This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 15th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Biden administration wants to hire tens of thousands of new IRS agents and wants to give

the agency broader powers to snoop on your bank accounts.

But as we've learned from recent ProPublica reporting, the IRS doesn't have a good record

with data security.

Andrew Moylan with the

taxpayer's union foundation details what we now know about how the

rich do and do not pay taxes and the likely outcome of giving the IRS

more money and enforcement power.

Joe Biden wants to beef up the IRS.

He wants the IRS to be a much more of an activist agency to have agents of the IRS understand more about our getting and spending

than the agencyPublica story

ProPublica story this advertised as a bombshell

as a bombshell that revealed how much and on what amount of income some of the

richest people in the world pay US taxes, Jeff Bizos, Elon Musk and others.

So what was your general takeaway from that story?

Yeah, I mean my takeaway is that it's the bombshell with no explosion, like somebody forgot to put the explosive material in because, you know, what the story actually said is we have all of this information now about the taxes that wealthy folks pay.

And while they pitched it as this big revelation, what it actually showed is one, that they pay a lot

in income taxes. And then the second element is that they pay a lot in income taxes and then the second element is that they

calculated this sort of fake number they made it up themselves about what their on paper growth in wealth was.

So if I'm Jeff Bezos, I own a bunch of Amazon stock

and how much did that increase in value.

...