grifter, avoid taxes is to make their returns incredibly complicated, with questionable multiple revenue sources and expenses. The IRS does not have enough accountants and lawyers to adequately police this. And much of the money that supposedly is to be used to hire this horde of auditors will actually be spent on hiring enough people that you don’t have to wait days to talk to them on the phone, and to replace COBOL-based computers from the 1970s and 80s that cannot transfer information to other systems.

I find it ironic that the party of “law and order” wants, basically, to allow the IRS to ignore tax cheaters, a serious crime.

And if all the taxes already owed by people who play games with their returns were to be paid, there would be billions more in revenue.

Make the tax code so simple it doesn’t take lawyers and accountants to file taxes. The current complexity begs for gaming.

“The pursuit of knowledge and truth is the greatest weapon against ignorance and oppression.” — Ethan Allen

“… The IRS generally audits a larger share of high-income taxpayers than those with lower incomes, as illustrated in Figure 1. However, those who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)—who typically have low incomes—are much more likely to face an audit than all but the highest- income taxpayers. …” — sgp .fas .org /crs /misc /IF12521 .pdf

Going after billionaire tax cheats is expensive.

I thought the 87,000 new IRS agents were going to armed with HANDGUNS !

Janet Yellen writing to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig in August of 2022: “Contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited.”

An audit by the Treasury Inspector General For Tax Administration found that “President Biden’s plan to hire a new army of tax collectors is falling flat, and the agents already at work. 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000,”

It’s almost as if the politicians lied to us.

Audits of wealthy taxpayers, large companies and large partnerships fell considerably over the past 20 years, coinciding with a roughly 25% budget cut over the same time. The agency has cited budgetary restrictions as a reason for the shift.

But in 2022, Congress authorized $80 billion in new funding for the IRS. The agency has used much of that money to hire more experienced agents who can handle the complexities and pushback involved with auditing wealthy taxpayers, companies and partnerships. This is particularly valuable for auditing partnerships, a growing category of tax filers that are particularly time consuming to audit. – Yahoo Finance

Big corporation tax preparation businesses like turbotax and h&r block do not want more IRS agents or free-file software. They want people to keep paying for tax work, so the tax prep businesses can keep raking in the money.

These companies have spent the last twenty years, and forty million dollars, paying off republicans to stop the hiring of more agents, and to stop allowing taxpayers to access electronic, free-file software offered by the IRS. And the republicans have been doing it.

These big prep businesses want to kill off anything that saves not-rich people money, and the greedy republicans, looking out for themselves as usual, are accepting campaign donations to be the executioners’ assistant.

You suck, ramirez

Here’s ramirez, at tax time, trying to help turn people against the IRS.

Hey ramirez, you lying fake, why don’t you scratch out a cartoon that addresses the fact that the republicans are blocking the addition of more IRS agents in order to help the richest Americans.

The republicans voted unanimously to repeal the Democrats addition of more IRS agents, and house speaker kevin mc outta here bragged about it.

If there were more agents, the IRS would be able to conduct more audits, and catch billionaires, who cheat on their taxes, hide money in offshore accounts, or just don’t pay.

The nation’s millionaires and billionaires are avoiding paying more than $150 billion a year in taxes.

And this is not clever accounting, it’s illegal tax evasion

All they do is add to an already growing government deficit.

If we had more agents, auditing more rich people, maybe we could get trump to stop bragging how smart he is to pay only 750 dollars in taxes, and how dumb we are, making up the difference.

Ramirez hits a home run with this one. The IRS is targeting the middle class over the rich democrat donors and corporations

Spot on…..

True, the 87,000 new agents are auditing the middle class. Don’t care what fact checkers and snoops say.

Biden is trying to fix this, but the Republicans will do anything to protect the wealthy. Tell me one thing the Republicans have done to champion the working class?

The stench of BS is strong.

I just paid mine to the IRS last Monday. It is a shocker how much they take and everything we earn is reported so there is no room to cheat. Paid in cash under the table, hidden tips, fake deductions, and off-shore investments. Then there are those don’t pay at all.l. I earned $15,000 less this year. So much for Bidenomics. So go ahead and audit. Let’s EVERYONE pay their share, even if it is $10.

hey mikie… in his recent fundraiser with BILLIONAIRES where he claims he raised $50 million dollars… your favorite pu$$y grabber, porn star porking…tax dodging… secret stealing… unstable genius, bible selling, ex-prez promised not to raise taxes on BILLIONAIRES… just like he did in 2017…. how about a comic on that….spin it please…..in your bright red style…we’ll wait…

The Trump admin doubled the USA debt by giving tax breaks to billionaires which the middle class has to pay for.

Reagan’s ‘Trickle Down’ pulled trillions from the workers of the USA and turned the middle class into the working poor.

Stop voting for people who only want to steal your tax dollars.

“The art of taxation is so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the smallest amount of hissing.” – Jean Baptiste Colbert, French King Louis XIV’s Finance minister.

Get rid of 501©(4)s….. politicians are increasingly using nonprofits capable of accepting unlimited dark money funds to advance their agendas. Bribery by another name….

“Eighteenth-century Americans objected to taxation without representation, and later, equally objected to taxation WITH representation.” – John Kenneth Galbraith.

however did the USA survive without the 16th amendment and the federal reserve?

It’s not cost effective auditing someone who makes less than $400,000 a year, so the IRS doesn’t. Audits run from there up to about $5M year. The super rich have so many lawyers and accountants on the payroll, trying to audit them requires resources the IRS doesn’t have.

I am 76, on SS and a Civil Service pension. I have been constantly audited for the last five years because somebody at the IRS does not believe I deserve the extra standard deduction for being over 65.

The rich have the tax lawyers the know all of the loop holes. The middle class are low hanging fruit.

One of the first things Trump will do as president will be to restore the Trump tax breaks which will expire this year for rich people like Trump the thief.

Who did you think buys the lobbyists.

A flat sales tax would keep this from happening.

The top 1% pay 40% of all taxes. The bottom 40% pay NO TAXES at all. The lie “We need the wealthy to pay their fair share” is total bull$hit.

VOTE BLUE!

Right… Everyone has something to hide from the IRS. We usually refer to it as “our own money that we earned”. The IRS refers to it as “tax revenue”.