By Craig Fahle
Americans spend a lot of time thinking about the concept of the rule of law. Our discussions about protests, violence, drugs, immigration and just about every other contentious issue typically center on the notion that people in the U.S. must abide by the law. Yet there is one area in which that dedication to the rule of law has a lot of wiggle room: our tax system. The late Senator Russell Long of Louisiana summed up the debate on taxes rather cleverly when he said “A tax loophole is something that benefits the other guy. If it benefits you, it is tax reform.''
Arguments about how much people should be taxed, what kinds of income should be taxed, and whether tax cuts “trickle down” to the average person have dominated our political debate since before the American Revolution. Nobody likes paying taxes. Yet everyone likely realizes that taxes are the backbone of a civil society.
The question is, what to do when you don’t have enough tax revenue coming in to fund the things that make that civil society?
In their annual report for 2021, The American Society of Civil Engineers found that the 10-year infrastructure investment gap between what we spend, and what we actually need to maintain our systems now stands at $2.6 trillion. That’s a lot of money. With the concept of raising tax rates pretty much dead, where does the money come from? Here’s a concept … allow the Internal Revenue Service to do its job and collect the money that the U.S. Government is owed. This will take people and resources to accomplish.
Naturally, the idea of investing more money into IRS enforcement and personnel doesn’t sit well with the anti-tax/small government conservatives. It also doesn’t thrill the wealthy or the corporations, who have found ways in recent years to pay virtually nothing in taxes, especially when compared to the revenue and profits they are generating. Finding ways to minimize taxes, or in some cases evade them, is seen almost as a game by many. They know the IRS is understaffed, and a typical 1040 doesn’t get the scrutiny and full analysis that it likely deserves. The current head of the IRS estimates that the country is losing about $1trillion per year due to lax enforcement. This financial bleed must stop.
On the issue of gun violence, conservatives often make the argument that the U.S. doesn’t need any new gun laws, it simply needs to enforce the laws that are on the books. If they are intellectually honest, they would apply the same logic to our tax laws and fund the IRS to the level that makes them effective.