In the 1980s and before, the IRS literally had no way of knowing if you're telling the truth without auditing you. Everything was done on paper, cash was king. So the audits were indiscriminate and invasive, and needed a large army of employees to orchestrate.

Now, the IRS knows almost everything about your finances. They get electronic data from your employers, your bank, your brokerage. Most of commerce is settled electronically. Paypal and Venmo send them your info if you receive more than $500 in a year. There is nothing to be gained by randomly auditing the average family if the numbers on their report match what the IRS knows. The IRS can zero in on specific activities, such as people claiming unusual business deductions. But they no longer need to routinely audit most of us, and they don't need funding to that effect.

I think that this is a solid argument for why the government should be reducing filing burdens. If they already have the vast bulk of what is needed, and they're able to rely on that to audit people in case of discrepancies, they also should allow people to file more easily (or not file at all) using that information. Many other countries, including the UK where I currently live have a system wherein the most common kinds of employment don't require filing at all. The US could become one of them if it really wanted to.

Afaik, this is both true and not.

The IRS gets very specific data points, that institutions are required by law to give them.

That's largely a complete picture of your income, at least from sources that are required to report.

What they have no idea about is your expenses or classification thereof.

If we decided to move to a progressive (more money = higher rates) and no exemption/deduction system, then the IRS would have everything needed.

But in fact we have a spaghetti of deductions, because it's far easier to sneak a special interest deduction into the tax code.

When I started filing taxes way back in the olden days, I had to mail a copy of my W2 to the IRS. I could alter it, not include it, whatever. So audits would verify all that.

Now w2s are sent electronically along with 1099s and everything else.

So it’s not perfect, but it’s much easier on the IRS now, than it used to be.

For most people, there are no expenses. You could lie about kids but you need socials. You could lie about tax or mortgage deductions but those data are sent to the IRS by institutions. You could lie about charities, but again that’s sent electronically.

There are some edge things, but they are really edge because most filers don’t have any deductions that are easy to lie about without detection.

I do not think this is the case. Taxpayers have to have records to substantiate in an audit, but I don’t believe that information is filed with the IRS by the charity. (I’ve never been asked for, nor provided, my SSN when making donations over the decades.)

This one of the most misguided narratives I see from people of the other "specific US political party" to the one you're referring to.

As another commenter pointed out, if the transition away from cash and self-reporting to automatic data collection on hundreds of millions of Americans hasn't produced any productivity gains, then everything the the "evil 1%ers" have been saying about the ills of government are in fact true.

2) Tax enforcement is a cat and mouse game, efficiency from automatic data collection could be offset by any number of things like changes to the tax code or more advanced methods for tax evasion.

3) Efficiency relative to the 1980s is way less important than the efficiency of each marginal dollar. Refusing to fund the IRS over its efficiency is like skipping work because you need to find a faster route to the office first. Finding a faster route isn't a bad idea but it shouldn't take priority over the point of the whole endeavor.

But this disincentivizes productivity and is a sign of a broken system of endlessly expanding do-nothing bureaucracy.

The budget for [insert government agency] should never being growing steadily with population growth + inflation, assuming similar scope of work. This would mean government is wholly incapable of productivity, which would be a terrible outcome for the citizens who fund it.

What evidence do you have that the amount of tax evasion on a per capita basis is more prevalent today than it was in the past? All numbers I've seen for Americans is that tax evasion has been reduced dramatically. Americans can't even hold money abroad anymore without it being automatically reported by every single bank in the world due to FATCA.

There is a subset of Republicans who believe that taxes should be painful. They should be constantly front-of-mind for every American. It keeps people from forgetting about income taxes and having them fade from public discourse.

Can you cite this?

Scroll down to the section that mentions Americans for Tax Reform and links to the presentation: Doing taxes keeps citizens aware of the tax burden imposed upon them by the government. A Return-Free scheme would allow the government to raise revenues invisibly

In case you're not aware of Norquist, https://gop-waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/1...: The paradox for taxpayers is that visible, painful taxes are the taxpayer's best protection against runaway government spending and taxes.

This guy?

This is where people get it wrong, and VERY wrong. The IRS's budget had even significantly fallen between 2010 and 2014[0,1]. But it also increased from 2000 to 2004, then decreased, and increased from 2007 to 2010. Democrats only held congressional control (house and senate) in that second increase[2], but in some of those times the entire government was Republican controlled (granted, very narrow).

I'm not trying to say the Republicans are the "good guys." Actually I'm saying the opposite. I'm just saying that the defunding of the IRS isn't a partisan issue. It's just one is much more vocal about it.

This isn't an issue we can solve if we simply blame one side. Just remember, you can hold those that you side with accountable. So if you're a Democrat, it's important to be critical of Democrats or if you're a Republican, to be critical of Republicans. If you give your side a pass and just blame the other side, you bet people are going to take advantage of that. And they have.

[0] https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-need-to-rebuil...

[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/war-irs

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...

Things have flipped over the last decade. The populist and 1%er parties have flipped.

We can just say it as it is here, frankly. The 1% are overwhelmingly Democrats. They live in cities like NYC, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston. Nearly all relevant US cities are extremely to the left in terms of wealth and voters. The Forbes 400 is overwhelmingly Democrat voting and donating these days. The very richest in the US are overwhelmingly Democrats.

From Zuckerberg to Bezos to Buffett to Gates, the elite of the Forbes 400 are not far right wingers or Trumpers or Conservatives. They vote center-left and they donate center-left. They champion left causes almost exclusively. You won't catch them backing Trump.

The Democrats used to have the south as a voting block, until the late 1990s / early 2000s. Those people are the foundation of the right vote today. The left abandoned them and largely gave up on domestic blue-collar labor.