August 27, 2022

GOD BLESS OUR GOLD STAR FAMILIES

On Friday, we observed the one year anniversary of the murder of 13 American service members by a suicide bomber at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan. I still do not have the words to adequately express my gratitude for their sacrifice, but I know for certain that this tragedy should have never happened. In October, I was honored to vote in favor of posthumously awarding our heroes with the Congressional Gold Medal. We will forever remember their bravery and sacrifice.

DEMOCRATS' ARMY OF IRS AGENTS

Among the many disastrous provisions found in the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, there is one in particular that is of great concern. This legislation awards $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to expand their workforce and hire 87,000 new agents. This plan would make the agency larger than the Pentagon, State Department, and Border Patrol combined. 

The IRS is currently sitting on millions of unprocessed tax returns and correspondence files from the past two years. These bureaucratic delays are preventing hard-working men and women from receiving the money they are owed. Only three percent of this new funding, however, will go to customer service to address this massive backlog. This means the other 97 percent will go towards expanding IRS staff to increase audits on every single American.

Joe Biden campaigned on the promise that he would not raise taxes on Americans making less than $400,000 a year. With this expansion, he has broken that promise. 

The Joint Committee on Taxation and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that lower- and middle-class Americans will face about 710,000 additional audits because of this provision. The CBO has also estimated that this expansion will generate $200 billion in new taxes, mainly from lower to middle class Americans and small business owners.

Democrats thought they could get away with this under the guise of closing the tax gap. This absurd claim has been debunked by the Treasury’s own documents, the CBO, and the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Washington should not be using your taxes to fix their spending problem. It’s incomprehensible. Years ago, people who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and worked hard every day could be successful. Today, the federal government has made it nearly impossible for honest people who do an honest day’s work to get ahead. The Democrat’s tax and spend spree must stop. I’ll continue working every day to get this country back on track and get the federal government out of your way.

BIDEN'S STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS PLAN

This past week, Biden announced his student loan forgiveness plan. It's a band-aid solution for bad policy. It ignores the very problems most Americans are facing and will do nothing to make college more affordable. More than 80 percent of Americans do not have student loans. For those who do, 60 percent of student loan debt is held by households that earn more than $74,000 annually and 56 percent is held by households with additional graduate degrees. Just twelve percent of student loans are held by low-income households. We do not need farmers and ranchers, small business owners, and teachers in Oklahoma paying the debts of Ivy League lawyers and doctors across the United States. 

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