The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor.Full Bio

 

87K IRS Agents! Dems Push Through Massive Tax and Spending Bill

CLAY: Eighty-seven thousand new IRS agents. We now are going to have almost as many IRS agents as we do United States Marine Corps members. And right in the middle of a recession, with inflation at 9.1%. The Democrats, as we were concerned — and I’ll say on this show, Buck, you and I started talking about this, months and months ago — would Democrats try to ram through one last bill right before they were going to lose control of at least the House, maybe the Senate, and they did. They spent nearly $800 million, and I think the country is gonna be worse off. You raise taxes on many different small businesses during a recession, many different businesses overall; you have added —

BUCK: It’s $800 billion, right.

CLAY: Yeah. Did I say million? Billion, yes.

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: You added a further — billion here, billion there — 740 billion — added further inflationary pressure. Not that the economists have gotten very much right at all. But almost every economist lined up looking at these numbers and said, even though this is called in a very Orwellian facing the Inflation Reduction Act, it will actually add a massive amount, potentially, of inflationary pressure to our country’s economy. Buck, this was the worst possible thing that Democrats could have done in the summer before the election for the nation. So, of course, they did it.

BUCK: Paying off their constituents in the green energy side of things. They like that one, right? There’s close to a hundred billion dollars of straight-up taxpayer cash for windmills, solar panels, probably some carbon credit programs. So, that’s all snuck into this, just so everyone knows. They call that green energy investments. What that is, is spending your money, you, the American people, on stuff that is inefficient, unnecessary, and favors the Democrat green ideology.

They’re also talking a lot about bringing down prescription drug prices as a means of trying to stop seniors from looking at what’s going on here with the — ’cause remember seniors, a lot of them are on fixed income, and so inflation really hurts them because a lot of their fixed income isn’t going to keep up with the inflation that we see. And so they’re trying to have a minor giveaway to seniors that will make them think, I guess Biden’s not that good on the economy.

A huge expansion of the IRS. And did you see over the weekend, Clay, there were these people — the quislings, the throne shiners, the boot shiners of the regime — on social media saying, “Well, if you’re gonna worry about the IRS, maybe you should just pay your taxes,” as if these idiots… And I guess a lot of them who are journos in Brooklyn and D.C. haven’t been through this.

They don’t understand that the tax code is effectively, when you add it all together, tens of thousands of pages with the opinions and everything else, and it is opaque on purpose. It is meant to keep you in perpetual fear because you never know — they claim to know at what the exact number is that you owe but they won’t tell you until after you’ve paid, and if you pay the wrong amount, maybe they’ll just give you a fine, maybe they’ll send you to prison.

CLAY: This is a tweet from Steve Guest to conceptualize — and you’re exactly right. The IRS will now have more employees, federal government IRS employees, than the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, and border control combined. We’re talking about over doubling the number of IRS agents. This is important too. This is from Phil Kerpen. An amendment that was offered by the Republicans on the 87,000 new IRS agents said, “Hey, we want those new IRS agents to only audit companies and individuals with income of $400,000 or more.”

It failed. So, if you’re out there and you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, well, they’re just gonna go after billionaires,” there are only around 780 billionaires in the United States. And the vast majority of those billionaires have incredible, incredible tax attorneys and accountants. And they’re already spending millions of dollars to make sure that they’re following all of this. I think what’s gonna, unfortunately, happen here, Buck, is you’re gonna have so many people out there who don’t have large incomes that are gonna get letters in the mail because that’s how the letter comes on the IRS audit, you don’t have, by and large, if you’re a regular person in America, a lot of money to fight IRS audits. They’re gonna be suddenly demanding, hey, you owed $8,000 more, and you’re gonna end up having to spend thousands of dollars to defend yourself, even if you didn’t do anything at all wrong.

BUCK: This is the huge lie that Democrats engage in all the time. We’re just gonna tax the rich people. There’s not enough money that rich people even have. I mean, truly rich people. There’s not enough money to pay for the agenda the Democrats want for more than a couple of months. And that’s if you took all their money. We’re talking about billionaires, with the spending… When you’re talking about a three or four trillion-dollar spending package, you could take the money from the billionaires, it wouldn’t last very long, and I mean seize their assets.

I don’t even mean raise their tax rate 2%. So, where does the money really come from? And this is what they never want people to understand because it’s so — class warfare and envy are, unfortunately, effective politics. Everyone… This goes back to Bastiat. You know Bastiat, the lawyer, the Frenchman. Clay, you’d love it. He says the great fiction of the statists is that they can live at the expense of everyone else, right?

That everyone’s gonna get taxed, everyone’s gonna get stuff, and they won’t pay for it, right? The fiction that you can live with the expense of every other man. The real money comes from what you said, five grand, six grand, seven grand, in additional tax to people making 60 grand, 70 grand, 80 grand, but millions and millions of those people. That’s why they need tens of thousands of additional IRS agents, folks, to go through the audits on the millions of people, not on the hundred billionaires.

CLAY: We’re talking about doubling the number of IRS agents out there. I mean, this is a big college football stadium full of pencil-pushing IRS agents. And they’re selling this purchase, this addition, this expansion by saying, oh, we’re gonna make so much more money as a result of all these IRS agents ’cause we’re gonna catch so many more people cheating on their taxes. I just don’t believe that’s true. I really don’t.

Because they’re auditing high level, high-income people on a regular basis. I think I’ve said this in the air before, Buck. You know, one of the first things I was told when I took this job, somebody in the know said, “Expect to get audited every year for the rest of your life now, ‘cause you’re going from being a sports talk radio guy… People don’t really care that much about sports talk radio.

“You’re kind of in the toy chest of life as a sports talk radio guy. You’re stepping into the Rush Limbaugh time slot, you’re going to be saying a lot of things that many people in high positions of the government don’t like, and much like Rush…” And the Rush crew can talk about this. Rush got audited all the time by the IRS. “Where were you doing the show from? Did you cross that T? Did you dot that I? ‘Cause they didn’t like what he said. One of the first things I was told was, “You’re gonna get audited every year for the rest of your life,” and there are a lot of people out there listening to us that with 87,000 additional IRS agents are gonna find yourselves in the same boat.

BUCK: Rush was audited, Clay, by the state of New York — and Rush talked about this; obviously, a lot of the audience remembers this from listening to him — 12 years in a row.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: 12 straight years of audits. And I believe there was a line from then-governor Patterson — am I right on this one, guys? Where Patterson, when this was brought to his attention that Rush was audited 12 years in a row said, well, if that would get him to leave the state, I wish we’d done it even sooner. That’s the governor of the state of New York, folks. I mean, one of the big things that we’ve learned — and I think it was hammered home more in the Trump era than at any other time in living memory, although remember the Obama administration, Clay, had the Lois Lerner IRS in an election year —

CLAY: Oh, yeah. Yes.

BUCK: — putting her hand on the scale against any organization, any entity that had “patriot,” “liberty,” “freedom” in the name. If you want to know what the libs really hate, by the way, patriots, people that like liberty, people that like freedom — and they admitted this.

CLAY: The American flag.

BUCK: This was something they would have called a conspiracy but Lois Lerner to get ahead of it said, “Yeah, so, we kind of edited that,” and it was meant to suppress Tea Party groups. Why? Because they got their asses kicked in 2010 by the Tea Party. So, 2012 rolls around, guess what? 2011, the IRS all of a sudden is not pushing through these groups, not allowing them to get their tax-exempt status, doing everything — and they say, “Oh, well, there was no top-down order for this.” Does anyone think the authoritarian agents of the IRS needed to be told they’d get a pat on the back for crushing as many Tea Party groups as possible? I don’t think so.

CLAY: And as many of you will learn, unfortunately, thanks to this bill being passed, the investigation itself is often the punishment. Because the amount of time, energy, and effort that you are going to have to spend responding to these 87,000 IRS agents when an audit arrives on your doorstep is going to be, even if you paid your taxes accurately, and even if you paid where the difference is a thousand dollars or $800 or something of that nature, you’re going to spend far more than that responding to their audit. So, we’re talking about a default additional tax, irrespective of the tax itself.

But the man-hour tax, the accounting tax, the IRS attorney tax that many people out there — remember, again, I think this is important to emphasize, Republicans tried to say, hey, only people making $400,000 or more — ’cause remember Biden lied and said, hey, if you make $400,000 or less, I’ll never raise your taxes. Democrats were not willing to say, okay, we’re only gonna focus on people who make $400,000 or more because, to your point, Buck, they know that the real money, given where incomes are, is in going after the guy who’s a small business owner and might have made $125,000 in a year, and they’re gonna argue, hey, you misidentified one of the details on your tax return.

Very — to your point, Buck, the most — one of the most infuriating things out there — people have this idea if you don’t spend a lot of time in the tax code is that a tax code is a math problem. It’s really an accounting art, right? You can have 10 different accountants. You can give them all every bit of paperwork that you have, and they will come up with 10 different amounts that you owe, all of them trying to do the best job that they can. Once your taxes become a little bit complicated — you run a small business, you’ve got multiple different income streams coming in. I know this. I file my taxes every year, Buck. I sign off on it. I can barely understand it.

BUCK: Remember Donald Rumsfeld used to send a letter in to the IRS every year where he would say, just to be clear, I have a team of attorneys and accountants looking at this, and I want to state for the record that I do not — you’re asking me to say if these are accurate. I think they are, but I do not know. And he did that every year. And, you know, Donald Rumsfeld, think what you will about the guy, he’s a smart guy.

CLAY: You can be brilliant and not able to follow the tax code. In fact, that’s why I’ve argued for a long time, you know, the Forbes tax cut — tax idea, flat tax, 15%, 12%, whatever the heck he was arguing for on a postcard, it actually does make a ton of sense.

BUCK: All the FairTax fans in the audience are about to hop in your mentions, Clay. FairTax, not flat tax. It’s like you’ve betrayed them by saying flat tax. I never know which one I’m supposed to say. I like the FairTax and the flat. I’ll take either of them. You know what I mean?

CLAY: I want low taxes, and I want less IRS agents.

BUCK: I think that’s a good plan.

CLAY: Yeah.


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