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Bush to the Rich: Cheat on Your Taxes, Wink Wink

July 24th, 2006

Kevin Drum noted this story in the New York Times:

The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others.

So the message from the Bush administration to wealthy people is, sorry we couldn’t get the estate tax repealed like most of your other taxes, but don’t worry–just don’t even bother paying taxes in the first place. We won’t audit you. We fired all the auditors, see? Cheat away!

Why doesn’t the Bush administration just drop all pretenses and tell everyone who makes a million dollars a year or more that they just pay no taxes whatsoever, and they’ll get a rolling amnesty for as long as the party can swing it?

This violation of the Executive duty of upholding the law is brought to you by the people who have already ignored half the Constitution and most of the laws passed by Congress. Have a nice day.

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  1. Brad
    July 26th, 2006 at 14:28 | #1

    Yes, but there’s still half the auditors remaining, so the risk of being caught is still there, yes? Plus, if/when the other party gets voted in, can’t the IRS go back retroactively in their audits?

  2. Kathleen
    July 26th, 2006 at 15:52 | #2

    While on the other side of the economic spectrum my net wages in 2004 were around $9,000 something. I am self employed and pay double FICA, I was only able to pay part of the tax and still have a balance owed of $249.00 — the IRS seems to be using all the resources available in its arsenal to collect this amount from me!

  3. Luis
    July 26th, 2006 at 20:27 | #3

    Brad: you have to read the quote carefully–only half of all the lawyers were let go, but the ones let go are all or almost all of the ones specializing in gift and estate taxes–leaving only those specializing in other taxes. So effectively they emasculated the IRS’ ability to enforce not only estate tax, but gift taxes as well. Gift taxes are typically used as an end-run around the estate tax.

    As for future enforcement, maybe that could be a hitch, if the next president wants to be characterized as someone using the IRS to attack wealthy people in a class war–and who knows, there are probably other sfaeguards involved that we don’t know about.

    In the end, the fact remains that Bush axed the estate and gift tax lawyers at the IRS–which you can bet he didn’t do for fun or at random.

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