Opinion: To make her wealth tax work, Elizabeth Warren must revive the IRS
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., addresses a campaign rally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. By Paul Waldman Paul Waldman Opinion writer covering politics Email Bio Follow Opinion writer May 22 at 3:22 PM If you’ve followed Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, you know she has a series of ambitious plans, many of which involve substantial government spending.
Warren’s ambitious agenda relies on two assumptions that defy a long history of U.S. policymaking: First, that the country’s wealthiest taxpayers won’t find ways to evade the targeted tax hike she proposes; and second, that new entitlement programs won’t result in ballooning costs that plunge the federal government deeper into debt.
Look no further than our current president, who may be one of the great tax cheats in American history. As the New York Times exhaustively documented, Donald Trump, his father, and his siblings engaged in a massive tax-fraud scheme during the 1980s and 1990s, which enabled them to cheat the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Warren says that she wants to beef up Internal revenue Service enforcement to make cheating more difficult. But there’s no doubt that it’s a real problem, particularly since hiding wealth can be easier than hiding income. Even some liberal economists have warned that cheating would be rampant if a wealth tax was in place.
As of last year, the IRS had 9,510 auditors. That’s down a third from 2010. The last time the IRS had fewer than 10,000 revenue agents was 1953, when the economy was a seventh of its current size. And the IRS is still shrinking. Almost a third of its remaining employees will be eligible to retire in the next year, and with morale plummeting, many of them will.
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