If you haven’t heard by now, as part of the “Inflation Reduction Act,” the IRS has 87,000 new positions open to be for the most part tax auditors, and a lot of people were upset that these agents will be armed.
Let me tell you, the most fearsome tool a law enforcement officer has on his person is not his sidearm, but his radio. A LEO wears a sidearm for the exact same reason armed citizens do, self-defense for when they are confronted with violent resistance. One-on-one, any person in reasonably good shape has a chance of besting a LEO in a fight. However, if that LEO is able to get on the radio and say “officer needs help” you will quickly find yourself surrounded by 38 officers that will start at the top of the “Use of Force continuum” model instead of the bottom.
But that’s not the way to look at this situation.
Government grows. Once you are employed by the bureaucracy, it would take some particularly heinous acts (and a few felonies) to actually fire you. And positions themselves almost never go away either.
Once these agents are in place, they will be locusts. Not “like locusts,” they will be locusts. Insect locusts live underground until the time is right, then they will emerge and swarm, before descending upon the nearest farmers’ field and strip it bare, consuming everything of value. Then the locusts will move on to the next field, and so on until they come around again to strip the first farmers’ field bare again. Government locusts will be required to justify their employment. To keep their jobs they must audit so many households, “find” their quota of unpaid taxes and confiscate said taxes.
I lost the link to a story where a couple was “deemed” to owe taxes (there is a whole terrible story that I can’t remember accurately and thus will not relate). When the IRS agents showed up to the house to collect the debt, they confiscated every asset in the house all the way down to the cash in their child’s piggy bank.
So, these agents will start with the second quintile (because there’s already lots of agents on the top quintile), strip those households bare of “unpaid taxes,” then move on to the third quintile, then the fourth, then the fifth, and back up to the second again. And this cycle will repeat.
Oh, before I forget, the new department being set up to run these 87,000 locusts is headed by Nikole Flax. You don’t know the name, but she was one of the seven IRS managers whose laptops crashed mysteriously and without backup when IG’s were sniffing around the IRS in 2014, due to the kerfuffle over the IRS not granting non-profit status to Conservative non-profits.