Clearly the guy hasn’t been on the job, looked at the data, and is simply speaking from what he knows. Some businesses HAVE cut too far, down to the bone, and it has been counterproductive. I doubt the IRS is like that but give the guy a break until he’s confirmed and let’s see what happens then. I could see additional enforcement people along with a reduction in other areas resulting from simplification of the tax code.
This would be a reallocation.
I find it very hard to swallow that the Trump administration just wants to grow the beast as a whole.
Clearly the 90,000 current employees have not been getting the job done. They have utterly failed to stop tax evasion including the under-reporting of income in entire sectors of the economy and the tax fraud involved in hiring people (including but not limited to illegal aliens) under the table.
I don’t like the complexity of the current income tax or the progressivity of it. It is the definition of punishing success. But as long as we wink at millions of people, from construction workers to waitresses to small business owners, who routinely dump their tax burdens onto honest workers, we should not complain about efforts to reduce tax evasion. Even if we switch to a flat tax tomorrow, how long and how big an IRS will it take to punish prior evasion and collect those taxes owed prior to that switchover ? Didn’t we just vote for law & order ?
He’s very much at risk of coming off as the rich guy who thinks his team of accountants has to deal with significant IRS scrutiny and so every two-bit Joe out in the rest of the country should have to deal with it too—while simply being out of touch by what an imposition mindless IRS pressure is on the little guy who doesn’t have and can’t afford a team of accountants.