Episode Details

Billionaire GOP mega-donor Steve Wynn has some free messaging advice for Republicans, which he proffered in a conference call last Wednesday with Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and Newt Gingrich (the audio was obtained by Politico): He urged the GOP to run TV ads telling average working people that Democrats have funded the IRS to hammer them. Wynn even offered a script: “Tell them the IRS is ‘coming after you if you’re a waiter, if you’re a bartender, if you’re anybody with a cash business … they’re coming after you.’”

Unfortunately for Wynn, the funding for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act targets the very wealthiest Americans — such as Steve Wynn — whose complicated businesses dealings and small armies of accountants and tax attorneys require lots of IRS resources if they’re to be audited.

Over the past decade, Republican lawmakers cut the IRS budget by roughly 20 percent — with the result that just 2 percent of the richest Americans had their taxes audited in 2019, down from 16 percent in 2010.

Not surprisingly, the richest 1 percent of Americans are estimated to be hiding more than 20 percent of their earnings from the IRS, accounting for more than a third of all unpaid federal taxes. The newly-added IRS funding is projected to raise some $100 billion in net tax revenue over the decade, mostly from the very rich.

Wynn isn’t the first to dream up the bogus story about the IRS going after average working people. Senator Ted Cruz warns of a “shadow army of 87,000 IRS agents,” threatening Americans, and Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for Arizona governor, ties the increase in IRS agents to the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and concludes that, “Not a single one of us is safe.” Many other GOP candidates are telling the same lie.

This lie isn’t even consistent with the older GOP lie that the rich pay most income taxes and almost half of Americans pay none (remember Mitt Romney’s 47 percent?), which isn’t true when you include Social Security taxes, state and local income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes.  

But the billionaire class will do anything to avoid paying taxes. Why do you suppose Wynn and others like him bankroll Republicans in the first place? (Hint: Republicans cut their taxes.)

During that same conference call last Wednesday, Wynn asked RNC chair Ronna McDaniel to recommend dark-money nonprofits to which he and other wealthy contributors can donate without their names being revealed. Some donors, Wynn said, “are self-conscious for reasons that are personal to them, business people and folks like that,” and would ra