Some More News - SMN: The IRS Sucks (For More Reasons Than You Think)

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

Hi! In today's episode, we discuss the IRS. Is it good? Is it bad? Can it be better? Can I keep my money? Please? Please fill out our SURVEY: kastmedia.com/survey/ We now have a MERCH STORE! Check it out here: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/somemorenews Secure your online data TODAY by visiting http://expressvpn.com/somenews. That's http://expressvpn.com/somenews and you can get an extra three months FREE. Right now, Some More News Friend-Pals can get 15% off their Raycon order at HTTP://BUYRAYCON.com/somenews. That's HTTP://BUYRAYCON.com/somenews! Go to HTTP://Brooklinen.com and use promo code [MORENEWS] to get $20 off your purchase of $100 or more! Athletic Greens will give you an immune-supporting FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit http://athleticgreens.com/morenews today. Follow us on social media! Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews Source List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MNMCg_HvMvPs0zm_uSA_qx25JS0whByOLkL8CEGqf_0/edit?usp=sharingSupport the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fuck. Shit. Fuck. Yay! Here's some... the show? Hold on, I just gotta... THREE FLESHLIGHTS?! Oh, I remember. For having sex with. Okay. Hi! Sorry, folks, I'm having a whole day. I got some clowns reinstalling my bathroom now. I'm going through the old financials. You know how money is fake and we made it up? Well, I certainly thought so, but it turns out that there's something called the Internal Revenue Service. And boy, they do not agree that money is fake. And I guess they have a lot of questions for me now about my money. And like, I guess I've been required to fill out these forms about money, these money forms every year and just that nobody told me that I had to do that

and so I first I wrote them back explaining that money was fake and they didn't seem to Accept that viewpoint and luckily I have been drawing pictures of all of my purchases for years now So I'm gonna like I'm gonna ball these up and put some twine around them. The IRS likes wads of things, right? Ah, ha, I hate it. It's all fake. Like, like, like why are they even coming after me? Have you, like, look at my haircut.

I don't have money. The government must know coming for me isn't going to get them squat. What do they want? My collection of bird paraphernalia? My Ikea Gnop-Narf sofa? My one good sweater from Everlane? Is that what you want, tax man?

Okay, well, I guess this is gonna be an IRS episode now. Yeah, they wanna come after me. Well, I'm going after them. This is war. I'm like John Wick, but with my mouth. I'm gonna beat them all off with my mouth unless they accept my wad. All right, here's the show. The IRS sucks for more reasons than you think.

It's not exactly a fresh take to say that the IRS can eat a mound of dead rats. Nobody likes them, but we can't seem to get rid of them. They're like the Jared Leto of government agencies. And much like the star of Morbius, the IRS feels vaguely sinister without most people really knowing the details. Like considering everything we know about the extremely rich and their tax shelters

and them Panama papers, you would think we would be seeing a bunch of high profile instances of celebrities being dragged away in handcuffs, or you know, at least audited. I mean, dang, beloved superstar Emilio Estevez was named in those things.

How is Emilio gate not trending for years after, God, really? Not at all famous since the 90s. Are you, all right. You're saying that loaded weapon one didn't, you know what? We'll talk about it later. My point is that it's just strange how the IRS seems completely disinterested

in pursuing the rich for the money they definitely owe. In fact, by one estimate, the IRS will fail to collect nearly $7.5 trillion of taxes due over the next decade, which fun fact, would have been enough to cover the now deceased Biden spending bill three times over. With that much money, we could build like a Mecca United States that shoots fire or remake Avatar

30,000 times. There's a lot we could do with that money is my point. And yet a US treasury report recently found that America currently collects less tax revenue as a percentage of the GDP than almost every other point in recent history. Why is that? Why is the IRS both a nuisance and totally ineffective?

How did we get to this point? Also, seriously, why aren't we doing anything about Jared Leto? There's some grim stuff happening with that guy. Besides Morbius. Anyway, let's start with a bit of history, because it turns out that things that were then affect things that are now. Also, it turns out that things that were then affect things that are now.

Also, it turns out that the IRS, even in its earliest iterations, has always been a struggle. Our country's first official version of tax collection was founded because of a request by then Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton. That's right, a mediocre rapper and terrible singer came up with the first of several attempts

to create a tax system in the US. See, I'm not sure if you realize this, but taxes were sort of a sore spot for us early on. Something about a word that rhymes with taxation. Yeah, it's not important, I'm sure. And even though this first attempt specifically only targeted whiskey producers, as in a tax on whiskey and nothing else,

this almost immediately led to an uprising of violence. The Whiskey Rebellion, great band name, consisted of distillers flat out refusing to pay the taxes, which led to attacks on tax collectors, which led to roughly 700 people showing up at a wealthy tax collector's house and waging war, which led to a 7,000 strong march in Pittsburgh that was met by 12,000 militia men, which is a long way of saying that shortly after Thomas Jefferson took over the presidency, he immediately abolished the whiskey tax

that proved impossible and dangerous to enforce. After that, America kept pretty quiet about taxes, only whipping them out whenever we had a war to fund. The War of 1812, for example, saw taxes briefly return. Then, of course, came the other one, the Civil War. Once again, the US needed money. And so Congress passed the Civil War Revenue Act of 1861. Not only did this create the Office of Commissioner

of Internal Revenue, but established the country's first income tax. This income tax specifically targeted citizens with an income of over $600, which for the record is about 15 to 20 grand today. If you made over $10,000 or roughly 250 to 320K, you would be the subject to a 5% tax. Meanwhile, the people in the middle were taxed about 3%.

Seems fair, you pay a bigger percent, the richer you are. They knew this back in the 1800s. This percentage was increased a few years later following a heated debate in Congress, steamy. One opposed to the increase, Senator Justin Morrill, claimed that increasing the tax rates would create a risk of class warfare. The horror!

Coincidentally, Morrill was so wealthy that he managed to retire before the age of 40. And the taxes would continue to be challenged by politicians who happened to also be very rich, curious. In the 1865 case of Springer versus the United States, then future House of Representatives member, William Springer, would challenge the constitutionality of the 1864 Act over taxes for his income of $50,798,

which is nearly a million dollars today. The government ultimately won that case. And used the money for not war? Sure, why not? After the war, the income tax was repealed and we went back to tariffs and duties. But it was during this time that people began to realize that simply taxing products and not taxing wealthy people

created a system in which small businesses and people buying goods were most affected. And so in 1894, we saw the creation of the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act, which was the first non-wartime income tax. Portions of this were actually challenged and ruled unconstitutional. However, in 1913,

Congress passed the 16th Amendment that gave them the ability to collect income taxes without any strings attached. And as we blasted into several world wars, the decisions made to fund those wars would continue to shape our modern system. In World War I, the US passed the War Revenue Act, which raised income tax rates while lowering exemptions.

This led to the US increasing its tax revenue from $809 million in 1917 to $3.6 billion in 1918. After this war, we got the Great Depression as a fun little intermission, during which FDR signed the Social Security Act into law, which at the time simply focused on retired workers in need who were over 65 receiving benefits based on their payroll tax contributions.

You could argue this was the first actual instance of our earned tax dollars directly helping people on a federal level. Schools, for example, are funded from property taxes and decided on locally, which of course led to ridiculous differences in quality depending on the area, but that's another video. Anywho, next came World War II. Two world, two war, I believe it was called at the time. And so Congress passed a new Revenue Act, which amazingly increased the amount of Americans paying income tax from 5% to 75%. In order to not make everyone go broke,

it was here that the government required employers to withhold money from paychecks so people wouldn't be slammed with a large lump of taxes after spending what would have been their tax payment on the 1940s version of a PS5. A slinky that was sold out for a year and a goddamn half. And it's the one where you have to download the slinks. Anyway, a lot of things would happen after this

that would make tax collectors more important and get big snooty heads about it. Prohibition was enforced by IRS agents who of course would later take down Al Capone. The modern Internal Revenue Service wouldn't be officially named that until 1952, thanks to Harry Truman, who, and this is important, also fought heavily against Congress

as they tried to make budget cuts to the agency, saying at the time, "'I am advised by the Secretary of the Treasury "'and the Commissioner of Internal Revenue "'that the reduction of $20 million in the appropriation "'for the Bureau of Internal Revenue will mean a reduction in personnel of 4,000 to 5,000 employees and will result in a direct loss of revenue of not less than $400 million in the fiscal year 1948.

There is at the present time with present personnel, a backlog of 30,000 leads on tax evasions awaiting investigation. a backlog of 30,000 leads on tax evasions awaiting investigation. In other words, it was clear in the late 40s that reducing funding to the IRS would actually cost the government more money because it would hurt their ability to collect taxes. It would gunk up a system that at the time

was already facing a backlog of cases. And this is where we start seeing the problem. Unfortunately, between this time and today, another thing had to happen. A man named Ronald Dildo Reagan would become the president. And RDR was of course known for the Economic Recovery Act of 1981, something for which Republicans would praise him to this day

as a move that brought on economic recovery. Ronald Reagan also signed the largest tax cut in history. He reduced government regulations from Washington. He did. And economic growth exploded. Ah, yes. When Ted Dildo Cruz ran for president, he often talked about wanting to bring us back

to Reagan economics. He talked about it all the damn time. But what Mr. Dildo and a lot of the other GOP dildos failed to mention about this point in history is that while yes, in 1981, Reagan passed one of the about this point in history is that while yes, in 1981, Reagan passed one of the largest tax cuts in history, this was followed by him raising the taxes five times

before his presidency ended. Almost once a year, he raised taxes with the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, Social Security Amendments of 1983, the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, Tax Reform Act of 1986, and Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987. And these adjustments, when you do the math,

appear to completely reverse the cuts he initially made. Cuts that, at the time he made them, Reagan framed with the quote, "'It is our basic belief "'that only by reducing the growth of government "'can we increase the growth of the economy, mommy? See, there's a myth that happened during Trump's sad little term,

that tax cuts pay for themselves. But it should be noted that even when Reagan made this first big cut, his own people predicted that government revenue would fall because of them. That was part of the point. Small government, rich people trickling down, et cetera. Ronald McDonald was counting on spending cuts to make up for the loss,

cuts that did not happen. And so slowly the taxes went back up. Some studies of the subsequent economic recovery found that while those initial tax cuts could have helped, it wasn't nearly the sole reason we bounced back. For one, interest rates were also cut. And also it was found that greatly investing in our infrastructure would create more jobs, which is exactly what we did at the time. More specifically, Ronald Reagan raised fuel taxes 125% and spent that money on our highways.

The woke socialist radical Ronald D. Reagan's build back good plan. And so as our economy recovered, Reagan was gradually raising taxes every year. This is all to say that the man who really set the standard for the GOP's belief in tax cuts didn't actually cut taxes. And in fact, sure appeared to be wrong in his initial belief on how to grow our economy. And this is what set the stage for when America began to fundamentally break the IRS.

Taxes at this point were routinely challenged by the mostly wealthy as the country became more and more complex. Between FDR and Reagan, we would see the expansion of social security and formation of Medicare. And Rodildo clearly learned that whether or not you like taxes,

they are needed if you also want a modern country that functions. But then, thanks to the myth of Reagan's actions, one of our two major parties, I won't say which one, began to fantasize about perpetually cutting the taxes needed for these programs. All the nuance of Reaganomics was lost. And when we hit the 90s,

there grew a full-on assault on the service of revenue, comma, internal. And we'll talk about just that after an ad, or heck, maybe two ads. There's no way to know. Did you know that spiders can hear everything we're saying? They can understand our language. Similarly, if you're using one of these new cellular telephones, very often your mobile company can monitor and sell your online data and activity to third parties.

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Ah, pal, blammo. We're back from one or two ads, I still don't know. And we're trying to figure out why I keep getting phone calls about the IRS wanting to discuss my quote, extremely serious situation. So far, we haven't mentioned much about the internal workings of this agency, but rather a history of political relationships with the concept of taxes. We briefly mentioned

that during the hairy times of the Truman realm, the IRS was already suffering a backlog of audit cases. But what actually broke them, as in the point where everything went steeply downhill, happened in the late 1990s when America was becoming a thriving cop land and or spice world. In 1997 and 1998, both the media and Congress began a steady freak out following a series of accusations of improper behavior from IRS agents. They were accused of conducting Gestapo-like raids

or as some might call them, Gaspacho-like raids involving holding children at gunpoint. Many of the whistleblowers were from inside the agency. A Senate committee was formed and an investigation held. The IRS was accused of holding investigations based on personal vendettas and unreliable tips. Combined with this, the GOP had already started to vilify the IRS

as one prominent Republican candidate who nobody remembers had just run on the promise to completely abolish it. This sentiment would come back with the running of the aforementioned Dildo Cruz as well. It's a very popular idea with the GOP. And so this plus the new accusations led to the Internal Revenue Service

Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998. It was wildly popular at the time and was specifically designed to shift the power dynamic away from the IRS. They established an oversight committee, enhanced the taxpayer's power to sue the IRS, and very importantly, put the burden of proof on the IRS instead of the taxpayer when it came to court cases.

In short, it greatly reduced the IRS's ability to go after people for not paying their taxes, which at the time made sense considering all these stories of abuse from their agents, right? Except here's the fun part. All those accusations of gelato type raids and personal vendettas,

the government accountability office would later find absolutely no hard evidence that any of that actually happened. Most of the witnesses were the people being audited by the IRS after all, so they weren't exactly impartial. Now that isn't to say there wasn't corruption, nor am I saying the IRS is scandal-free,

and in fact, they are the opposite of that. I'm not taking the side of the IRS, and it's good that government agencies are watched closely and that the people are given priority over authority. This is all a good idea, but this wasn't actually about that. Up to this point, the IRS had been running pretty smoothly and probably didn't need sweeping reform.

What this was actually about is a man named Newt. Unfortunately, some people wanna make these tax cuts smaller and use the money to increase welfare spending instead. Our friends in the other party have introduced a competing bill that does just that. Let me be clear, their bill is not a tax cut bill. It is a welfare increase bill. Newt, you see, was the Speaker of the House in the 90s

before passing the role off to literal convicted pedophile, Dennis Hastert. Newt had spent the first half of that decade rallying against raising taxes for the wealthy and funding welfare programs. In 1993, when the Democrats raised rates for the top 1.2% of income earners, Newt went on the record saying

that this would create a recession the next year. And instead, the exact opposite happened. The economy flourished, the deficit went down, the stock market doubled, the widening income gap between the rich and poor was at least stabilized for the moment. Newt was wrong. Not as wrong as his successor, but wrong.

And at the time, Newt echoed the Reagan myth that tax cuts somehow would stimulate the economy. I don't know if he knew he was wrong or was just trying to protect the very rich people, which he is also one of. It doesn't really matter. The point here is that Newt Gingrich and the GOP were on tilt when it came to taxing the rich.

They were against it, but had no logical way to prove it was actually bad, probably because it wasn't slash isn't bad. And so Newt's only hope was to go after the IRS itself. And when that scandal broke, he got his chance and he took it. But that was just the start. What Newt and this investigation did was essentially create more obstacles for the IRS to properly investigate taxpayers. In theory, that would be fine if they had the resources to abide by these new rules. And for the early 2000s, the IRS budget was doing okay,

except that's where the 2010s come in, the 90s of the 2000s 80s. Specifically, we're talking about when Republicans took back the house under Obama. And in 2013, the GOP voted to cut the IRS budget by $600 million. Once again, a war was waged. The Obama-appointed commissioner was under constant attacks from the right. And in the span of just eight years, the IRS budget was slashed by 27%. Their staff shrinking by 23%. If you recall from a previous episode we did on the USPS,

If you recall from a previous episode we did on the USPS, this is almost the exact same playbook from when the GOP big hand quotes, reformed the post office in 2007. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act made changes seemingly designed to make it possible for the postal service to keep within their budget and then acted like they did something wrong

when they began to hemorrhage money. All in the name of stripping down a service especially important to the lower class and turning it over to private companies. And so similarly, we saw the IRS fall apart. Their tax enforcement budget went way down and investigations into delinquencies went from 2.3 million in 2010

all the way down to 360,000 in 2017. This included a huge reduction of audits for the very rich as opposed to a way less steep reduction for the poor. And that there is the key. See, up until this point in the video, you might've been wondering what the big deal was. Even though we need taxes to pay for schools and roads and junk, it never feels good to pay them,

especially when you can't afford it. So at least emotionally, the idea of abolishing the IRS seems pretty sweet and or rad. After all, that's the entire appeal of the GOP pushing for it. So at least emotionally, the idea of abolishing the IRS seems pretty sweet and or rad. After all, that's the entire appeal of the GOP pushing for it. But what it comes down to is that when given all of these restrictions from the 90s and having their budget greatly reduced, what that actually means is that the IRS no longer has the resources to go after the wealthy specifically. They are the ones who can afford accountants and lawyers and complicated schemes to hide their already complicated finances.

And so what we're left with is a system that only goes after the people it can afford to audit. Those people being the poor or middle-class. You know, the lessers, the taxables. And that's not like my opinion, man. A 2021 treasury report flat out said that the IRS simply doesn't go after the rich because it's too difficult.

And a study by Syracuse University found that since those 2011 cuts, IRS audits of people making over $1 million have gone down 72%, leaving only 2% of all millionaires getting audited. IRS commissioner Charles Rettig would specifically note that they would be able to go after the wealthy if their budget were to increase, making them wealthy,

and then they'd have to go after themselves, but then they'd take their money from themselves, so they wouldn't have enough money to go after themselves, which would make them poor, which means they'd go after themselves, but they're poor because they took their own money, so they'd have that money, which would make them wealthy. So then I purposefully lost the thread.

Anyway, as for right now, this means that the easiest audits they can conduct are for the very poor. Along with the fact that audits happened way more frequently in black and Latino areas, because of course, we can't even do taxes without being super racist about it. 31% of all audits are for people who were eligible for earned income tax credit,

as in a tax break specifically designed for lower income workers. They claim the reason they do this is because it's easier. You can do it through the mail and with low level employees, but I feel like I don't have to explain why this situation is absolutely batshit and unjustifiable. So I won't. I will simply assume that my tone and the facts I have stated via that tone have adequately communicated this to you. On top of all of this, there's very little assistance to help taxpayers deal with these lengthy and painful audits. Thanks to understaffing combined with, say it with me at home, the pandemic. Only one in four people calling the IRS actually is able to talk to a human being. They do sponsor a program designed to provide

free legal help to low-income taxpayers, but in a state like Mississippi, they only provide a single attorney, as in one. Mississippi, coincidentally, being the state with the highest rate of these EITC audits. It's almost as if this is how some people want the system to work. They want taxes, but don't want the very rich

to have to pay them, and instead, would rather cut the corners needed for a working tax system at the expense of the very poor. It's so almost as if that, that it is that. So the decline was all mainly until 2017, but maybe after that, things got better, right? Does anyone remember what happened around 2017? Some kind of like major political event probably.

I'm sure it's nothing really bad that would make the situation worse. See, this is me acting right now. I'm acting perfectly, fully aware that in 2017, Donald Trump became the president of the United States and boy howdy, tits and dicks. It turns out that the guy who was famous for playing an evil rich man his whole life

and had a questionable tax history didn't do the IRS many favors. Along with cutting budget and staff by an additional $240 million in 2018 and then $300 million in 2019, Trump also cut down tax rates for the very rich. Not that they needed much help to begin with. Now we could talk all day and won't

about the legal ways via which the super rich avoid paying taxes and the legal precedents that led to begin with. Now we could talk all day and won't about the legal ways via which the super rich avoid paying taxes and the legal precedents that led to this situation. In 1920, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that the exact definition of income was gain derived from capital from labor or from both combined. This means that, for example, stock holdings only count as income once you actually sell your stock. And so what you can do if your name was, let's just pick a name at random, Elon Musk. It sounds fake, but again, I just made that up at random, like a Star Wars character, Brugis Blugis.

If you were this hypothetical Musk fellow, you could take out loans and use your stock and assets as collateral, then live extremely well off of those huge loans and never actually pay taxes because none of it legally counts as income. Then you can just die having never paid much or any taxes, or perhaps you pay some taxes and then brag about it endlessly on Twitter

like all the fucking time. You can also avoid estate taxes as well by simply creating trust funds for your kids, ensuring that your entire legacy exists to leech off of the rest of the country you live in while, and this is optional, demonizing the poor for being the very leech you actually are.

Maybe you can even work tirelessly to squash unions while legally claiming a low income child tax credit despite being one of the richest people to ever exist. That sounds fun, right? Maybe I can do that with my taxes this year. Is there like a box I can tick off to do that, you know? These are props. Damn it!

Anyway, according to a UC Berkeley report, such unrealized gains held through things like stocks amount to $2.7 trillion out of the $4.2 trillion the super wealthy already own. And if you haven't already realized, in order to get them to pay their fair share, it's going to take a lot more than IRS funding. Like we should definitely fund them more

because it will help, but we're mainly talking about huge changes to the way our government works so that these bafflingly legal loopholes could become perhaps maybe not legal. And spank my balls, that was all very bleak. Also, it didn't help me at all with my current situation. Just made my balls hurt.

But perhaps we can still find some kind of way to fix all of this. After all, Trump is no longer the president. Maybe that new old guy can do something about it. Or heck, perhaps we'll get moonfalled and won't have to worry about money at all. That would be pretty neat. Like that movie, Help!

The Moon, it's coming at us. Anyway, I don't know. I guess we should cut to ads and then we'll come back from ads and this will all be figured out. Definitely. Hey, fools. Did you know that Mother's Day is coming up?

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at smart stuff, but I guess not. So it's time to discuss what we can, if anything at all, actually do to make tax season not a complete punch in the butt. And I guess for starters, it should be acknowledged that if we want roads to drive on and social security and health programs like Medicaid and drones, I guess, well, that money has to come from somewhere, at least until we abolish the concept

of money. So unless we want to set up a national OnlyFans where other countries see our nudes or something, we have to go with taxes, despite my idea being way sexier. But if we all have to pay taxes, then we should probably design our tax system in a way that pisses everyone off the least. And so when talking about the IRS as an organization, this is really the goal.

What can we do to make this unpleasant process easier for people? And just for starters, we super duper absolutely don't need to make the actual process of filing your taxes as complicated as it is. We could make it take five minutes to do taxes in this country, and we could change that by next year if we wanted to. We just don't. And you know how I know that? Because literally every other country already does it. Americans spend about six billion hours a year collecting the data and filling out the forms. We spend $10 billion to H&R Block and other preparers,

and on top of that, $2 billion in tax preparation software, which still takes hours of work. It's outrageous the burden we put on people. And how long does it take to do your income taxes or file your income taxes in some of these countries, if it's so simple? I was in the Netherlands on March 31st, the day before their taxes were due. I was with an executive who makes $200,000 a year, two mortgages, a lot of investments.

He'd have to fill out 12 forms in America. I said, Michael, how do you pay your taxes? He pops a beer, he goes online, the government's filled in every line. If the numbers look right, he clicks OK, takes five minutes. In Japan, you get a postcard from the IRS that says, we think you made this much. We withheld this much. We owe you a refund of that much. We'll put it in your bank on April 1st. Takes one minute if you think the numbers are

right. And I said to my friend Togo, you know, in America, people spend hours, days filling out these forms. And he said to me, why would anybody want to do that? Okay, I get it, dude. You have friends. But Mr. Popular is extremely correct. America is unique in a lot of terrible ways, but one we rarely talk about is how needlessly complicated our tax system is.

Turns out that in other countries, you don't have to try and guess how much you owe every year. You don't have to hire a person or a company and you don't have to try and guess how much you owe every year. You don't have to hire a person or a company, and you don't have to fill out a bunch of forms. In other countries, they just send you a letter or message telling you what you owe, and if you think they're correct, you pay it, because they already know how much you owe,

better than you know, and that is no different here. The IRS knows how much we owe them, and yet we spend billions of dollars and hours a year in order to tell them what they already know, which is absurd. So why do we do it? Well, it turns out that there have been proposals for very simple filing options we could do.

Here's one from the US Treasury in 2003. It would be called return-free filing and would mean that the government could do the accounting on their side and leave the taxpayer mostly out of the process. And wouldn't you know that sweeping reform they did back in 1998 actually included a measure to develop

a return free system. Even dildo Reagan called for a return free system back in the freaking eighties while also maintaining that taxes should hurt in that he felt the process of giving the government your money should always be unfavorable. We've been talking about this for a while and even have a lot of the system in place.

Did you know that the IRS actually offers free filing for people making under $73,000 a year? And yet amazingly, out of the 100 million people who qualified for that in 2014, only 2.8 million returns were filed through it. Why do you suppose that is? Laziness? Lack of sturdy bootstraps?

Well, you who is asking that question, it turns out that there's this thing in America called, cow pal salism, cap it al al-ism. Okay, you see, when the IRS initially set up this program, they were specifically told that it couldn't compete with the free market of tax preparation companies. And so they created something called the Free File Alliance,

which contained all of the most popular tax companies like H&R Block and Intuit, and let those private companies facilitate the free filing program. When you go to the IRS website for this, they redirect you to a bunch of third party companies to actually do the filing. And those companies sure don't like not taking your money.

And so these individual companies concocted a series of restrictions to make applying even harder. TurboTax, which is owned by Intuit, was able to bring that qualifying 70K down to 30K. Along with this, most of these companies purposefully hid their free filing option or put up various digital hoops to make them impossible to find,

often redirecting people to pay options disguised as free. I think you knew deep in your heart we were gonna get to this, but the single biggest reason our tax system is a nest of drunken snakes is the result of a 20 plus year lobbying rampage from the biggest tax preparation companies out there. Here is a leaked slide

from a 2007 Intuit board of directors meeting, specifically boasting about their efforts to stop every attempt by the IRS to simplify or make filing free. It is an insidious, aggressive, and expensive push by these companies to maintain a purposefully broken system solely because it would put them out of their extremely unnecessary business.

And when you think about it, it's like a direct attack on the people of the United States. To put it lightly and with no hyperbole, it's 9-11-2. A war with the taxpayers, using Congress to deliberately make a dysfunctioning system so that they can make profits on a service we never needed in the first place. And they are winning. In 2019, Congress nearly passed a bill making it flat out illegal for the IRS to offer online or free filing. So it didn't compete with the sites like TurboTax.

The section was thankfully removed after people realized how incredibly messed up that really was. But we still don't have a simplified filing system in this country. Not as long as these companies exist. Where's cancel culture when you need it? Why giving Louis CK a Grammy, silly goat?

But one of the big reasons for this situation is that the IRS simply doesn't have the funding to compete with these lobbying efforts. And even with more funding, it's very far down on the list. In fact, our current old guy, Joe Biden, has pledged $80 billion to the IRS in the next 10 years as part of his Build Back Better plan, which if spent right, could net an additional $700 billion to perhaps one trillion money dollars

through the increased tax enforcement. Not raising taxes, mind you, just enforcing the taxes that are already there. You know, if that actually went through, which, you know. Meanwhile, the IRS rushed to hire an additional 10,000 workers for this year's tax season, but this is all in an effort to catch up with their backlog of returns. None of this goes towards efforts to reform how we define income or take on tax prep lobbyists.

This is all still the IRS digging themselves out of a hole. We're still at the point where our politicians are fighting over whether or not to give the IRS enough money to properly function, let alone attempt to actually reform for the better. There's a guy right now who's proposing a 50% cut of the IRS budget while raising taxes for lower income Americans. It is bleak out there. And again, not the only institution

that could be greatly reformed, but is instead stuck having this exact horse dick of a problem. Just last year, a proposal to strengthen IRS enforcement was yanked from the infrastructure bill after the GOP complained, claiming that the IRS didn't need more money and was unfairly targeting conservatives.

That's the level of taunt on shit we are still knee deep inside of. Now, if there's a little ray of sunshine, it's that the desire to fund the IRS is at least gaining some bipartisan support. People have begun to realize that if we made basic changes like updating technology and increasing staff,

the IRS could generate a trillion dollars just from collecting overdue taxes, an amount that could cover one and a quarter years worth of our defense budget. But of course, the real juicy good stuff would be if we actually dabbled with the concept of perhaps maybe taxing billionaires properly, a thing that most Americans agree

we should probably do. There are a few ways to do that. For example, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden pitched an idea to have a billionaire income tax that would apply to taxpayers whose assets amount to more than a billion. This would include tradable assets like stocks and account for the fluctuations of their value.

Joe Biden has also tossed out an idea for his 20% minimum billionaire tax, which would set a minimum for the wealthiest Americans while prepaying for unrealized income like stocks. Would either of these ideas work? Maybe, I don't know. I haven't looked too far into it on account of these ideas, probably never actually happening

as long as Washington is populated by rich old people who want to stay rich. After Joe Biden unveiled his plan, our favorite everything ruiner, Joe Manchin, immediately denounced it, much like how he similarly denounced the Build Back Better plan, claiming that it was divisive to target the very wealthy.

I'm assuming he claimed this from his yacht. Hey, remember all the way at the start of this video when I talked about how in the 1800s, a rich politician opposed tax increases because he thought it would create class warfare? Interesting how all this time later, the rich people in power are still playing the hits. Did I say interesting?

I'm sorry, I meant not at all interesting and actually depressing. Interpressing. But shoving aside the billionaire stuff, shove billionaires. Also, as I already mentioned, if we actually want to fix the IRS, like really fix it up,

all we really have to do is just give them more money, raise their budget and enable them to collect on uncollected taxes, hire more people, have the resources to go after the wealthy and actually do that. Notice how that solution has nothing to do with the raising taxes, the thing Republicans claim to hate. Will it solve everything?

No, but it would at least start us on a path to taking on the bigger fish, perhaps making filing easier like in other countries, and then maybe, just maybe, taxing the ultra wealthy their fair share. Then we have all that money and can like, like make a big money ball with it. Like really wad it up like the IRS loves so much.

And I don't know, we all eat it. What do people do with money? Look, I'm not the money guy, okay? I think I've made that clear, but surely there are good things the government could do with more money from rich people. They could fund fund universal healthcare, a thing they don't wanna do,

or make schools and roads better, a thing they claim to want to do, or I guess make bombs, a thing they just cannot stop doing. Okay, well, that's kind of a bummer, but you know, still, I'm sure they'll get sick of making bombs at some point. How fun can it be? And you get to ride them?

Okay, I get it now. So, all right, they'll make all the bombs first, and then once they've made all the bombs, they'll do like healthcare and schools and stuff after that. I mean, how many bombs can they make, right? And they don't even have to use them? Okay, problem solved.

All right, did we do my taxes? I think I have to, I guess, put this episode on a DVD and send it to the IRS and then that's my taxes, right? That seems easy enough. All right, done with my taxes. It was a bit of a pain, but at least I don't have to think about it for another 10 years.

Every year? I'm not doing that, that is silly. Tell them I'm not doing that. Okay, thanks mom. Warm bow, warm bow. We need to talk about some of these purchases. How do you buy more warm bows? What does that even mean? And that's why I'm returning all of your children

to the store. Thanks for watching everybody. Make sure to like and subscribe and leave a nice comment or a mean one if you're feeling mean today. And we've got a podcast called Even More News you can check out and this show as a podcast if you don't like my face and we've got merch with various things on it and we've got a patreon.com slash some more news and we've got

those things