Editor, The Beacon:

I have often thought that with Republican legislators, it’s always Opposite Day. For example, anytime you hear them express concern about the deficit, please feel free to laugh in their faces. It was bad enough that they voted to slash Medicaid and food assistance to try to plug the gaping hole their planned tax giveaway to the very rich would leave in the budget. Now they want to strip away the funding invested in the IRS by the Inflation Reduction Act.

Remember the horde of IRS agents Republicans claimed were going to be knocking on ordinary taxpayers’ doors? Well, the IRS has been knocking on some very wealthy doors — 125,000 of them in fact — who haven’t filed taxes since 2017. In just six months, they have recovered $172 million in back taxes from 21,000 of them.

They have also been going after millionaires who owe more than $250,000 in tax debt, and have collected more than $1.1 billion so far.

These are the programs your fiscally conservative Republican legislators want to cut. And the IRS hordes have also been answering the phone: Their call-wait times went down from an average of 28 minutes in the 2022 filing season to just three minutes after receiving Inflation Reduction Act funding. Well, we can’t have that.

In addition to the proposed funding cuts, Trump’s “efficiency” program is imposing 7-percent staffing cuts. I hope I don’t need any help when I do my taxes.

Steve Tonjes

DeLand