Marc Goldwein: Solutions: Biden still has time to nudge the federal budget closer to sanity
Marc Goldwin is senior vice president and senior policy director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He wrote an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, an excerpt of which is below.
With just over two months left in his term, Biden has the opportunity to build on these fiscal successes and make right some of these fiscal failures.
That starts with protecting his legacy on tax compliance. Every year, households and businesses underpay their taxes by $600 billion. The combination of tax cheating and honest mistakes adds tremendously to our debt. Every president from Reagan through Trump proposed to increase funding to the Internal Revenue Service to reduce this “tax gap.” Biden actually succeeded, persuading Congress to appropriate $80 billion to the IRS to upgrade its information technology, improve its customer service and strengthen its enforcement.
Unfortunately, this funding is under threat. Congress has already rescinded more than a quarter of the funds to pay for other spending, and an end-of-year appropriations deal could go further. Another $20 billion of cuts from the IRS would reduce tax revenue by more than $65 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Read the entire piece here.
Published works by members or staff of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget do not necessarily reflect the views of all members or staff of the Committee.
