The Biden administration’s expensive efforts at beefing up the IRS’ ability to target wealthier Americans with unpaid federal taxes have finally netted $1 billion in additional revenue.
Or, to put it another way, the yearlong campaign has generated enough cash to fund the federal government for…about 90 minutes.
Do the math. The United States spent about $6.1 trillion last year. That translates to roughly $16.7 billion per day or about $700 million per hour. Against the federal government’s insatiable appetite for spending, even unfathomably large figures like $1 billion are reduced to mere rounding errors.
That $1 billion was the result of what the IRS calls “stepped up activity” targeting about 1,600 individuals with incomes of over $1 million and who owed over $250,000 in known tax debt. The $1 billion in new revenue comes from payments made by about 1,200 individuals, according to the IRS.
“Our increased work in this area means these past-due tax bills from high-end taxpayers are no longer being left on the table, like they were too often in the past,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a press release.
Of course, everyone should pay the amount of tax that they legally owe—and not one penny more. And, yes, $1 billion in additional revenue brings the federal books marginally closer to balancing.
But this announcement mostly serves to underscore the size of America’s fiscal problems and the utter inability to solve them by closing the so-called “tax gap.” The federal government is on pace to run a deficit of $2 trillion this year and a cumulative deficit of over $20 trillion in the next decade. Closing that gap will require a complete overhaul of the federal budget and a rethinking of the role of government.
Hellbound and Down 