Imagine the IRS Was Run Like a Football Team

Billions are on the line with one obscure Supreme Court tax case

If the IRS was a football team, the mainstream media would be the pep squad.

Need proof? Just look at the collective meltdown over a Supreme Court case that could limit the federal government’s ability to tax money that you haven’t made yet.

Here are the details: Charles and Kathleen Moore claim that the $15,000 IRS tax bill they got for owning part of an Indian manufacturing company is unconstitutional. They haven’t received any money from their $40,000 investment—all the profits have been reinvested back into the company. But a provision in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 levied a one-time mandatory repatriation tax on Americans with certain investments in foreign companies. 

The Moores have taken their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing this is akin to the government taxing your home’s appreciation as “income” before you’ve sold it.

But for the press, this case isn’t about the merits of the policy. Instead, the IRS’ cheerleaders—who are simply supporting the most humble of public servants, didn’t you know—are making it about how “only” a $15,000 tax bill could “cost” the government hundreds of billions of dollars of your money.

Check out these pom-poms, backflips, and coordinated cheers:

• Dismissiveness by the Atlantic: “The Supreme Court Takes On Yet Another Made-Up Controversy”
• Explicit class warfare rhetoric by the Associated Press: “A Supreme Court dispute over a $15000 IRS bill may be aimed at a never-enacted tax on billionaires”
• Insultingly sexist by Ms. Magazine: “The $15,000 Tax Case that Could Cost Women Billions”
• One step away from made up numbers by the Hill: “Supreme Court to consider ‘quadrillion-dollar question’ in major tax case”
• And finally, the quiet part out loud by the Nation: “This Supreme Court Case Could Make It Even Harder to Tax Rich People”

But in all the fanfare propping up the IRS as the champion of the little guy, they forgot to mention what the IRS has done to the little guy. In 2022, the agency audited tax filers in the lowest income bracket at rate 5 times that of the highest earners. They also have a history of targeting groups based on their political leanings, and last year finally ended a door-knocking harassment policy with self-congratulatory language about “safety,” “fairness,” and “service” that would embarrass a Member of Congress.

The IRS fanboys in the media have also left out the other side of the $340 billion equation—inflation-related ink shortages, probably—where spending cuts could satisfy their newly discovered fiscal responsibility fetish. It’s surely hard to find a few hundred billion dollars in savings like…

• $240 billion in payment errors in one year. 
• A low-end estimate of $100 billion in annual Medicare and Medicaid fraud. 
• $200 billion in Covid-19 relief fraud.
• $2.8 billion in Employee Retention Credit fraud.
• $19 billion in improper Earned Income Tax Credit payments (28 percent error or fraud rate), to which Congress is trying to allocate another $80 billion. Ironically, it was the Biden administration’s expansion of the EITC which led to all of those audits of low-income earners.

Funny how the liberal press loves to cheerlead for these programs too, isn’t it?

You know, the Moores aren’t exactly billionaires—sure, $40,000 is a nice little egg, but it doesn’t make them  the elites who make up a big chunk of Congress. But the media wouldn’t care if they were broke, either. The truth is, the Moores are simply standing in the way of the media’s favorite team. 

Paul Revere is the pseudonym of a conservative writer