Hacker News Reader

Comment by notch898a | Hacker News Reader

Didn't the legislature try to introduce a bill to prevent using the new agents/funding against lower earners, and it flopped? So it turns out all along no one actually wants to keep anyone accountable to such "promises."

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...

  Statement of Purpose: To prevent the use of additional Internal Revenue Service Funds from being used for audits of taxpayers with taxable incomes below $400,000 in order to protect low- and middle-income earning American taxpayers from an onslaught of audits from an army of new Internal Revenue Service auditors funded by an unprecedented, nearly $80.000.000.000, infusion of new funds.

  Vote Result: Amendment Rejected

View on HN

> legislature try to introduce a bill to prevent using the new agents/funding against lower earners

Money is fungible. This was a messaging bill. If they were serious, they'd create an independently-funded agency within the IRS with the sole mandate of going after high earners.

If the bill was a message, so was the response. "Fuck you, we'd rather not be hindered by such promises."

-----------------------------------

RE: below [due to timeout]

>The original bill already passed.

  factcheck:  false.  Original bill passed almost 12 hours later on the same day[0] [1].  The (above) amendment was voted on in the early morning, with the unamended increase passing in the afternoon.

>Congress has more important things to do.

  factcheck:  false.  All 100 senators voted on the floor for a full vote on the amendment.  None found they had something more important to do that would cause them not to cast a vote.

>The executive has stated its position.

  factcheck: True.  Either congress ignored the position, or they followed the privately endorsed position rather than the publicly endorsed one.

  [0] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1172/vote_117_2_00325.htm

  [1] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1172/vote_117_2_00296.htm

> so was the response

Not really? The original bill already passed. The executive has stated its position. Congress has more important things to do.

So less than 400k is designated as high net worth? 200k will be the new threshold at some point.

Inflation will ensure almost everyone is in a higher tax bracket and is auditable in 1-2 decades.

Then more money will have to be printed. So we get a raise, but the raise still doesn't match the hurdle rate, while demand remains the same. That's some dystopian fucked up shit there.

I don't take the legislature's failure to pass a bill as a sign of anything other than their general incompetence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com