Said to unleash the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on middle-class Americans, while keeping tax loopholes open for billionaires and their multinational corporations, the bill backed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) has taken on new life.
This newly proposed bill, a seeming reprise of the “Build Back Better” plan, and agreed to by Schumer and Manchin, would massively bulk up IRS audits and criminal investigations, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Effectively, the main target of these funds, will be dedicated to going after middle-class Americans, already choked by inflation.
According to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board-
“The bill earmarks $45.6 billion for “enforcement,” including “litigation,” “criminal investigations,” “investigative technology,” “digital asset monitoring” and a new fleet of tax-collector cars. The result will be far more audits, civil suits and criminal referrals. [Emphasis added]
The main targets will by necessity be the middle- and upper-middle class because that’s where the money is. The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78% to 90% of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4% to 9% would come from those making more than $500,000. [Emphasis added]”
The IRS knows the super-wealthy employ lawyers and accountants who make litigation time-consuming and risky. It also knows that Democrats would howl if the agency pursues fraud in the earned-income tax credit program, despite what the IRS has estimated are $18 billion in improper payments each year. [Emphasis added]”
-Wall Street Journal
It should be noted that, the tax provisions in this Schumer – Manchin plan, hugely benefitting billionaires and their multinational corporations, would go untouched. Additionally, green energy tax credits would be zoomed in on, by billionaires to cut their corporations’ annual tax burdens. Amazon and its founder, billionaire Jeff Bezos, notoriously employs this strategy, to pay close to zero in corporate income taxes.
According to Breitbart News’s, John Carney-
“Amazon’s tax bills were part of the inspiration for a minimum tax. The company faced no federal corporate income tax liability in 2017 and 2018. In the years since, it has had an effective tax rate that is just a fraction of the 21 percent rate put in place by the Trump administration’s tax reforms. According to the calculations of Matthew Gardner of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, over the past four years Amazon’s effective aggregate tax rate was just 5.1 percent. [Emphasis added]
While the alternate minimum tax would prevent companies from using deductions for capital investments or stock-based compensation, it continues to allow them to use tax credits, Daniel Bunn of the Tax Foundation told us. In fact, the bill includes hundreds of billions of dollars- worth of new tax credits aimed at fostering green technology adoption. And Amazon plays in beast mode when it comes to using tax credits to reduce its tax bill. [Emphasis added]
Jeff Bezos’s retail giant said in its annual report that tax credits reduced the taxes it would have otherwise owed by $1.1 billion. The company has said that most of those tax credits are federal research and development credits, although it does not give much detail in its annual reports. The Manchin-Schumer tax bill would not touch this. Amazon will lose the benefit of the write-off for stock-based compensation, but the company will most likely at least partially offset that by using the green tech tax credits. The end result could be no change in Amazon’s tax rate. [Emphasis added]”
- John Carney, Breitbart News
Democrats attempted to pass a similar tax plan, Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, that failed in Congress. This former plan, would have also targeted the middle-class, while providing billions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans living in blue states. Both that measure, which failed, and this measure before Congress, will be paid for by middle-class American taxpayers.
Literally, a twisting of words to make it sound palatable, this plan does NOTHING to really reduce inflation. Further, it targets those who can least afford to lose more, Americas middle-class and small businesses. It is just another Democratic knife-blow to America, who continues to struggle with the destruction wrought by Joe Biden, the progressive liberal-left, and his cronies in the Democratic party, in their effort to suck Americans dry for their own political pursuit of a socialist America.
One blogger put it this way,
“The New Democrat Communist Party Hit Teams backed up by IRS criminal agents that are fully armed. The IRS has already stocked up on 600 thousand rounds of Ammo for this Hitler Style Brown Shirt enforcement branch of the IRS. Wake up America, the end is near and the blind citizens just do not seem to know what is going on around them, Biden's new legislation that they are trying to pass now gives the IRS 60 billion dollars to get this new enforcement team together very quickly.”
-Chzim, Breitbart Blogger
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
-Frederic Bastiat