Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday slammed President Joe Biden’s plan to hire 87,000 additional IRS agents as a “middle finger” to the American people.
The Republican governor visited Escambia County in western Florida to continue promoting his latest education plan. He opened his press conference by noting how northwest Florida was “a place a lot of people looked to for normalcy and to see where people could live their lives” during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
DeSantis also noted that Florida ended its last budget year on June 30 with a $22 billion surplus, the largest in state history.
DeSantis touted the fact that the Sunshine State now has more people working than it did before the pandemic.
Meanwhile, because of the “legacy of their lockdown policies,” many blue states have not recovered to where they were three years ago because they’ve been “Fauci-ing” their citizens, said DeSantis.
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“This has a huge impact on people’s lives – to have an economy that’s open and thriving, in spite of all the headwinds we see with the inflation and the energy coming out of Washington,” he added.
The governor then contrasted Florida’s path to how the Biden administration is handling things.
“By the way, what have they done?” he continued. “They just stuck you with 87,000 new IRS agents – and they are going after you.”
“People say they’re going after billionaires. Do you know any billionaire that doesn’t already have accountants and lawyers? Of course not. They do this every day. And that’s just how they do.”
But, he added, the Biden administration is preparing to “go after independent contractors. They’re gonna go after small business people. They’re gonna go after someone that may be driving an Uber or a handyman or all these things. And why would they do that? Because you’re not going to be able to contend with the audit.”
“They’re going to crush a lot of people by doing that,” DeSantis predicted.
“And I think of all the things that have come out of Washington that have been outrageous, this has got to be pretty close to the top. And I think it was just a middle finger to the American public, that this is what they think of you.”
“All these problems we have to deal with, and they think the way is to do 87,000 IRS agents,” said DeSantis, noting the IRS would soon be bigger than many other federal agencies combined.
“They’re not putting very much might down at the border, I can tell you that right now, but they want to be able … to unleash them on American taxpayers,” he added. “That’s wrong.”
“Fortunately, that’s one of the reasons we don’t have an income tax. If you don’t have an income tax, you don’t empower revenue agents,” DeSantis said.
The governor also predicted that those 87,000 agents would target people – and specifically “people that the government doesn’t like.”
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“I think it was horrible, what they did. And I can’t believe that you would think that would be something that you would want to do,” said DeSantis.
But the Internal Revenue Service says it does not plan to use the nearly $80 billion it’s set to receive in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to hire 87,000 new agents in order to target middle-class Americans, a Treasury Department official told ABC News.
According to Treasury Department spokesperson Julia Krieger, a sizable portion of the money will go toward improving taxpayer services and modernizing antiquated, paper-based IRS operations.
“The resources to modernize the IRS will be used to improve taxpayer services — from answering the phones to improving IT systems — and to crack down on high-income and corporate tax evaders who cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The majority of new employees will replace the standard level of staff departures over the next few years,” Krieger said in a statement.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Free Press.
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