America, the IRS is the good guy; tax cheats are the bad guys

This one’s easy. Feed the IRS. 

“Starve the beast” has long been a Republican rallying cry to make government smaller and less invasive, and the Internal Revenue Service has been a constant target. 

Republican lawmakers have taken great pride in fighting to reduce tax rates for big business and high-earning individuals (while doing comparatively little for low- and middle-class Americans). And while doing that, they’ve drained the Internal Revenue Service of the resources it needs to collect even those reduced taxes on the wealthy. 

As a result, we have a government agency in 2022, as Kiplinger.com notes, whose computers rely on COBOL — a more-than 50-year-old computer programming language. As Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote in August, after a visit to the agency’s Austin, Texas offices: 

“As of July 29, the IRS had a backlog of 10.2 million unprocessed individual returns. Blame the pandemic, sure, but also the agency’s embarrassingly outdated, paper-based system, which leaves stacks and stacks of returns cluttering shelves, hallways and even the cafeteria.... Paper tax returns aren’t scanned into computers; instead, IRS employees manually keystroke the numbers from each document into the system, digit by digit.”