This was done to ensure the IRS cannot audit the very rich. That works because the auditing the rich is very expensive and you need highly skilled Auditors for that.
So, this is working as planned by Trump.
But it is "profitable".
It is one of the very few things the government does that generates short-term "profits" - every dollar spent auditing the rich and collecting from them generates more money than is spent, and we have never been close to break-even.
If you truly want to run the government like a business, increasing funding to IRS audits and collections is one of the hallmarks of what you would do.
EDIT: a lot of what the government does, and it should be everything the government does, is profitable, but it's more like "we spend this money, it increases GDP on some timescale, and then we get more taxes from it". This is short-term because it is more direct. The IRS audits bring in more tax revenue quite directly.
This isn't just a Trump thing, it's a Republican party thing.
Meanwhile, even in an alternate reality where IRS was occasionally seizing some billionaire's entire life savings for cause, the proceeds would fund the federal government's operations for just a few hours. Hours! No amount of collected taxes make a difference when congress spends 2-3x what they collect!
Correct. The average was 1.37x revenue from the last decade[0], and the peak was 1.92x in 2020, not quite 2x.
[0] FY2015-2024
Do you imagine that when the government spends, it feeds money into a furnace and it's gone forever? That's not how it works.
It pays people and companies. That money comes back as more taxes.
Propaganda worked on finance bros. Bullets will too.