 You pay your taxes. Why shouldn't the wealthy? Well, Republicans are making it easier for the rich to cheat while making it harder for you to get your taxes done and slower to get your refund. Let me explain. Thanks to President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS received an $80 billion budget boost after decades of being underfunded. That's helped the agency go after America's real freeloaders, the super rich. Since then, the IRS has increased its audits of the wealthiest taxpayers, which require more agency resources because of how complicated their returns are. So far, the IRS has collected over $500 million from just 1,600 delinquent millionaires who failed to pay what they owed. It also hit Microsoft with an additional $29 billion in back taxes. And remember, these aren't new taxes. These are taxes already owed that just haven't been paid. The IRS is finally making honest taxpayers out of the rich and powerful. It's about damn time. And this funding lets the IRS serve you better, clearing a backlog of millions of unprocessed tax returns, cutting the customer service wait time by 85%, and improving technology to get refund checks out faster. But Republicans aren't having it. They threatened a government shutdown to extort $20 billion in budget cuts to the IRS. They claim these cuts will reduce the deficit. Well, that's baloney. Every extra dollar spent auditing rich tax cheats yields an estimated $12 in return. America lost a record $688 billion in unpaid taxes in 2021, disproportionately from the richest 1%. That's nearly half the size of last year's budget deficit. If Republicans truly cared about the deficit, they would fund the IRS, not gut it, but this isn't about the deficit. It's about protecting the wealthy and the powerful at the expense of everyone else. So what can we do about this? Spread the word and tell your representatives to protect IRS funding. We should all be playing by the same rules, don't you think?