Republicans Propose to Castrate IRS

Republicans Aim at IRS by Pairing 24% Budget Cut With Limits 

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service budget would be cut by 24 percent under a House Republican proposal that would create new restrictions on the tax agency.

The $9 billion IRS budget proposal, released today in Washington, includes new limits on videos, bonuses and conferences after reports about overspending. The plan would withhold 10 percent of the agency’s enforcement budget until the IRS inspector general confirms that it has implemented all of the recommendations made in a report on the agency’s scrutiny of small-government groups.

That's a good start, although I'd still like to see a scenario where "affirmative action" was imposed on the IRS, and half the staff fired to make way for explicitly conservative activists.  A few years of treatment in kind would be good for the liberals. Turnabout is fair play, after all.

Of course, democrats were less than thrilled to have part of their enforcement arm neutered:

The Republican approach on appropriations is shortsighted, said Representative Joseph Crowley of New York, a Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee. “That’s typically their answer to it -- if there’s a problem, just cut the budget and somehow the problem goes away,” Crowley said. “It’s not addressing the issue.”

The change may hurt tax collections. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew told lawmakers in May that each dollar spent on IRS enforcement yields $6 for the Treasury. Using that metric, the proposed $1.5 billion cut to enforcement would cost $9 billion in revenue.

So the IRS consumes 1/6th of the US revenue?  They absolutely need to do less with much less.