Lindsey Graham Asks God For Help As IRS Prepares To Hire More Employees

When asked about the IRS getting the funding to hire 87,000 new agents, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said "God help us" if that actually happens. The reason Graham is calling on a higher power to help is because he knows how bad this is going to be for his donors, and the thought of losing campaign cash is the worst fate someone like Lindsey could ever imagine. Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham this past week during a press conference, not only attacked the inflation reduction act that will give the money to hire 87,000 new IRS, uh, agents basically enforcers to make sure the wealthier pay in their fair share in taxes. So not only did he attack that, but then he invoked a higher power to somehow save us, save us from these IRS agents. Here's what he had to say. If I'm so sorry, here it is. If you think the federal government's outta control, now God help us. When you get 87,000 new IRS agents who are looking under every rock and stone to get money outta your pocket, God help us. May the Lord almighty save us from these terrible bureaucrats who just wants you to pay what you owe for the luxury of living here in the United States and benefiting from all of our capitalistic ways, right?

You're benefiting from our military, from our police forces, from our public education. You're benefiting from our roads and bridges and infrastructure. You're benefiting from our water treatment. You're benefiting from our energy into infrastructure and God help us. If we think those rich bastards are gonna pay for it. Right, right. Lindsay, isn't that what you're getting at? Because that's what you're about. You're off because we're gonna have 87,000 new IRS agents whose purpose in being hired at all was to make sure that we have better enforcement of the tax laws here in the United States. Now, at one point in this press conference, Graham of course did try to say that, you know, well, let me read this. supposed to be for the rich, but the rich have a bunch of lawyers and accountants.

Okay. So you're basically admitting there that yeah, rich people hide money and they use these loopholes sometimes not exactly in legal way, but you know, they can fight it. They've got the lawyers, they've got the accountants, they've got the fuzzy math as George W. Bush used to call it about other things, but either way. And he says, of course, they're coming after you, you, the small business owner, you the middle class American worker. That's what this is about because he also pointed out that most audits occur on people making less than 75,000 a year, which has of course become a staple in Republican talking points while tackling this issue. And there's a reason why most of the audits focus on people making less than $75,000 a year. Like that's not a bug. That's a feature of what Republicans have done to the IRS over the years after cutting and cutting and cutting, cutting the funding, cutting the staff and cutting everything they can from the IRS. They no longer had the tools

To go after the wealthy elite. You know, as I've pointed out, plenty of times in the past, it takes about one person half a day. If that, to go through the taxes of your average middle class family, you know, we don't actually have write offs. You know, we don't have all these big deductions. Most of them take the standard deduction that is offered. So they're not going through and claiming all these things that an IRS agent would have to go through and check later. That's why it's easy for them to do it. So they can still say, Hey, we did, you know, a hundred thousand audits this year. Yeah. But you only had to spend two hours because John and Jane Smith only had, you know, two things on their tax return, you looked at their things w two S and said, okay, yeah, you're good to go.

Bye for wealthy elites. Because as Lindsay Graham did correctly, point out, they've got lawyers, they've got accountants, they've got multiple accounts. Some not even in the United States. It takes months to properly conduct audits on these individuals. It takes more than one IRS agent to go through it. It takes teams of people to go through these things months of work. So that's why most of the audits do focus on those making, you know, barely anything in this country because Republicans cut and slash the IRS to the point where they couldn't go after their wealthy donors. And that's what terrifies Lindsay Graham. So that is of course is why he's begging God to help us because God forbid his wealthy donors have to pay a little bit more in taxes.