It intentional.
The only reason means testing exist is so people get mad who gets it when they don’t.
Instead of getting mad at the people preventing everyone from having it, they get mad at the people even lower who need it more.
The only way the oligarchs can keep balanced on top is if everyone is punching down.
According to this 3 year old data set, US direct and indirect subsidies for the Oil and Gas industry ALONE account for ~750 billion per year.
Agricultural subsidies add another $30 billion per year.
Wal-Mart, just a single company, benefits from around 7.5 billion per year in public spending.
The US government literally hands our tax revenue DIRECTLY to the rich. And then says we have no money for SNAP. Like stop giving Lockheed and General Dynamics and BAE and Raytheon a trillion dollars a year. The US government is a machine for taking money from working people and handing it to the rich, just like pretty much every other aspect of society at this point.
So will the IRS.
Only because we keep gutting their funding, and making them stay 40 years in the past with documentation. They go after the easier marks.
If they had more resources, and they could modernize, they could more effectively go after the wealthy, but decades of “iRs bAD” propaganda has kneecapped their public perception, and their ability to do their jobs against billionaires.
While you’re not wrong, part of the problem is that we can’t just give the IRS money and cross our fingers that they’ll go after the billionaires. Without any legislative teeth backing it up, there is a sizeable chance they’ll keep going after the easy marks first.
With enough resources they’ll run out of easy targets faster and they’ll have to go for harder ones.
Yeah, and that’s terrible. I don’t want the IRS going after everybody that failed to report the $2 in royalties they get from their self-published book before they go after Amazon.
I want them to prioritize high-value targets over easy marks, and I don’t think giving them a carte blanche is a way to achieve that.
The funny thing is that all IRS inspectors (or the equivalent in other countries) always say the same: they go after the easy targets because they don’t have resources to go after the hard ones. I assume they have to have a minimum work as finished.
