Joe Biden says he wants to raise the taxes on the rich and corporations in order to pay for the trillions of dollars he wants to spend on new social programs and the nation’s highways and other infrastructure.
Two IRS commissioners from the 1990s have another suggestion for the president: “Let’s make it a priority to collect taxes from people who owe but don’t pay before we rush to raise taxes on people who already pay what they owe.”
According to Fred Goldberg and Charles O. Rossiti, a small percentage of upper-income people skirt paying a huge amount of taxes by hiding their income. In 2019 alone, this tax cheating amounted to $574 billion — roughly equal to what the lower 90% of all taxpayers pay each year, they wrote in a recent op-ed column.
They are encouraged by Biden’s plan to increase the IRS’ budget by $80 billion over 10 years, following a quarter-century of cuts. They estimate the investment, if approved by Congress, will pay for itself 15 to 20 times over.
