In this editorial I’ll be taking aim at the kinds of misrepresentation demonstrated in a piece published on TheHill.com by Alfredo Ortiz, who is part of a group called the “Job Creators Network“, a right-wing lobbying group created by Home Depot co-founder and ardent Trump loyalist Bernie Marcus. This particular piece demonstrates a number of tactics frequently employed by political agitators to misrepresent political issues and rally the support of low information conservatives.
The piece refers to President Biden’s plan to fund new government spending by increasing funding for IRS enforcement. Ortiz demonstrates obvious skepticism of the numbers Biden cites, and makes the false claim that: “…the wealthiest Americans likely wouldn’t be affected by increased IRS enforcement. They have high-priced lawyers and accountants who ensure their taxes comply with every provision on every page in the tax code.” Ortiz is making an “assertion without evidence” with this statement. He claims, without evidence that the wealthy are abiding by every page in the tax code, even though there is plenty of analysis, such as an NBER working paper on the cost of income tax evasion, and hard evidence such as the infamous “Panama Papers” of several years ago, that the wealthy are not paying all of their taxes.
Ortiz then claims that the burden of an enlarged IRS would fall on small businesses, who would face “an army of auditors” if the agency is expanded. These claims are entirely speculative, and because Ortiz is not a government employee and has no insight into how Biden intends to expand the IRS, his comments count as little more than paranoid fantasy. Ortiz then continues with the phrase “Weaponizing the IRS to go after small businesses…”, integrating the paranoid fantasy that he fabricated out of whole cloth into a vehicle for further projection.
Ortiz then claims that “Biden’s IRS plan calls for granting the agency access to personal and business account information,” and cites another editorial, written by an author for a right-wing group called “IRS Watch”. The notion that the IRS could “know more” about your bank accounts is ridiculous, as the IRS already has full access to financial information for anyone who holds an account at an American banking institution. The only accounts that the IRS does not have full access to are those held overseas, and small business owners typically don’t have an extensive portfolio of offshore bank accounts.
Ortiz returns to an old GOP talking point by falsely claiming that “Under the Obama Administration, the IRS targeted conservative nonprofit organizations…” this is a tactic known as “rallying the faithful”. Individuals who are already sympathetic to conservative ideology will see the reference to a prior conspiracy theory, and assume that Ortiz’s paranoid screed is a conservative talking point of similar importance. Ortiz also claims that the IRS is not under-funded because Congress gave the agency more funding than it requested for the 2020-21 fiscal year, but he fails to mention that the reason the initial request was so small, was that request was generated when the agency was led by a Trump appointee who made his personal fortune representing wealthy clients who were being audited by the IRS. The IRS shrank substantially during the Trump Administration, and funding requests for Federal Agencies from left-over Trump appointees have typically been far less than what those agencies requested in past administrations.
The only real question to be asked here is “who benefits from this kind of misrepresentation?” The answer: Home Depot co-founder and ardent Trump loyalist Bernie Marcus. He is a right-wing extremist who is contemptuous of government, and has a personal fortune worth millions. Bernie Marcus is just the kind of person who is likely to use complicated tax strategies to avoid paying taxes to the IRS, and he’s in the income bracket that Joe Biden intends to target. By creating a propaganda mill like the “Job Creators Network”, he can circulate anti-IRS enforcement propaganda and scare working and middle class Americans into thinking that Biden’s expanded IRS budget will have consequences for them. This editorial is an example of the wealthy using highly trained propagandists, and the reach of commercial media and the internet to try to influence American politics for their own financial benefit.