Me vs. the IRS

A parable for our time

A couple weeks ago I got the letter from the IRS you don’t want to get.

“Dear Sniveling Taxpayer,” it said. “You owe us; you’re overdue. Put your life savings in the enclosed envelope or we will seize your wages and also your cats. Tremble!”

Okay, it didn’t quite say that. But it did say that I hadn’t paid my taxes.

So I did what you’d expect. I swore. I panicked. I may have whined. Then I went back to my bank statement to double check that I had in fact paid my taxes. I was certain I had. And, hey, I had.

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What to do, though? How could I tell the IRS that I had paid when they though I hadn’t paid? I considered just screaming at the top of my lungs, which would have been cathartic but probably not ultimately efficacious. I asked my (small beer) accountant for help; they proved their small beerness by marinating on the problem for two weeks and then telling me, “Well the IRS appears to have made a mistake. You should probably contact them.”

There was no phone number on the letter the IRS sent me. But it sent me to the online portal, where I had to jump through verification hoops and more verification hoops and then still more verification hoops, before I got in and staggered around the site looking for guidance.

Eventually I found a phone number tucked into a corner of a screen, called it, waited for an hour and a half, and then had to give up to walk the dog.

But I tried again the next day, waited an hour, and a not especially cheerful federal employee took all my data and said that, hey, I didn’t owe anything. They apparently sent the overdue letters before the taxes were actually due on April 15 (?) so I (and maybe a certain number of other people?) received overdue notices sent before we were overdue?

“So I don’t owe anything, right?” I said, just to make sure.

“Not unless you want to pay $0.00,” said the slightly snarky federal employee.

I did not. I hung up. All is well!

Except that I wasted my time, my accountant’s time, and some random federal employees time for literally no reason. Plus however much time it sent them to send me the pointless letter.

Oh, and also maybe took years off my life as I contemplated struggling with the IRS over this stupid payment for the rest of my life.

Efficiency!

Government screwing up can be terrifying because the government is big and powerful and not always responsive, and if they decide to squash you, either by accident or on purpose, there is often little you can do about it. People resent government bureaucracy because government bureaucracy is huge and impossible to reason with. Looking at the letter from the IRS I felt like one of those extras looking up hopelessly as Godzilla’s foot comes down.

Republicans make much of this natural aversion to government as Godzilla. They argue that everyone would be better off if government were less powerful and less intrusive. Starve the beast! Fire those slightly snarky government employees! Kneecap the IRS and it won’t be able to hurt you. Huzzah!

This has been the remit of Elon Musk and his Nazi clown car at DOGE, which has been slashing slashing slashing government in the name of efficiency! The IRS has been a particular target of (unconstitutional and illegal) DOGE cuts; the government plans to cut 40% of the IRS workforce.

Cutting the IRS workforce is not efficient in any possible sense of the word. IRS workers raise money by enforcing tax law. The cuts are expected to cost the government $1 trillion over the next decade.

Fewer workers at the IRS also means fewer people to answer phones when you try to call and find out why they accidentally dunned you. It also means fewer quality control checks and more errors—which may explain why I got that letter in the first place.

Government spending isn’t waste. It’s investment.

This is the thing about government. Yes, it feels huge and terrifying and unstoppable and unresponsive. But trying to cut it down or wound it is like sending byplanes after Godzilla; it just makes him angrier. Or makes him less able to see where he’s going and more likely to step on you. Squish.

We’ve probably run the Godzilla metaphor into the ground now (squish.) But the point is that government is not a giant rampaging monster that needs to be stopped. Government does a lot of important things that makes life easier for everyone. It builds roads; it delivers the mail; it invests in cancer research; it makes sure our food and water aren’t poisoned.

When you put resources into government, it does these necessary jobs better. If you starve it of resources it does these necessary jobs worse—and it also becomes less responsive to individuals who have to access services or deal with its mistakes.

Would you rather have to spend an hour waiting to talk to an IRS employee? Or would you rather have to spend 15 minutes waiting? If it’s the latter, there’s a simple fix—hire (a lot) more IRS workers. If you do that, there will also probably be more people to catch errors before they impact your life, resulting in the ideal world where you don’t have to talk to an IRS employee at all.

You could say the same about the DMV, or the post office, or any notoriously inefficient, maddening government bureaucracy. Yes, you want things to run efficiently. But running efficiently doesn’t mean cutting employees or “saving money.” Paying more—hiring more employees, spending more on systems that actually work—is efficient, because government performs necessary tasks that make people’s lives easier, and investing in those tasks is investing in people and in the country. A government which has enough employees to deal with queries from taxpayers is a more efficient government. A government which has enough employees to prevent errors so taxpayers don’t need to query the IRS in the first place is even more efficient than that.

This seems obvious. And yet, Trump would have us believe that it’s better to try to deal with government organizations that have no money and have no ability to respond to our needs. Nor is that just Trump. Republicans since Reagan at least have insisted that less is more, when the “less” is government services that we need. It’s like telling people they’d be better off if they had no electricity, no roads, no mail. Or not even “like” that, since that is exactly what the Republicans are telling us.

Most depressing is the fact that even Democrats have often been reluctant to come out and say, “You know, we want to spend more because we want to spend more on you.” Everybody wants to be the party of cutting waste, fraud and abuse. No one wants to be the party of, say, fully funding libraries or post offices or cutting your wait times at the DMV to 15 minutes or less.

My irritating blip with the IRS is just an irritating blip. But a few million irritating blips starts to really chew up person hours. We are a rich nation; we could make everyone’s life better in ways both big and small. Instead, we’ve voted in the absolute worst people on earth, who, while taking breaks from committing genocides, are working hard to increase the number of petty government errors, and to force us all to spend more time on the phone with functionaries who don’t want to talk to us either.