Opinion | It’s almost like the House GOP never cared about deficits after all

Now, if you hear “spending cuts to [x government agency]” and assume “Oh, surely that will save money,” I’m sorry to say you are mistaken here.

Unlike most kinds of government spending, each dollar spent on the IRS leads to much more than a dollar flowing back into government coffers, especially when the IRS would use that funding to collect unpaid taxes. Which this spending would: The GOP-proposed cuts specifically target IRS enforcement efforts. The Treasury Department projects that this latest GOP proposal to siphon resources away from IRS enforcement would result in an $8.6 billion loss of revenue, by limiting the agency’s ability to audit high-income and corporate tax dodgers.

Opinion: How much did Congress lose by defunding the IRS? Way more than we thought.

Also, to be clear (since it can be hard to keep track): This newly proposed IRS budget cut should not be confused with a previous $1.4 billion that Congress rescinded from IRS budgets in its recent debt limit legislation, via another law enacted three weeks ago. Both of those cuts are also wholly distinct from the $20 billion in mandatory-spending cuts from the IRS budget that Congress and the White House agreed to in a side deal last month.

That is: These are three separate GOP-led efforts to hack away at the federal government’s primary means of funding itself. Death by a thousand cuts, indeed.

This latest round of IRS-related legislation has some anti-consumer measures in it, too. For example, it would expressly prohibit the IRS from using any of its funding to develop its own free, public, electronic tax-return-filing service, as it currently plans to pilot next year.

This IRS bill is not the only legislative development of late that might lead reasonable people to doubt the GOP’s alleged commitment to fiscal responsibility.

This month, the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee introduced a sweeping tax bill called the American Families and Jobs Act. While that legislation would do little to help “families” — it would not, for example, revive the expanded child tax credit, which had slashed child-poverty levels before its recent expiration — it would cut tax levels pretty much across the board for the next fewyears. The legislation would restore some large business tax breaks that had recently lapsed, even making those tax cuts retroactive. It would also increase the standard deduction.

To reiterate: After (correctly!) reminding Americans that our government is too large relative to the amount of tax revenue coming in, Republicans respond to this challenge by … draining tax revenue further.

Overall (and including GOP plans to rescind some clean-energy tax breaks), the tax bill would cost roughly $80 billion over a decade with interest, according to an estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

But that figure arguably understates the cost of these measures.

Why? Because the bill’s biggest tax breaks officially expire at the end of 2025, to make the legislation look less expensive. Come 2025, Republicans are widely expected to push for extending these tax breaks yet again, just as they always have. If the temporary measures are eventually made permanent, this GOP tax plan would cost more than $1.1 trillion over the course of a decade.

To be fair, Democratic politicians do not seem especially committed to fiscal responsibility either. Like their Republican counterparts, Democrats sometimes talk a good game about reducing deficits. President Biden promised significant deficit reduction in his budget — but his own projections did not include the massive cost of extending most of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which his administration has lately committed to do.

At least Biden has some kind of budget, a general statement of what gets funded and how much. Republicans, on the other hand, still do not. Unless you count the “blueprint” released recently by the Republican Study Committee, a subset of the House coalition. Note that the document includes some policy changes (including to Social Security and Medicare) that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had explicitly ruled out early this year.

So perhaps we’ve returned to the natural state of budget discourse: no one actually caring enough about deficits to do anything at all — or even pretend to.