Dana Milbank tries to keep up with Republican lies, but there are so many that it’s hard to refute them all. Right now, the biggest lie (other than the claim that Trump won the 2020 election) is that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act will enable the IRS to hire 87,000 armed agents who will target middle-class Americans and arrive at their doors armed with AR15s. I know this lie has taken hold because a friend of modest means told me that, because Biden’s legislation passed, the IRS would send an armed agent to her door to collect her taxes.
He writes:
It is impossible to keep up with the volume of disinformation churned out by the MAGA-occupied Republican Party. But sometimes it’s worth pausing to examine the anatomy of a particularly egregious fabrication, to understand the broader “alternative fact” ecosystem that misinforms tens of millions of Americans.
Let’s consider the lie, endlessly repeated by Republicans and the Fox News-led echo chamber, that new legislation enacted by Democrats funds the hiring of “87,000 armed IRS agents.” Like the “death panel” fabrication during the Obamacare debate, this is a whole-cloth invention designed to stoke paranoia.
Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sent an open letter last week warning Americans not to work for the IRS. He falsely claimed that the Democrats’ climate, energy and tax bill would add “roughly 87,000 agents” at the IRS, creating “an IRS super-police force”:
“The IRS made it very clear that one of the ‘major duties’ of these new positions is to ‘be willing to use deadly force.’ … The IRS is making it very clear that you not only need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them.”
Where to begin?
The IRS certainly isn’t adding 87,000 armed agents. It isn’t even adding 87,000 agents. In fact, it’s not even adding 87,000 employees.
When you figure in attrition (current funding doesn’t let the IRS fill all vacancies), Treasury officials tell me, the expected increase in personnel would be more like 40,000, over the course of a decade — which would merely restore IRS staffing to around the 117,000 it had in 1990.
Only about 6,500 of the new hires would be “agents.” The rest would be customer-service representatives, data specialists and the like.
And fewer than 1 percent of the new hires would be armed. (The IRS job posting Scott cited, which predated the new law, was specifically for such law-enforcement personnel.) Such officers, who go after drug rings and Russian oligarchs, have been part of the IRS for more than a century.
As for the IRS coming after “hardworking Americans,” Treasury says the new law will result in a “lower likelihood of audit” for ordinary taxpayers, because technology upgrades will enable the IRS to target the actual tax cheats — the super-rich — for more audits. The wealthiest 1 percent defraud the government, and fellow taxpayers, of more than $160 billion a year.
So here we have a Republican Party leadership figure generating false hysteria about armed government agents, hysteria that has increased threats against the people who collect the funds for the U.S. military, among everything else. And he’s dishonestly fomenting antigovernment fury in the service of protecting filthy-rich tax cheats.
It isn’t just Scott.
Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), fantasizing about an “army of 87,000 IRS agents,” proclaimed that “we WILL NOT FUND these 87k armed new IRS agents who will target the American people.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) mused on Fox News about “a strike force that goes in with AK-15s [sic] already loaded ready to shoot some small-business person.”
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) warned that “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you.”
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel saw an “IRS ‘SWAT team’ ” invading “your kids’ lemonade stand.”
Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade imagined that IRS agents would “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers that don’t pay enough.”
Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.) envisioned “87,000 new agents, AR-15s and 5 million rounds of ammunition.”
Somebody has to keep track of GOP lies. I’m glad Dana Milbank is doing it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
87K agents with AK47s?
Why would the IRS send armed agents to your door to collect taxes when they have so many other much easier and more effective means at their disposal? (Including garnishing of wages and social security and seizure of assets)?
What use would going to the door serve anyway?
How many people who owe taxes have the money under their mattress or in their cookie jar?
Bill Gates would need an elevator to get in bed each night
And some companies like Apple would need a moon rocket.
My son came home from college last weekend to get some more of his belongings and he was sharing with me that he was listening to all of his new friends’ career aspirations since he is “undecided”. I told him to get a business/accounting degree because the Fed Gov’t/IRS will soon be hiring! It’s about time that the IRS will now have the workforce to enforce the bullies to pay their fair share.
Working people pay their taxes. It is about time that the ultra-wealthy paid theirs as well. The GOP has cut IRS workers because they are opposed to taxes, but a healthy, functioning government is required to collect taxes to provide services. The federal government should do better about waste and fraud, but billionaires need to pay their fair share.
Not holding my breath waiting for the wealthy to start paying their share. Small business owners can’t afford committees of high-powered accountants and lawyers to design legal tax avoidance strategies. Trump paid a little over $700 in taxes the first year he was president. And as Warren Buffet pointed out, his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does.
I live in a deeply red part of North Florida. My husband works part-time for the US Census Bureau, which is part of the Dept. of Commerce. He is essentially a data collector for the NIH and some other agencies. The data are used to justify funding various programs from the federal government. He mostly enjoys the work as he is retired. This year he has had a much harder time getting people to participate. He noticed increased resistance which he thinks is due to the fact that he represents the federal government. Some people have accused him of “harassing” them, but he is simply following a required protocol for contacting people. The irony is that some of these refusals are from people that work for the federal government as members of the military or private military contractors that depend on the federal government.
Northern VA (just outside of DC) is the home of data collection warehousing. There are miles upon miles of these massive concrete, energy consuming (cooling required year round) buildings and they are mostly owned by wealthy government contractors. There is too much personal information stored and people don’t even know that they have ceded their rights to privacy as they have traveled down the tech highway. The next big “tech industry” will be in using all of this data (Blockchain?) according to my techie husband (retired from the Fed Gov’t). Smart/educated people are catching on to this intrusion of privacy and they aren’t very happy about it and they are not cooperating.
None of the data collecting in off years government census surveys are personally connected to anyone’s identity. In fact, there is a law against it. He is not doing the 10 year surveys that require names of people living in a home. There are no names or addresses involved in the data. These are housing, economic, crime, community services and health surveys, and they relate to future planning for the government. These surveys are conducted to address future planning and funding needs.
Attacking the IRS with lies is nothing more than another form of anti-democratic dogma. Waiting for attacks on the National Institutes of Health next, especially since Biden is the first president to make it a national priority. Every agency–see FBI for most recent proof–is at risk of being demonized with lying propaganda.
And while we’re at it, now that Russia RepubliQans have become the party of fascist theocracy why are churches still paying zero tax?
Our democratic republic is hinging on a very thin thread, especially as a public school teacher. I’ve never seen such an active, open display of contempt for not only democratic processes but their guardrails in the name of “protecting” said processes and guardrails. Republicans and this brand of Republicanism are a clear and present danger to everyone. I hearken back to my elders of the World War II generation and what they fought for. I think of Ike’s letter to those of the D-Day Invasion, I think of my granduncles showing up at Utah and Omaha, getting shot and captured (and eventually liberated and sent home) in the Battle of the Bulge, fighting hand-to-hand in the Pacific. All of that–ALL of that–could be for nothing. Nothing.
Yossarian,
Would you post Ike’s letter to the troops on the D-Day invasion?
“Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!”
“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months,” Eisenhower wrote.
“The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
“Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is will trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
“But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
“I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
“Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”
When I was a kid, there was a comic strip called Snuffy Smith. The characters were “hillbillies” who made -and drank- their own hootch out at the still. A recurrent theme was shooting at the revenuers who were coming to take their money.
Progressing backward to the ’50’s.
LOL. Well observed, Christine!
Sarah Kendzior has a new book out, titled They Knew. Here’s a link to a tweet that contains an incisive explanation of how the paywalling of mainstream media has contributed to the free floating disinformation on blogs, Facebook and Nextdoor. You can enlarge the image.
This is so horrifying. It will be so easy for the fascists to control the mob, just as in Putin’s Russia today.
Yeah, the 1850’s
Backward is as backward does.
The Now and Then podcast does a great job this week talking about historic time when reasonable politicians punched back. I have no problem with Gavin Newsome and Joe Biden doing just that.