Kill the IRS guys: What happens if they get their way?

[Grek]

So, down here in the south, we've been getting lots of terrible commercials about how it's "Time to Kill the IRS". Now, clearly, getting rid of the part of the government that collects taxes is a bad idea, but how bad of an idea is it? If congress abolished the IRS tomorrow, what happens to people who stop paying taxes?

Anyone want to weigh in on this? I find myself unable to imagine how this would even work.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Don't think about it too hard. Seriously, there's no reason to even entertain the scenario. That kind of lunacy come from the same morons who screech get your government hands off our Medicare.

It's just *WORMy revanchist whining. The same kind the US has been having to put up with for the past, oh, 40+ years.

*White, old, rural male.

[name_here]

Well, only the IRS is empowered to enforce tax law, so if in some crazed bizzaro world where everyone got drunk simultaneously it actually got disbanded, people who don't pay taxes would not be at any risk of legal action whatsoever.

Also, the IRS calculates how much people should pay in the first place.

[Drolyt]

I find myself unable to imagine how this would even work.

That's because it wouldn't. You probably don't want to hear me rant about the laissez-faire crowd, but the actual result of the government being unable to collect taxes would be a complete breakdown of society. Thankfully that will never happen.

[Username17]

No one with any power is actually trying to disband the IRS. The extremist rhetoric is supposed to inflame rightwing Southern voters and to hopefully put through their main goal: politicizing the IRS. The idea is to convince people that the IRS is already politicized so that they can pack it with conservative partisans with partisan agendas in order to "balance" it. That's as far as it goes.

Fortunately, it turns out that there never was an anti-conservative conspiracy in any part of the IRS and there really isn't any scandal and the people running the Ohio office were actually conservatives themselves. So this particular push just makes them look as retarded as their constant Benghazi investigations do.

But in a different world where they had super majorities in both houses of congress, the investigations would have stopped before they had shown that there was nothing to find, and then they would have pulled a Fox News on the IRS to use a bludgeon to crush political opponents keep the IRS "politically balanced".

It's a fight they've already lost, but they think they might be able to play this defeat into victimhood whining to drum up votes, so they are keeping at it.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

In the hypothetical case that someone did shut down the IRS and the FedGov couldn't tax an individual's income, they would have to move over to a more ruinous series of taxes and tarriffs on commerce to fund the government - probably along with printing more money and sale of government assets, and a general increase of fees and a scaleback in services and size of the government. Which would disproportionately benefit rich people (who consume less relative to their income) and harm poor people (who consume more and rely more on government services).

[Lago PARANOIA]

And at any rate, no rich person of a monetarily sovereign nation with any sort of welfare state wants the central government to stop taxing people. Because if they don't, the government will almost certainly just print more money and/or jack up central bank interest rates. While this will kick the lower classes in the groin really, really hard this will kick rich people directly in the throat.

[Blade]

A state with no tax incomes (including business taxes and tariffs) would have few options:

- Finding other sources of incomes such as selling property, getting donations, having profitable businesses and re-injecting the benefits in the State (which is some form of taxes). The first one wouldn't work very long. The second one would lead to a plutocracy where the biggest donors have the biggest influence on what the State does. The third one would require the business to be big enough to cover the states need. It could lead to something similar to the megacorporations or the corporate-states seen in some sci-fi stories, and/or to some kind of communist state.

- Stopping spendings, which is pretty close to ceasing existence, as well as closing any public services. This situation wouldn't last very long, it would probably lead to someone (or multiple people) taking the power (one way or another) and establishing (a) new government(s)... with taxes.

- Print more money, and pretend that there's no problem. In the U.S it would lead to a weird situation, where banks and other countries are unhappy with what happens but can't take too drastic decisions without hurting their own economy. I think it would probably solve itself by having something take down the government and put in power a government that pays its bills.

Of course, none of these are realistic, since no government would ever stop collecting taxes.

[tussock]

They'd issue bonds like they do now for any capital projects, it's just that any spending on wages would be highly inflationary that way, so they'd have to privatise the bureaucracy and every branch of civil service and have them collect their own wages like the service industry does.

Which Anarchists aren't stupid enough to believe in, but Libertarians are. It's essentially how the world worked in the middle ages, where the fines collected by the courts paid for the courts, and restorative justice was a high priority to keep costs down. If someone murdered your brother you kinda had to take the case to court yourself and beg them to help (which they likely wouldn't unless you bought along credible witnesses) because the police weren't invented yet.

[Josh_Kablack]

Well the US of A's federalism and history does open up a few additional crazy purely hypothetical situations that will never happen but appeal to right-wingers in various ways:


1. You could roll the clock back to pre-1913, eliminating federal income tax and having the federal government finance itself mainly through tariffs on imports. This is a right-wing plutocrat wet dream since it helps to bring things back to the way they were during the golden age of robber barons. This is sold to the plebes by citing the original constitution and spouting rubbish about the "founder's intent"

2. You could eliminate the federal income tax and have individual States within the union kick a portion of their own revenues towards the federal system. This is a wet-dream for the States' Rights crowd - each State would be free to collect their needed revenue through means decided at the State level (property taxes, State Income Taxes, licensing fees, speeding tickets, etc) and the system would result in a very weak federal government.

3. You could shuffle around the Treasury Department's organizational chart to eliminate the IRS and have a different bureau assume responsibility for tax collection. This is a wet dream for high-income tax-dodgers, since any such re-org would result in years of confusion and new loopholes and ways to challenge the legal authority. It could be sold to the plebes as streamlining government and reducing inefficiency.

4. You could do all of the above, eliminating the IRS and federal income tax, and having the federal government finance itself through TTB revenues. Remember that one of the drivers for the repeal of Prohibition was a desire to replace federal income tax with sales taxes on alcohol. Since sales taxes are generally more regressive and there is a strong inverse correlation between income level and tobacco use, this is big with the soak-the-poor objectivist crowd, but can be sold to the plebes as taxing vices and promoting virtue, because any church that takes donations will be on board.

[infected slut princess]

lol you guys are all welfare bums