'Fake populism': Columnist pulls the lid off MAGA's plans to gut tax collection

The Bulwark's Jill Lawrence on Thursday took President-elect Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party to task for their seeming obsession with gutting funding to the Internal Revenue Service.

In her column, Lawrence outlined how the added funding delivered by Democrats to the IRS over the last couple of years has actually made the agency more responsive to taxpayers than it had been in the past.

Among other things, Lawrence notes, the increased funding has drastically reduced the average wait times of calls to the agency and has launched a free tax-filing tool that means taxpayers don't have to rely on paid services like Turbo Tax to get their taxes done.

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Republicans, however, seem determined to end all of this and keep the IRS as un-user-friendly as possible, which she says pulls the mask of what she describes as the GOP's "fake populism."

"Republicans... from Trump on down... campaigned and won by touting fake populism and pretending to care deeply for the working folk," she writes. "The endgame in starving the IRS is not to make it work better for normal people, or to bring in more revenue to reduce the deficit or the tax burden on low- and middle-income taxpayers. It’s to make sure the billionaires, millionaires and corporate captains in Trump’s circle don’t have to endure tax audits or even nudges to pay up."

Read the full column here.