The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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November 05, 2002
Thank Rand for small favors Here's some encouraging news for the beleaguered citizenry: the IRS doesn't have quite the awe inspiring omnipotent reach that they'd like you to think. According to the New York Times:
Over all, the I.R.S. gets a budget of 41 cents per tax return, 10 percent less, after adjusting for inflation, than in 1997. Yet during those five years many sophisticated new techniques to evade taxes have come onto the market, sold by the nation's largest accounting firms and others. And Congress has enacted 293 changes in the tax law, imposed complex rules protecting taxpayer rights and demanded the diversion of many law enforcement resources to functions like answering telephone calls from taxpayers.
Outgoing Commissioner of the IRS Charles Rossotti says "This is systematically undermining one of the most important foundations of the American economy."
Rossotti strikes a particularly hilarious note there. Apparently this bureaucrat thinks that his agency's ability to loot and pillage keeps the economy going, rather than being one of the main things holding it back.
A more intuitive outlook, on the other hand, might take it that citizens creating businesses and going to their jobs create the wealth of society. In this view, the political class largely do little but drain away the wealth of society. The IRS does the primary job of extracting the wealth from those who created it in order to pass it on to those who didn't.
From this perspective, any subversion of the the ability of the IRS to extract wealth from the taxpayers looks like a net gain for liberty and prosperity. On the one side, the political class screams for more money for Very Important Programs. On the other side, the taxpaying class resents having their money taken- and the heavy handed encroachments of their privacy involved in doing so. Of course, often the political class and the taxpayer class are- schizophrenically- the same people.
In any case, this NYT story suggests that the taxpayer side of the equation is gaining some ground at the moment, which is a blessing for the whole economy- and critical to our re-emergence from recession. The congress wants to spend every nickel they can get hold of, but fear the wrath of taxpayers too much to give the IRS the full authority and resources that would be necessary to really enforce the tax laws that are supposed to extract that money. Thank Rand they lack this will, or they'd really wreck the economy.
Not that this will provide much comfort to those whom the IRS does manage to find the resources to target.
