GOP Say Relief Bill Too Expensive - Call Their Bluff!

 Not a single Republican voted for the COVID Relief Bill. They tried to claim it was just a liberal wish list, but the public was too smart to buy that weak argument. Now they have shifted to a new argument -- that the bill is too expensive and the country can't afford to do it.

That's a rather hypocritical argument coming from the party that gave trillions in tax breaks to the rich and corporations. But there is a way to call them on their bluff about it being too expensive a bill. 

Here's what Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent says the Democrats should do:

President Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package has extraordinarily broad public support, and it’s likely to juice the economic recovery, but Republicans are playing the long game. Their scheme is to admit the economy is improving, but say it’s unrelated to Biden’s stimulus — then pivot to bashing Democrats for overspending.

“This bill won’t speed up our return to normal,” says House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), admitting normalcy is returning, before adding that the bill will “burden future generations with unnecessary debt.”

As the New York Times reports, Republicans are betting voters will become “disillusioned with the scope and price of the plan,” and “punish Democrats accordingly.”

Here’s a way for Biden and Democrats to counter this attack: move to increase funding for the Internal Revenue Service so it captures some of the trillions of dollars in revenue that are expected to go uncollected in the next decade.

This is more than just good politics. It could also help bolster voters’ faith in public spending and progressive governance at a moment of great opportunity to seize on momentum from passage of Biden’s plan to do a lot more of both.

The case for IRS reform is spelled out in a good piece by New York University tax expert Chye-Ching Huang. A decade’s worth of IRS budget cuts have cost taxpayers trillions of dollars:

The agency is increasingly unable to detect or address blatant tax cheating by high-income filers and the largest businesses. In February, the I.R.S. commissioner, Charles P. Rettig, told Congress that about $570 billion in taxes owed in 2019 were not paid. That tax gap is projected to total about $7.5 trillion over this decade.

As Huang reports, the agency is so depleted that it often doesn’t follow up on tax-dodging by high-income people that it knows about, and big corporations and the wealthy are extremely skilled at using legal complexities to frustrate audits and evade taxes.

This also would provide a weapon against deficit-scolding going forward. Republicans are betting on voters getting checks and vaccines and enjoying the recovery — and over time forgetting how that all happened, after which Republicans will point to deficits and scream that Democratic profligacy is destroying the country.

“If Republicans are truly concerned about rising deficits, it should be a no-brainer to collect taxes that are owed from people and companies that are cheating the system,” Seth Hanlon, a tax expert at the Center for American Progress, tells me. “You can do this without raising rates.”. . .

By tackling the ways elites game the system with impunity — exactly the sort of thing right-wing populists demagogue to turn people against liberal governance — beefing up tax enforcement could bolster faith in the general project of paying taxes to secure public goods and solutions to large public problems.