GOP

gift article....

fiscally responsible you say?

https://wapo.st/42TyjfD 

  Opinion | It’s almost like the House GOP never cared about deficits after all
Opinion by Catherine Rampell
June 25, 2023 at 6:30 ET
In the weeks since threatening to cause a global economic crisis over their avowed desire to reduce deficits, Republican lawmakers are again pushing legislation that would increase deficits.
By billions upon billions of dollars.
On Thursday, for instance, a House appropriations subcommittee marked up a bill covering Internal Revenue Service funding for fiscal year 2024. This legislation would slash more than $1 billion — roughly 9 percent of annual funding — from the agency relative to last year. After adjusting for inflation, the IRS would be down to its lowest annual appropriations levels so far this century.
Now, if you hear “spending cuts to [x government agency]” and assume “Oh, surely that will save money,” I’m sorry to say you are mistaken here.
Unlike most kinds of government spending, each dollar spent on the IRS leads to much more than a dollar flowing back into government coffers, especially when the IRS would use that funding to collect unpaid taxes. Which this spending would: The GOP-proposed cuts specifically target IRS enforcement efforts. The Treasury Department projects that this latest GOP proposal to siphon resources away from IRS enforcement would result in an $8.6 billion loss of revenue, by limiting the agency’s ability to audit high-income and corporate tax dodgers.
[Opinion: How much did Congress lose by defunding the IRS? Way more than we thought.]
Also, to be clear (since it can be hard to keep track): This newly proposed IRS budget cut should not be confused with a previous $1.4 billion that Congress rescinded from IRS budgets in its recent debt limit legislation, via another law enacted three weeks ago. Both of those cuts are also wholly distinct from the $20 billion in mandatory-spending cuts from the IRS budget that Congress and the White House agreed to in a side deal last month.

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