Just how bad is the Biden administration's and Democrat Congress's grossly misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act" of 2022?

The Wall Street Journal has a shocking lead editorial titled "The IRS Is About to Go Beast Mode" about the particulars of its $80-billion expansion of the IRS:

The $80 billion is more than six times the current annual IRS budget of $12.6 billion. The money will be ladled out over nine years and comes with few strings attached. The main Democratic command is for the tax agency to bring the hammer down on taxpayers.

The bill earmarks $45.6 billion for "enforcement," including "litigation," "criminal investigations," "investigative technology," "digital asset monitoring" and a new fleet of tax-collector cars. The result will be far more audits, civil suits and criminal referrals.

The main targets will by necessity be the middle- and upper-middle class because that's where the money is. The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress's official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78% to 90% of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4% to 9% would come from those making more than $500,000.

The IRS knows the super-wealthy employ lawyers and accountants who make litigation time-consuming and risky. It also knows that Democrats would howl if the agency pursues fraud in the earned-income tax credit program, despite what the IRS has estimated are $18 billion in improper payments each year.

So the target will be the middle class, particularly small business start-ups, whom Joe Biden would like to see a lot less of.  They're the entities about to be audited up the wazoo.

The Journal points out that customer service will not improve under this new money-gusher, and the government isn't actually running short on cash from taxpayers:

The new wave of audits will hit taxpayers even as tax revenue as a share of GDP is back close to its historic norm of 18.5% and may be going higher as corporate and individual tax revenue soars. Tax receipts were up 25% in the first nine months of fiscal 2022 after rising 18.3% in fiscal 2021.

The federal government isn't starving for revenue. Congress wants more tax revenue because it can't control its appetite for spending. That's why it wants a tax agency in beast mode.

So instead of improving the tax system by simplifying it, as in "low flat tax," and kickstarting the economy so that revenues flow in, the Bidenites are going for the Full Lenin — crushing the middle class.

Here's the word from their master, who understood how to obtain power: "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."

They've got the inflation down pat.  Now they're perfecting their game with taxes.

Lenin understood this principle very well because he knew how unpopular communism and Marxism were with the lower middle classes.  For years, Marxists plotting in their dens in Zurich and Vienna had been baffled at the resistance of the working classes, people they claimed to champion, and their adjacent middle and lower middle classes, to embrace communism as good comrades throughout Europe.  It was a dilemma, a humiliation, for them.

Lenin, though, understood how to seize power and had the perfect answer for dealing with these recalcitrant middle classes — through inflation and taxes.

It's as if someone out there is reading the playbook.

What we ought to see are downright street protests to ensure that this horrid Democrat bill expanding the IRS to monstrous levels does not become law.

Not only will the grossly misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act" increase inflation with all its government spending, with forecasted net reductions expected at less than 1% over a period of nine years, but it will turn the IRS into a raving monster with a gargantuan appetite for tax collections by any means necessary.

The bill is currently hanging by a thread, with just Sen. Kyrsten Sinema mum on whether she will support it or not.  Sen. Joe Manchin has sold out and fully supports the bill, despite the damage it does to the coal interests in his home state of West Virginia.  News reports say that Sinema wants a clause about the carried interest rate altered.  She should be hollering to kingdom come on the impact of a monster tax agency come to sic itself on her home state of Arizona's locals, as it will hit the Latino community there, full of entrepreneurs, particularly hard.

Republicans, despite not having much power now, need to get this messaging out, too, because when this deal is done, it's done.  It's very hard to contract the size of an expanding government, and the GOP already has a bad record of stopping such expansions once started.  It ought to be the number-one election issue, tied with inflation as word about this gets out to voters.

It's about power; it's about money; and for the left, it's about getting rid of the middle classes, leaving just an elite to make decisions for them.  It's as un-American as such ideas come, but it certainly would be at home in some place like Cuba.

There is no better way to destroy the prosperity that's a feature of America than the Lenin Way, through the undeclared tax of inflation, and a taxman coming to take away everything else America's middle classes have.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.