This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Monday, April 17th,

2003. I'm Caleb Brown. The IRS possesses enormous power,

exists solely to extract resources from the productive sector and is in serious

need of reform.

Cato adjunct scholar Joe Bishop Henschman details some of the recommendations from

his new Cato paper on IRS reform.

Give us a sense of just the vast powers of the IRS, you know, this is an agency with which

virtually every working American and probably most non-working Americans have some interaction with in their lives

and this is an agency that exists to extract resources from the productive sector of the economy.

Yeah, I don't think anybody listening needs me to tell them how powerful the IRS is and what they can do to you if you cross them.

And you know, I do a lot of helping people that come to me because they've gotten the letter in the mail

with the little logo in the upper left there and the nice use of

bold red font on the letter itself saying

we think you were wrong

you can go ahead and send us a letter within 30 days convincing us otherwise, but other, you know, if you're not, if you're not going to do that, then just send it in.

And it's very effective at getting people to send it in because they know if they don't, down the line are wage

garnishments and seizures and prison and all the awesome, awesome and the, you know, the real sense of the word power of the

federal government to use and enforcing its tax policy.

Now, and that's to say nothing of the credibility that

the advice of the advice that the IRS regularly hands out to taxpayers regarding

how to how to do the job of filing effectively.

Yeah, no, it's a, if it wasn't so,

...