Apparently Kevin Drum has given me the “brass balls award” on his blog for my recent post about the IRS. He says that the reason the IRS is incompetent is that “conservatives have been hellbent on gutting the agency over the past 25 years.” He goes on to recount the alleged misdeeds of Republicans reducing the IRS’s workforce.
In doing so, Drum misses the overall point of my post: The tax code should be simpler. The IRS does not make the tax code. It enforces the tax code as written by Congress. The IRS should not need so many employees in the first place because Congress should simplify the tax code. That was what I was arguing, as any plain reading of the post would indicate. Despite a few helpful moves in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, such as increasing the standard deduction so fewer taxpayers need to itemize, the tax code remains far too complex, which makes the IRS’s job more difficult than it should be.
It does also happen to be true that the IRS is poorly run, a fact that Drum does not dispute since it is based on information from the Office of the Taxpayer Advocate (which is within the IRS) and the experience of pretty much anyone who has ever had to deal with the agency. The proximate cause of my post was a Capital Matters article from Daniel J. Pilla, which is about the terrible proposal to further empower that poorly run agency with facial-recognition technology to verify identity and aid investigations that the agency undertakes. Drum was noticeably silent on whether he thinks that is a good idea.
Drum writes that Republicans want the IRS to be poorly run because “it helps make taxes unpopular,” as if that’s a cause that needs any help. Taxes are unpopular because they involve the government taking your money, which is something that has rankled Americans since at least 1776. Americans then observe how the government spends that money and, understandably, become even more upset.
Drum’s recounting of history is also a bit suspect. He seems to believe that when a Democrat is president and Republicans hold the House majority, the speaker of the House assumes plenary power to decide the size of the IRS. He blames Newt Gingrich and John Boehner for IRS staffing decreases that occurred under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
He writes that during President Obama’s time in office, Republicans “slashed another 20,000 employees by bargaining with Obama over things he cared more about.” In other situations, that dastardly practice is known as “compromise” and is seen as a necessary part of our constitutional order, especially during periods of divided government. Here it is being denigrated as a way to retroactively shield Democrats from criticism for policy moves with which Drum disagrees.
Drum does get one thing right. The endless complexity of our tax code has spawned an industry around tax preparation. That industry then has an interest in lobbying the government to keep the tax code complex. Again, the solution to that problem is what I argued in the post: Make the tax code simpler anyway. That requires politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, to stand up to lobbyist pressure.
But nothing in Drum’s post undermines my point, which I will repeat: With a simpler tax code, the tax collectors would have less to do, which is better for them and better for us.
Thanks for the award, Mr. Drum.