For a man whose companies have been convicted on multiple charges of criminal tax fraud, for falsifying records to evade taxes, and found guilty on 17 counts, it seems preposterous for Trump to go after his enemies using the IRS to try and ferret out discrepancies in their tax returns. There were also civil cases of Trump defrauding banks where he was found guilty and ordered to pay $350 million, plus accrued interest of about $100 million. Trump does not care about his convictions and various fines for he can sell his MAGA hats, jerseys, medallions and other Trump paraphernalia to a host of MAGA supporters who disregarded Trump’s fraudulent criminal activities and bankruptcies and elected him president. Now the Supreme Court has granted him partial immunity for anything he does in his role as president. One of his major goals is to take revenge on anyone who disrespected him in the past or opposed his initiatives. He also wants to assure tax cuts for all his billionaire friends.
His first move in terms of taxes was to gut the IRS so they would not have enough personnel to audit every potential tax cheat. 20,000 IRS staffers, about 20 percent of its workforce, were cut, including the acting commissioner Musk had recently appointed. Trump’s team is now considering even further reductions to make audits even less feasible. Auditing more returns to find fraud or mistakes to get more money to cut the national debt has not been a consideration for Trump. He is hoping that his tariffs will bring in more funds to the government to reduce the debt, perhaps a dream of his. He doesn’t give a damn about the effect the tariffs will have on consumers by raising prices on almost everything or the small business that will have to close because they can’t afford to buy merchandise from China with tariffs added.
Trump wants to use the IRS as a political tool instead of an independent agency respected by America’s citizens regardless of party affiliation. In replacing some of the people he fired, he is trying to install political allies who will do his bidding in terms of going after his personal and political adversaries. As an example of his thinking, he wants to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, which Trump sees as a privilege and not a right. If he is successful in this attempt, he will undoubtedly go after other universities, and perhaps NGOs whose objectives he disagrees with, such as DEI and civil rights initiatives.
According to Federal law, the president cannot direct the IRS to execute specific tax investigations, and the IRS is in the process of deciding whether to move forward with the Harvard case. If Americans of both political parties believe that the IRS is being politicized instead of neutral and fair, and its tax enforcement is being weakened, it may have more difficulty collecting revenue from American citizens. This would make the national debt even more of a problem and further undermine the dollar as the preferred international currency. Trump appears to be blind to the crises his policies are causing for the American economy and the majority of American citizens. As long as his billionaire friends are doing okay.
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Posted at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: IRS, national debt, tax cheats, tax evasion, taxes, Trump
Political junkie, Vietnam vet, neurologist- three books on aging and dementia. Book on health care reform in 2009- Shock Therapy for the American Health Care System. Book on the need for a centrist third party- Resurrecting Democracy- A Citizen’s Call for a Centrist Third Party published in 2011. Aging Wisely, published in August 2014 by Rowman and Littlefield. Latest book- The Uninformed Voter published May 2020