The following is a lightly edited transcript of remarks made by Amani Wells-Onyioha during a Newsweek debate about the House GOP plan to abolish the IRS and to replace income tax with a national consumption tax. You can listen to the podcast here:
It's easy to think that nobody likes the IRS and that getting rid of it would be a great move, but when we get into the weeds, I think it's going to make it even harder for us to hold some of the wealthiest people in our society accountable for their taxes. They already do a great job at maneuvering around certain tax codes and liabilities, scooting around having to pay their fair share. This is going to be a way for the wealthy to do that further, and they're putting it in this cloak of the IRS being the bad guy, but in actuality it's going to protect some of the people who need to be held accountable the most.
My fear is that although the regulation that the IRS provides is very weak, once it's removed some people will feel like they are free and clear to do whatever they want. It opens the door for people to become even more willing to violate what this new code might be. There are so many parts of our system that are privatized, and much of that privatized industry is in our politics, so there are many routes where I can see this going drastically wrong. I hope that if we put a system like this in place that there's going to be regulations that help us on the political side with the people making those decisions in the House and Senate by putting parameters into place so that they can't engage in certain aspects of that industry.
Amani Wells-Onyioha is a political organizer and Director of Operations at Sole Strategies.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
