> If your tax-agents aren’t needed, then downsize them,
I mean, maybe I could have put it more clearly, but I think it is fairly obvious that I wasn’t advocating for what you seem to think.
I’m just not sure what strawman you’re trying to prove wrong here, or who you’re even arguing against. Unlimited funds to tax-agencies is silly, everyone agrees on that, but in both the original and my example, the result of downsizing staff to save a few million on the budget ended up costing society billions.
Society didn’t lose out on billions, the government did. Whether or not that is bad is definitely a discussion worth having, but I won’t immediately conflate the two ideas. People and corporations got to keep money they may have otherwise lost due to auditing.
At a glance, I am okay with that, and the arguments put forth so far don’t really convince me otherwise, like the number of dollars per IRS employee is a meaningless metric to me because it doesn’t tell me what’s optimal for government.
I’m danish, those billions pay for our education, healthcare and daycare/nursery institution.
Most of the money went out of the country to heavy investment companies and hedge funds who exploited the fact that our vat-repayment system went from hundreds of auditors to just two people. Something we’re now battling international banks, investment funds and pension indexes to get partly back (at another great expense).
I’m not sure what society you live in, but this was such a negative impact on ours that even our most liberal political parties, who exist primarily because they want to cut taxes heavily, support re-staffing our tax-agency.
I mean, maybe I could have put it more clearly, but I think it is fairly obvious that I wasn’t advocating for what you seem to think.
I’m just not sure what strawman you’re trying to prove wrong here, or who you’re even arguing against. Unlimited funds to tax-agencies is silly, everyone agrees on that, but in both the original and my example, the result of downsizing staff to save a few million on the budget ended up costing society billions.