It's tax season or as Donald Trump calls it,
would you get off my back already?
And the Biden administration has
been making a big effort to make
tax season a bit less painful.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which the President signed
last August, includes $80 billion
in new funding for the IRS to hire new employees
and upgrade its technology.
And it's working.
The IRS is doing much better at processing our returns
and answering our questions about how to file correctly.
And that's great.
Better enforcement of tax laws means
more money for all the many, many things
the government does--
Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure,
not to mention scraping off the feces
smeared on the Capitol walls by the Proud Boys.
Clearly, the new funding is long overdue.
In addition to paying for immensely popular programs,
it will help reduce the deficit.
So everybody's got to be happy about this.
Everybody, right?
Am I right?
Democrats want to spend $80 billion
to hire 87,000 more armed IRS agents to terrorize Americans.
They want to add 87,000 IRS agents
that can use deadly force to go after American families.
They want to turn the IRS into the Gestapo.
They are arming up the IRS like they're
preparing to take Fallujah.
A little like James Bond, but instead of hunting down evil
maniacs, these agents hunt down and kill
middle-class taxpayers that don't pay enough.
[laughter]
What on Earth are these people talking about?
If you forget to carry the 1 while you're calculating
your return, will the IRS actually come to your home,
break down the door, and gun down your entire family?
[laughter]
In a word, no.
In six words, of course not, you Republican idiots.
[cheering]
So-- so let's talk about what the IRS money
is really going for in another installment
of Long Story Short.
[cheering]
The administration is trying to fix a whole host of problems
that began back in 2011 after Republicans in Congress
started cutting the IRS budget.
Since then, the IRS's audit rate has dropped almost 60%,
and the number of IRS agents, the same number
we had in 1954, when the country's population
was half the size it is today.
And pediatricians treated sick children by prescribing
them menthol cigarettes.
[laughter]
And the combination of understaffing
and Stone Age technology has resulted
in a very weird situation.
You are more likely to be audited in the United States
if you make $20,000 a year than if you make $500,000 a year.
Less money you have, the easier it is for the IRS
to come after you.
This is because the IRS doesn't have enough money
to hire the highly-trained investigators needed to go
head to head with the wealthy.
Ultimately, it's easier for them
to audit lower-income people because it's cheap,
can be done by mail, and doesn't take a lot of time.
[groaning]
Can you believe that?
The IRS is so understaffed that they audit poor people
more than the wealthy because they
just don't have the experts to handle
the most complex returns.
They're going after poor people because it's easier.
It's like a comic who only does yo mama jokes.
Sure, it's easy, but at what cost to my mama?
[laughter]
Her life--
[cheering]
Her life is difficult enough.
Do you know-- do you know how hard it is to find a belt
the size of the equator?
[laughter]
So how much money in lost taxes are we talking about here?
According to the former head of the IRS,
it could be as much as $1 trillion a year.
To put that in perspective, if you stacked
a trillion $1 bills on top of each other,
it would-- it'd blow away.
[laughter]
It'd be ridiculous to even try that.
The solution is pretty simple, and
it's a bargain comparatively--
comparatively speaking.
Just adequately fund the IRS so it can improve
its enforcement capabilities and collect
that extra trillion dollars.
Now--
[cheering]
Now, you would think Republicans
would love an extra trillion dollars in revenue.
They're the ones who are always complaining
that America is spending money that we don't have.
Politicians in Washington cannot stop spending
money that we don't have.
Let's live in reality.
We have a spending problem.
We have a dramatic spending problem.
If you had a child, you gave them a credit card,
and they kept hitting the limit,
you wouldn't just keep increasing it.
You'd first see, what are you spending your money on?
So we're going to look at every single dollar spent.
We're going to audit it.
If you're going to have a party,
you have to pay the band.
[laughter]
Come on, Senator.
You don't have to have a band at a party.
Just hire-- hire your nephew's roommate to be a DJ.
Just think what we could do with an extra trillion dollars
a year.
We could begin to retire our national debt
and balance our budget.
Or we could do some new things that would
be worthy of a great nation.
We could have universal
pre-K. [cheering]
Or subsidized child care like they do everywhere else.
[cheering]
We could eliminate federal income
taxes completely for the bottom 90% of American households.
[cheering]
And this isn't just lefty, liberal pie in the sky
stuff with a trillion dollars.
We could do-- we could fund an entirely new Iraq war.
[laughter]
And why are we the only [bleep] developed country that doesn't
have universal health care?
[cheering]
And it doesn't have to be single payer.
We can have a public option, which
we should have [bleep] done in the first place,
[bleep] Lieberman.
[cheering]
The point is polling shows that 93% of Americans
believe it's every American's civic duty to pay their taxes.
And I think you can guess who the other 7% are.
So let's-- let's give the IRS the resources to make sure
that everybody does what we all should do for the right
of living in this great country,
a nation we can make even better if we do the [bleep]
rational thing and collect the taxes
that people actually owe.
[cheering]