The collections included $1.3 billion from high-income taxpayers who did not pay overdue tax debts and $2.9 billion related to IRS Criminal Investigation work into crimes like drug trafficking and terrorist financing. Despite its gains, the future of the agency's funding is in limbo.

Summary

The IRS announced it has recovered $4.7 billion in back taxes and criminal proceeds since receiving $80 billion in funding through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

This includes $1.3 billion from wealthy tax dodgers and $2.9 billion from criminal investigations.

Despite these gains, the IRS faces funding cuts: $1.4 billion was rescinded earlier, and $20 billion is frozen or redirected under recent budget deals.

Republicans, under a new majority, aim to further reduce IRS funding and renew Trump-era tax cuts. Trump has nominated Billy Long as the next IRS commissioner, drawing criticism from Democrats.

  • knightly the Sneptaur
    1·
    2 days ago

    It sure doesn’t seem to be working because it’s still costing more and more all the time. So they’re printing it faster than they’re taking it away.

    Precisely.

    The government can either fix this by raising taxes or by reducing the rate at which it allows the banking industry to print money, and neither option is politically viable for obvious reasons.

    But that’s not surprising since the government doesn’t tax itself.

    This comment leads me to believe that you have some fundamental misapprehension as to how money and/or governments work.

    Governments create money so they can pay people to do things. If a government tried to tax its own payments then it’d just be paying itself with dollars that never had a chance to circulate through the economy. Even in concept, this is a waste of time and energy. The only real effect would be artificially inflated numbers for government expenses and tax receipts, the total amount of economic activity enabled by those dollars and the total amount of currency removed from circulation would be zero.

    The purpose of taxation is to take excess currency out of the economy, and you just can’t do that by moving money from one government office to another.