You’ve gotta love the consistency of the
Bushites. When they ram through their multibillion-dollar tax giveaways,
it’s the super-rich and corporations that gain. And when they unleash
their IRS to look into tax cheating, they don’t probe the tax
shelters of millionaires or the multibillion-dollar offshore tax havens of
corporate finaglers — instead, they go after the working poor who are
entitled to tax credits of only a few hundred bucks each. With Bush & Co., them that’s got is them
that gets — and everybody else should watch out! That’s the
hard lesson learned by some 1.6 million low-income workers who have not
only had their tax refunds frozen in the past five years but also have had
their tax filings officially labeled fraudulent by the IRS. This crackdown
on the poor has allowed Bush to claim that, by gollies, he’s tough on
tax fraud. But the IRS’s own in-house taxpayer advocate,
Nina Olson, and her staff analyzed the returns of these accused poor folks
and found that two-thirds of them were actually entitled to the tax credits
they sought or entitled to even more money. Another 14 percent were due at
least a partial refund, and, of the remaining 20 percent, almost none had
committed fraud but instead had simply been confused by the complicated tax
forms and made honest errors. By the way, the average income of these supposed tax
deadbeats was only $13,000. The great majority were working parents who
were using the earned-income tax credit. But now these good folks are being
browbeat for crass political gain. If you’re a corporate tax cheat, the Bushites
and their congressional henchmen look the other way — but if
you’re a working stiff, you’re presumed to be a fraud and the
IRS comes down on you.
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2006.
