New IRS Agents Target Middle Class

  New IRS Agents Will Be Used to Target Middle Class, [View full headers] [View source] [View print format (Please consider the environment before printing this email)]  

  Time:  Wed, 31 Aug 2022

New IRS Agents Will Be Used to Target Middle Class, DeSantis Says

Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla.,  speaks at the opening of the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Hyatt Regency on February 26, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

By Jeremy Frankel    |   Tuesday, 30 August 2022 08:55 PM EDT

  

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The 87,000 new IRS agents made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act will be used to target the middle class, Florida's GOP Governor Ron DeSantis said Tuesday, adding that the Inflation Reduction Act will actually lead to higher inflation.

“There’s so many offensive things, and a lot of people aren’t talking about it,” DeSantis stated at a press conference. “And then in this bill, they actually impose taxes on energy production on both oil and gas. And so how is that going to cause you to pay less when they’re taxing it more? All those costs are going to be — those taxes are going to be passed on to all of you in the form of higher prices. So, that’s going to happen, for sure,” adding that the Act is “very counterproductive.”

“Not only are they doing the taxes. … They’re adding 87,000 IRS agents,” DeSantis added, explaining that these new agents’ targets would not be limited to just billionaires.

“First of all there’s not that many billionaires to need 87,000. Second of all, billionaires have accountants, they have lawyers and a lot of what billionaires do is they exploit the loopholes that Congress has put in the tax code over the years. That’s just the truth,” DeSantis said. “There was an amendment that was offered in the Senate when this bill was being debated that said you cannot use any of these IRS agents to go after anyone earning less than $400,000 a year. The Democrats voted that amendment down so it can go — it can go for anybody.”

“Who are they going to go after? They’re gonna go after the people that don’t have the wherewithal to withstand these audits. People that have lawyers and accountants, they know how to do this, but they’re gonna go after a sole proprietor. They’re gonna go after some handyman. They’re gonna go after somebody driving an Uber or somebody owning a family restaurant. That’s who they’re gonna go after, because you can turn the screws on those folks, and you can really get a pound of flesh,” DeSantis continued, noting that these new IRS agents will be used to “go after people they don’t like.”

Regarding President Biden calling the MAGA movement “semi-fascism,” DeSantis said that “they’re using the power of the state to weaponize that against people that they don’t like, and so who do they not like? Well, they don’t like people who are small business, people who are individual entrepreneurs, whatever, that’s where that’s going to go. So it’s a slap in the face for a government that doesn’t even enforce the law itself at the border and other places to be going after Americans based on technicalities in the tax code.”

DeSantis added that the new law will not reduce inflation “one red cent,” and that, “if anything, it’s going to increase inflation.”