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Have you heard the GOP’s latest conspiracy theory?
Republicans are having difficulty conjuring widespread fear over the court approved search into former President Donald Trump’s estate. And the hair-on-fire, migrant caravan scare tactic isn’t hitting like it used to.
So Republicans have a new conspiracy theory: The tax man is coming to rob and maybe even shoot you.
Let’s start, as we do with most GOP claims these days, by dispelling some lies.
The GOP’s IRS fear-mongering is rooted in new funding allocated as part of the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act.
The GOP’s IRS fear-mongering is rooted in new funding allocated as part of the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law earlier this week. Republicans denounced all aspects of the bill, but they were particularly critical of its tax increases on large corporations. The bill also set aside money for the agency that will be tasked with enforcing these increases and cracking down on tax evaders: the IRS.
The new spending bill sets aside $80 billion, which the U.S. Treasury says will be used to hire new employees — many of them in IT — as the current group of IRS workers ages into retirement.
That rather practical reality hasn't stopped some Republicans from conjuring elaborate mirages of gun-toting IRS agents. A small percentage of IRS employees are allowed to be armed, and Republicans have seized on that fact to suggest the IRS is hiring, in the words of Sen. Chuck Grassley, "a strike force that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small-business person in Iowa."
(For what it’s worth: I know multiple IRS employees, and the closest they come to menacing is during a ruthless Scrabble tournament.)
I searched far and wide for examples of these tyrannical, armed tax-collectors invoked by the Republicans and came up with nothing. Well, almost nothing.
I did unearth one tax collector who seems both menacing and well armed: Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz’s friend, convicted sex trafficker and former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg.
Before he flipped and started talking to investigators in the the Gaetz sex trafficking probe, Greenberg was a real-life, gun-toting tax collector who was weirdly obsessed with carrying guns openly.
Greenberg's insistence on being strapped around the office even led to a dispute with Trump-loving former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Greenberg was also once accused of using his tax collector badge to impersonate a police officer (he allegedly trailed a driver and reprimanded her for speeding).
So ... the GOP’s lawless, tax-collecting boogeyman might actually exist. But he’s one of their own. It all feels like more projection from the GOP, similar to the Republicans who obsess over voter fraud even as fellow Republicans are caught engaging in it (hat tip to my colleague Steve Benen).
Thankfully, Joel Greenberg will be spending an as yet unspecified number of years in prison. But the civil servants doing important and often uncelebrated work for the IRS should be left alone.