Tax cheats and the conservative budget cuts that help them
If there’s a “most frustrating set of tax facts” to be considered today as this year’s Tax Week comes to a close, it’s got to be this: the billions of dollars that tax scofflaws cheat their fellow citizens out of and the conservative, budget-cutting policies that help enable it.
As Citizens for Tax Justice reported earlier this month:
“All told, American Fortune 500 corporations are avoiding up to$600 billion in U.S. federal income taxes by holding more than $2.1 trillion of “permanently reinvested” profits offshore. In their latest annual financial reports, twenty-eight of these corporations reveal that they have paid an income tax rate of 10 percent or less in countries where these profits are officially held, indicating that most of these profits are likely in offshore tax havens”
Meanwhile, billions of tax dollars go uncollected each year from corporate and individual taxpayers, in large measure because of conservative budget cuts at the I.R.S. As former National Association of Manufacturers chief Jerry Jasinowski wrote on the Huffington Post earlier this week:
“For five consecutive years Congress has taken an axe to the IRS budget imposing total budget cuts thus far of $1.2 billion. As a result, the IRS has lost 13,000 employees, 11 percent of the total. Last year, the IRS began 19 percent fewer criminal investigations than the year before. This year the agency expects to close at least 46,000 fewer audits. With 5,000 fewer revenue agents, revenue officers and criminal investigators, the IRS expects at least $2 billion that taxpayers owe to the government will go uncollected in 2015.”
And don’t think North Carolina tax collections are immune to this toxic pattern. The Charlotte Observer reported earlier this week that more than 300,000 people owe more than a $1 billion to North Carolina in delinquent taxes. Noticed any proposals on Jones Street in recent years to meaningfully beef up the state Department of Revenue?
The sad bottom line on all this: It isn’t an accident. The conservative campaign to undermine the legitimacy of public structures by underfunding them and thereby eroding public confidence in (and support for) them has been ongoing for many decades. Here in North Carolina, the war on public education has been the most visible example of this Koch-Pope ideology in action, but the efforts to undermine the agencies that administer and enforce tax collections is another.
We’re all suffering as a result of this disturbing cynicism.
