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Yeah, well, it's tax season, or, as Donald Trump calls it, would you get off my back already? And the Biden administration has been making a big effort to make tax season a bit less painful. The Inflation Reduction Act, which the President signed lasts August, includes eighty billion dollars in new funding for the IRS to hire new employees and upgrade its technology. And it's working. The IRS is doing much better at processing our returns and answering our questions
about how to file correctly, and that's great. Better enforcement of tax laws means more money for all the many, many things the government does, Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, not to mention scraping off the feces smeared on the Capitol walls by the crowd boards. Clearly, the new funding is long overdue. In addition to paying for immensely popular programs, it will help reduce the depths to so everybody's got to be happy about this. Everybody, right?
Am?
I right?
Democrats want to spend eighty billion dollars to hire eighty seven thousand more armed IRS agents to terrorize Americans.
They want to add eighty seven thousand IRIS agents that can use deadly force to go after American families.
I want to turn the IRS into the Gustapo. They are arming up the IRS like they're preparing to take Fallujah.
A little like James Bond. But instead of hunting down evil maniacs, these agents hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers that don't pay enough.
What on earth are these people talking about? If you forget to carry the one while you're calculating your return with the IRS, actually come to your home, break down the door, and gun down your entire family in a word, no, in six words, of course, not, you Republican idiots. So let's talk about what the IRS money is really going
for and another installment of long story short. The administration is trying to fix a whole host of problems that began back in twenty eleven after Republicans in Congress started cutting the IRS budget. Since then, the IRS's audit rate has dropped almost sixty percent, and the number of IRS agents the same number we had in nineteen fifty four, when the country's population was half the size it is today.
And pediatricians treated six children by prescribing them menthol cigarettes and the combination of under staffing and stone age technology has resulted in a very weird situation. You are more likely to be audited in the United States if you make twenty thousand dollars a year than if you make five hundred thousand dollars a year.
Less money you have, the easier it is for the IRS to come after you. This is because the IRS doesn't have enough money to hire the highly trained investigators needed to go head to head with the wealthy. Ultimately, it's easier for them to audit lower income people because it's cheap, can be done by mail, and doesn't take a lot of time.
Can you believe that the IRS is so understaffed that they audit poor people more than the wealthy because they just don't have the experts to handle the most complex returns. They're going after poor people because it's easier. It's like a comic who only does your mama jokes. Sure it's easy, but at what cost to my mama? Her life? Her life is difficult enough, do you know? Do you know how hard it is to find a belt the size of the equator? So how much money in lost taxes
are we talking about here? According to the former head of the IRS, it could be as much as one trillion dollars a year. To put that in perspective, if you stacked a trillion one dollar bills on top of each other, it would it'd blow away. It'd be ridiculous to even try that. The solution is pretty simple, and it's a bargain comparatively, comparatively speaking, Just adequately fund the IRS so it can improve its enforcement capabilities and collect
that extra trillion dollars. Now you would you would think Republicans would love and extra trillion dollars in revenue. They're the ones who are always complaining that America is spending money that we don't have.
Politicians in Washington cannot stop spending money that we don't have.
Let's live in reality.
We have a spending problem. We have a dramatic spending problem.
If you had a child, you gave him a credit card and they kept hitting the limit, you wouldn't just keep increasing it. You'd first see what are you spending your money on. So we're going to look at every single dollar spent.
We're going to audit. If you're going to have a party, you have to pay the band.
Come on center. You don't have to have a band at a party. Just hire your nephew's roommate to be a DJ. Just think what we could do with an extra trillion dollars a year. We could begin to retire our national debt and balance our budget. Or we could do some new things that would be worthy of a great nation. We could have universal pre K or subsidized childcare like they do everywhere. We could eliminate federal income taxes completely for the bottom ninety percent of American household.
And this isn't just lefty liberal pie in this sky stuff. With a trillion dollars we could do we could fund an entirely new I rock war. And why are we the only borking developed country that doesn't have universal health care? And it doesn't have to be single payer. We can have a public option, which we should have being done in the first place, adding Labormen. The point is polling shows that ninety three percent of Americans believe it's every American civic duty to pay their taxes. And I think
you can guess who the other seven percent are. So let's let's give the irs the resources to make sure that everybody does what we all should do for the right of living in this great country, a nation we can make even better if we do the rational thing and collect the taxes that people actually Oh. My guest tonight is an author who's New York Times bestseller The Some of Us has just been adapted for young readers.
Please welcome, Heather McGhee. Good to see you here. You know, I've been doing podcasts, very prestigious podcast uh for uh for about four years. Now you're my You're my favorite guests. You've been on three times. You're my favorite guests. You are so brilliant. Now you're an economis you and you The first time we met was during the banking crisis, and we talked a lot about that. Subprime loans, et cetera. And housing has always been a big part in the
gap in terms of wealth between blacks and whites. Can you explain where that's where that kind of started?
Yeah? Absolutely. I mean I always say wealth is where history shows up in your wallet. So today, the average black college graduate has less wealth on average than the average white high school dropout. Makes no sense.
Say that again.
Yes, So if you're the average white high school dropout, you are wealthier than the average black college graduate. So that's his t's be showing up in your wallet, right. We're talking about wealth, not a paycheck. We are talking about your home equity, your stocks, your bonds, your inheritances. And that all dates back to that massive racial wealth divide that we have today, dates back to when most middle class Americans' wealth began, which was in the New
Deal era, coming out of the Depression. The progressive FDR government said we want to commit to affordable housing and mass home ownership, and they created this massive system, this system of public subsidy, and they based it on the never substantiated assumption that black people would be too much
of a credit risk. And so they commissioned maps of the entire country's largest cities and surveyed them down to the block level for their racial and ethnic character and said, if there was a high Negro concentration, we're going to circle that with a red line and say banks do
not lend here. And that really only ended in the nineteen seventies, and it was quickly replaced by what people call reverse redlining, which is when those contiguous communities of lower wealth black communities were targeted with those high cost loans.
But that's what we were exactly.
And that's how we met. Eight.
Yeah, but yeah, the redlining started during the Progressive FDR in the early thirties.
That's right, And you know the way I see it, And this is really the kind of core idea of the some of Us. You know, you and I met not just because black families were being disproportionately targeted early in the subprime crisis, before it was a household word. You and I met once everything had fallen apart, right, once Lehman had gone bankrupt, once trillions of dollars in household wealth and eight million dollar jobs had disappeared overnight.
And for me it was such an object lesson in the way in which racism can ultimately have a cost for everyone. We ignored the canaries in the coal mine, what was going on with black and brown families early in the crisis, and banking committee members just weren't focused on it. And then obviously we know how the story ended.
Well, The Some of Us is about how race intersects with economic inequality. And it became an instant New York Times bestseller. And now you've done a book that's for school children, for milliers, not for toddler, for middle school.
Yeah, school high school.
Yeah, and how do you explain this to them? How do because these kids are able to understand this, right, I mean I noticed this is the book and it's a little shorter than the other, but it seems pretty sophisticated.
Yeah, it's we really didn't dumb it down. That was the lesson I got. We did sort of casual focus groups of educators and middle school students, and they were like, don't dumb it down. Actually have access to all the same information you do, and we have the same kinds of questions. Right, The core question at the heart of the Some of Us is why does it seem like
we can't have nice things in America? Nice things like not like flying cars, but nice things like universal healthcare and paid family leave and childcare and a great school in every neighborhood. And they have those questions too, And so in the Some of Us, I use a lot of data and a lot of history, but ultimately it's a series of stories, like the story of the drained public pool and that.
Now the cover of this is the boy jumping in a pool. A white boy looks like and I think of a black child there. Tell that story because that's the first story you tell these kids, right.
Yeah, it is. It's the story of what happened to many of the country's nearly two thousand lavishly funded, grand resort style public swimming pools that were built in that same New Deal era of public goods, around when the big housing subsidies were happening. And I like to get the kids to picture what it would look like to have a community pool that was free and could hold
over a thousand swimmers at a time. And most of them, you know, they kind of gasp and they're excited about the idea, and then I tell them that they were usually for whites only, and they're sort of like, oh, you know, And then I say, but then in the Civil Rights movement, black families began to say, you know what, it's our tax dollars that have funded those public pools all along. We want our kids to swim. And the
court sided with them and progress was made. And then many towns and cities, not just in the Jim Crow South, decided to drain their public pools rather than integrate them. They literally drained out the water and backed up truckloads of dirt. And I really see in the conversations they have the questions they.
Asked, and they get it so unblievable, and they did that all over them.
All over the country. Yeah, in Ohio and West Virginia, all over the country. Yeah.
Yeah, so and then they planted over it.
Yep. So just so.
Black and white people couldn't swim together.
That's exactly right. It's this zero sum story, this old story that says that progress for people of color has to come at the expense of white people, that we can't all sort of share in well being, that we're in this competition for dominance and status. And you know what,
young people get it. It's this story that is of course unbelievable, but they've lived in America long enough to know that it's actually quite believable because they understand that over their lifetime, public goods have really beenen atrophying, that they don't have those big, beautiful swimming pools anymore, that there isn't free college the way there was that was a kind of a public pool that was funded by
the government. And they know that as the college going population got more diverse for them, right, they're already in.
A generation zero sum.
Yeah.
Idea is basically that wealthier whites taught poorer whites that anything that helps African Americans hurts them.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's zero sum, that's right. And the some of us is about we all do better when we all do better, which is what Paul Wallston is to.
Say, the Late Great, the Late Great. You know, it's the part of the book that young people really resonate with is the hopeful part. Right. They want to hear that we can fix this. And I truly believe that everything about the world that we see now, all the dysfunction, it's because people made decisions to make the world as
it is, and so people can make better decisions. And the core message is that through collective action, people coming together across lines of race, finding solidarity, recognizing that we all do better when we all do better, and that we all want big, beautiful public pools can really win and take on powerful interests, but we can't if we're divided. And they get that. And it's been a really fun trip across the country, schools, libraries, middle.
All over the country, finding communities where this is happening. In Minnesota, yeah, we have a town Wilma, Minnesota. It's in Kanday, Ohio County. It's the biggest turkey producing county in Minnesota, which is the biggest turkey producing county. It's the town I went to the graduation there. About half the class German, Scandinavian, about a third of the class Hispanic. There's a big meatpacking plant there, about fifteen percent Somali. This was the most beautiful thing I'd ever gone to
in the time that I was in the Senate. This town just worked together. Lewiston, Maine is doing that all over the country. This works when we all when we realize as the some of us, that's how we create wealth. That's how we create prosperity. That's how we create a good life for all Americans.
That's right. You should really run for office for her.
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