Any business owner knows that inventory reduction, advertising, and transportation expenses should be scaled back to avoid bankruptcy before eliminating debt collections and customer service. Republicans are fond of promoting government as a business, and in the last ten years have proven themselves to be horrible at rudimentary business acumen because they have deliberately reduced revenue while increasing spending on frivolous items such as entitlements for the oil industry, corporations, and the wealthy. It is no secret that Republicans opposes taxation and big government as a matter-of-course, and their tax-abhorrence has led to America’s economic stagnation and problems funding social programs that nearly all Americans depend on. Now, Republicans have continued their anti-tax campaign to include cutting the Internal Revenue Service’s budget for fiscal year 2012 and have left some Democrats with little choice but to go along with their ridiculous plans.
The Republican-controlled House voted earlier in the year to slash the IRS budget in what they claimed was a necessary move to save the government money. Last month, a Senate subcommittee voted to cut IRS funding for fiscal 2012 by $458.8 million; the House bill cut the IRS budget to a level that is $600 million below the fiscal 2011 level. President Obama’s deficit reduction plan called for increasing the IRS budget that would bring in an estimated $3.2 billion in additional tax revenues over 10 years. Apparently, Republicans think the country is awash in cash to be willing to let billions of dollars disappear so they could say they cut spending. Besides losing uncollected taxes, cutting the IRS budget will force the IRS to eliminate more than 4,200 full-time positions and reduce revenue collections by $4 billion annually.
