Republican National Committee Wants to Abolish the IRS

With the 2014 election season in full swing, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has found its new fundraising campaign: calling for outright abolishment of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). While the RNC’s new fundraising campaign is not surprising given the IRS’s unpopularity and recent controversies, it does promote the deeply irresponsible idea that the IRS is not a critical component of a properly functioning government.

The RNC’s campaign depends on its potential donors who will embrace their anger at the IRS and contribute to a campaign that claims it will abolish it, but ignores the fact that there is no viable way to have a functioning federal government without the IRS or some agency performing its exact function. Needless to say, the IRS collects nearly all the money that pays for the federal government, so those calling for its abolition would still need a way to collect the trillions of dollars necessary to fund Social Security, Medicare, the military, highways and the myriad of other crucial services that they support.

Even accepting the fact that this fundraising campaign is just overblown rhetoric, the underlying point that the IRS should be punished through “abolishment” or even just significant spending cuts is destructive. In fact, recent cuts in the IRS’s budget have already hamstrung the organization’s ability to respond to taxpayers’ needs and directly contributed to poor training and procedures that fueled the agency’s recent controversies in the first place. In addition, cutting the IRS’s budget actually increases the national deficit because every dollar spent on tax enforcement generates at least $10 in return.

While many GOP candidates have shied away from the irresponsible rhetoric of the RNC, Iowa senatorial candidate Joni Ernst has embraced the RNC’s messaging saying that “closing the door” at the IRS would be a wonderful start to fixing the federal government. Similarly, anti-tax conservatives like Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have long established their conservative bonafides by calling for the abolishment of the IRS. Perhaps more disconcerting than all this rhetoric is the fact that the House GOP has voted to exacerbate problems at the agency by using the IRS’s recent unpopularity to push deep cuts to the agency’s budget, including a particularly short-sighted cut of a quarter of the IRS’s enforcement budget.

Rather than demagoguing about abolishing the IRS, national political parties and their members in Congress should call for a substantial increase in the agency’s budget and consider the multitude of thoughtful reforms proposed by groups like the non-partisan National Taxpayer Advocate.