Be Very Afraid: Dems Want $70B for IRS Harassment

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BUCK: What is the most terrifying governmental agency to you? Now, it could be these days you would say HHS and the CDC. Fair enough. Fair enough. But what certainly is high up on the list of government bodies that can make your life miserable? Well, there’s of course the DOJ. If you fall in the crosshairs of the federal government, they have endless resources with which to go after you.

They get paid whether you’re guilty or not. They can ruin you merely with the investigation. Where do you go to get your reputation back? Where do you go to get the money back that you’ll use? You’ll probably go bankrupt defending yourself against the federal government. So when they are politicized at the DOJ and going after people, that’s very concerning.

Maybe we’ll come back to how Merrick Garland the attorney general put out a statement yesterday from the DOJ about concerns over parents saying — they say “threats,” but I’m gonna tell you right now probably — just mean things to teachers. This is now a DOJ…

The FBI may be showing up on your front steps saying, “Did you call the teachers unions a bunch of lazy thugs who don’t care about kids?” which, yes, I probably did say all those things. But the FBI may be showing up on your front steps to ask you that question sometime soon. But the IRS, I think for a lot of people if you’ve ever had any interaction with them, are probably the most terrifying government body that you be dealing with on a regular basis.

‘Cause they’re incentivized to harass you and to make an example of you. And we know the Democrats have weaponized them in the past. I’m bringing this up because there’s a $70 billion additional funding request in this reconciliation bill that is stalled but not over. They’re gonna pass something, folks. It’s just a question whether it’s two trillion.

What Clay and I said to you last week is true. They’re gonna pass both an infrastructure and a reconciliation bill. They’re just haggling over the price right now. That’s all this is. Trying to get their little piece of it done. But $70 billion for the IRS? And also, unrestricted access to all accounts with $600 in them or $600 of total transactions in a year?

And that’s not with a warrant or anything else. They just have access to your bank accounts. Clay, when I hear they’re gonna be hiring thousands of additional IRS agents, they’re gonna be giving them basically open season on any bank account with $600 or more… No one thinks that makes you a millionaire or billionaire.

It’s not a lot of money. And then on top of it the socialist rhetoric and the massive spending demands and the claim that there’s gonna be zero costs attached to it, that the rich will pay for it? To me, this is like unleashing the hounds of the IRS on the American people in a way that should be really concerning. I think this should worry people.

CLAY: I think a hundred percent it should worry people, and let’s talk about a couple of reasons why. First of all, we know that the IRS, under Barack Obama, was targeting conservative groups for investigations. So we have already proven in recent history — it’s not that long ago — that the IRS will use power that it is given in order to focus on groups that have a differing political agenda than certainly liberals in positions of power.

And, by the way, it could be in the future that there is a conservative president who decides to go after liberal groups. I don’t think either one of those are right, and I’m highly skeptical of the government having access to more of our information, period, regardless of your politics. But we know specifically that Democrats have abused that power in recent history to investigate conservatives based specifically on their political beliefs.

So why do we believe that wouldn’t happen again? I have zero faith in the government to evenly apply this standard to all people. Okay. So let’s start there. Second part of this: Buck, they are selling a false bill of goods to justify this funding growth. And let me explain what they’re saying. They are effectively looking at the revenue that the IRS spends now and the revenue that the IRS generates by investigating tax returns, and saying:

“Hey, right now for every dollar we spend, we get back $5 in return.” And let me just pause here for a moment, because I have some pretty good experience from a business perspective with the fact that that doesn’t continue forever. And let me explain an example. So, anybody out there who has ever bought advertising knows that what you look at is the return that you get on the money that you spend.

And, by the way, if you’re listening to this right now you have a Big Business or a small business or any business at all, you should be advertising on this show, ’cause you get a great return on your investment, all right? But if you spend, let’s say… I’ll give you an example, Buck. Do you know what Bud Light used to spend?

I know because they would spend some money with me. In sports advertising alone, their budget was $750 million. If you’ve ever been to a sporting event and Bud Light is the official beer of “insert team here,” you see their placards everywhere. Bud Light looked at the revenue that they generated based on the money that they spent, and they said $750 million is what we should spend in the world of sports.

Bud Light looks at that and says, “Hey, this is the sweet spot for us on expense versus revenue.” If they spent $7.5 billion on advertising, they wouldn’t get the same return. In other words, as you spend money, your return diminishes. And what they are doing right now is engaging in magical accounting, Buck, because they’re saying, “if we drastically increase what we spend on IRS investigations, our yield is going to remain the same.” That doesn’t fit business reality. So they are selling a lie.

BUCK: You’re approaching this, though, from the perspective of somebody who would actually care what the return on investment is in dollars and cents.

CLAY: Yes! ‘Cause I have a business background in some way.

BUCK: Right. But the Democrats don’t. The problem here is that they’re lying to people — and you’re right about your math and the way that they’re going. But really what this is allows for a massive expansion of the government wing that is most capable of targeted harassment of individuals.

CLAY: Yes, and it is not gonna pay for itself.

BUCK: Of course it’s not gonna pay for itself but they know that. This is about creating thousands and thousands more IRS agents who are gonna be part of the bureaucracy. By the way, they’re gonna be Democrats, overwhelmingly. They’re gonna be people that believe in the party of the state and want to support the Democrats. What, people think that it’s just the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Education, the State Department that are overrun with leftist ideologues? You kidding me?

CLAY: My business, our business.

BUCK: There are plenty. Yeah, the Environmental Protection Agency. Plenty of these places have leftists and statists running around who have an ideological agenda. Lois Lerner, you mentioned, at the IRS. Yeah. A big shock, Clay — a big surprise to all of us, right — that in the reelection year of Barack Obama, 2012, after the Tea Party shellacked Democrats in 2010, all the sudden all these Tea Party groups aren’t getting their charter approved, their tax-exempt status approved.

They are getting audited. I mean, the amount of groups that they suppress, we don’t know what that affect that that actually could have on the election and we never will. But they’re doing this, $70 billion for additional IRS funding. And the part of it that drives me so insane is, one, they’ll be politicized targeting which I think we both know and agree on.

And, two, Nancy Pelosi, the millionaires and the billionaires — as Bernie would say — don’t suffer as a result of IRS. They’ve got accountants that will take care of this, they’ve got lawyers, and they have all the resources to fight it. And the loopholes that do exist in our 70,000-plus-page tax code will be abused by and continue to be abused by the very rich.

What they’re doing is often not illegal. It’s just gross, right? There are carve-outs and tax shelters that they have access to. What actually ends up happening is a small business owner who’s listening to this, maybe you’re somehow getting audited and somehow you owe 50 grand that you just don’t have.

CLAY: And you don’t have the money to fight it. And that’s the frustrating thing, right? If you are a billionaire or you’re a hundred millionaire, as much as you may not like to do it, you can afford to pay for the lawyers and the accountants that are necessary to go head-to-head with the IRS. And both of these logic basis are incredible flawed and I think they’re relatively easy to explain.

You’re not gonna get the same yield on the dollars; so when you’re trying to say, “Hey, if we spend 80 billion, we’re gonna get back 300 billion or whatever it is in unpaid taxes.” The more you spend, the less the yield becomes. That is an economic reality. I understand that lots of people in the Democratic Party don’t understand economic reality.

But that’s the truth, I’m here to tell you. And then the other part is we know it’s going to be used, the money, to focus on conservatives or people basically outside the realm of “acceptable” (and I put that in quotation marks) opinion in this modern era because the Democrats have already done it before.

So the Republicans, to me, should be fighting this in a big way, and they shouldn’t be fighting it on the battleground that the Democrats want to fight. They should be fighting it by making those two arguments ’cause I think they’re particularly powerful and perceptive, and I think most reasonable people understand it.