Should the Internal Revenue Service be Abolished or Strengthened?
AllSides Summary
The Republican-led House of Representatives will soon vote on a bill to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and eliminate the income tax. The bill has virtually no chance of making it through the senate, and President Biden said he would veto such legislation, but the push has ignited discussion on taxes and the efficiency of the IRS.
Weaken The IRS: The Washington Examiner Editorial Board claimed the Biden administration “depends on middle-income earners paying thousands more in taxes than they think they owe, and he’s upset that the House should dare imperil his ability to make it happen.” After the House voted nearly along party lines to repeal the resolution in the Inflation Reduction Act that added 87,000 IRS agents, a writer in the Washington Examiner dismissed frustrations voiced by House Democrats, writing, “as much as they whined, they also didn't do anything about the tax code when they controlled the House of Representatives for the last four years.”
Bolster The IRS: A writer in Newsweek (Center Bias) believes abolishing the IRS would “make it even harder for us to hold some of the wealthiest people in our society accountable for their taxes.” A writer in Bloomberg argues that the IRS requires additional funding to be effective, stating that a dramatic budget increase is needed for the agency to “overhaul its auditing system and have any chance at reclaiming the billions, if not trillions of dollars that go uncollected every year.”
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From the Right
Biden's IRS army is not coming for billionaires — it's coming for you

When the new Republican-controlled House passed a bill to cancel President Joe Biden ’s desired army of 87,000 new IRS agents, the administration reacted with a full-blown tantrum.
Vice President Kamala Harris released an angry statement that Republicans want to “allow … millionaires, billionaires, and corporations to cheat the system.”
This is ridiculous if you know anything about how the IRS conducts audits and raises additional revenue. Fortunately, the Government Accountability Office released a report last spring that shows exactly whom the IRS tends to target.
First, the majority of...
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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.
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The IRS Needs Billions to Make Trillions

Regardless of how you feel about the Internal Revenue Service — it’s dysfunctional, it’s underfunded, or both — there’s a basic point that’s hard to refute: The current system to ferret out wrongdoers is terrible. And in a move that will only make it worse, House Republicans voted Monday to block new funding allocated for the agency by the last Congress.
Consider that the tax gap, or the difference between what taxpayers owe and what they actually pay, averaged $496 billion from 2014 through 2016 (the agency’s most recent estimates)....
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