The Internal Revenue Service is the federal agency that enforces the Internal Revenue Code and other federal statutes dealing with taxation. Across the excerpts, the agency figures in two distinct roles: as the compiler of the taxpayer data behind a book on migration, and as the object of a funding and hiring controversy.
The IRS as a data source
In a 2013 episode, Travis Brown described How Money Walks, a book and app built on Internal Revenue Service taxpayer data. Brown said the project required sifting through more than 134 million taxpayer records available from the IRS taxpayer data file, which were then made intelligible in conjunction with US Census Bureau data on population count Where is Everyone Going? (2013). The premise, as Brown put it, was to determine on a net transfer basis, looking at all migration patterns in every county in America, where taxpayers are voting to determine where they are most welcome. He framed state tax regimes as variable and therefore in competition, with a California taxpayer who dislikes the California tax system free to live elsewhere.
Brown said the data covered a 15-year span, from 1995 to 2010, chosen to extend beyond one administration, one recession, one boom time and one bust time. He described the book as identifying America’s biggest winning states, such as Florida and Texas, and America’s biggest losing states, measured in people and taxpayer wealth losses in adjusted gross income. Among the specific movements he cited were 20% of the wealth going to states like Arizona, over $6 billion to the Phoenix area from California, and $8 billion going to Las Vegas in Nevada Where is Everyone Going? (2013). Bob Zadek, introducing his guest, said Travis knows every county and who has left every county in the country and where they have gone, and noted that Nevada, if he remembered correctly, is the biggest recipient of former Californians as analyzed in the book. Zadek also told listeners not to ask Travis for names of realtors in Texas or Florida.
The 2023 hiring spree
A decade later, the agency returned as the subject of a 2023 episode built around the Biden administration’s plan to hire 87,000 new IRS agents. Zadek opened by saying that nothing personifies big government and a threat to individual liberties more than the Internal Revenue Service, the agency which enforces the Internal Revenue Code and other federal statutes dealing with taxation What the IRS’s Hiring Spree Means for You (2023). He said the Internal Revenue Code and the Service had just been given funding by the Biden administration and the complacent Congress to hire 87,000, give or take, agents to enforce the Internal Revenue Code, adding that they would not collect taxes from anybody earning less than $400,000 a year, or so they promise.
Zadek’s guest was Ashley Varner, vice president of communications and federal affairs with the Freedom Foundation, which Zadek described as a non-profit battle tank—not just a think tank, but a battle tank, taking on big unions, big government, and big anything that threatens individual rights. Varner described the Freedom Foundation as a national nonprofit whose mission is helping free taxpayer-funded employees, the public sector, the government employees, from union tyranny. She said the vast majority of those people have to pay union dues because they do not know they have an option, and that taxpayer dollars are being turned into radical leftist politics.
The union component
Zadek pressed Varner on why public sector unions belonged in a conversation about funding for 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service agents. He noted that there is, of all things, a union component in the legislation, and that the funding had already been signed into law What the IRS’s Hiring Spree Means for You (2023). Varner answered that government sector employees are the single biggest funder of radical leftist politics in this country, with a guaranteed revenue stream because they have a huge workforce. She called the government workforce out of control and bloated, and said the 87,000 IRS agents are a guaranteed new crop of people who are going to pay into the union dues campaign coffers.
Zadek framed the structural difference between public and private sector unions. He said public service unions have an advantage that no other worker has: if they want a raise, all they need to do is have the legislature enact legislation, and they get a job and get a raise, and we have no choice. He asked listeners to imagine a private sector company able to enact legislation compelling you to buy their service or product, and described what he called the incestuous relationship between public service unions and the government.
Varner drew the distinction between public and private sector unions in terms of accountability. A private company, she said, has shareholders it is beholden to and customers it must provide a product we want to purchase; even private membership organizations have to prove their membership offers something worth paying for. She invoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom she called that champion of small government, sarcastically, saying he loved private sector unions but was against public sector unions because he said it was inherently unfair for union representatives to sit across the table from the politicians whose campaigns they directly support without the representation of the taxpayer who funds it all there at the table to negotiate. Varner described government employees going to leadership in the House and Senate and asking for provisions to be inserted into the next omnibus bill, reminding them how much money they gave and who put them in leadership. She said that when President Biden was campaigning in 2020, he told several union outfits on the campaign trail that he was going to be the most pro-union president this country has ever seen, and that it is one of the few campaign promises he has actually done quite well.
The IRS as a political weapon
In a later segment of the same episode, the discussion turned to the credibility of executive promises about who would be targeted by the new resources. The segment summary states that the speakers express deep skepticism toward claims that middle- and lower-income taxpayers will be exempt from increased audits, arguing by reference to historical precedents and data regarding agency behavior that enforcement often naturally gravitates toward lower-income individuals because they lack the resources to contest agency findings What the IRS’s Hiring Spree Means for You (2023). The segment concludes that the expansion may ultimately function as a de facto tax increase on the general public, regardless of official rhetoric.
Zadek devoted a monologue to the income tax itself. He said the income tax—the tax the rich concept—carries the clear implication that there is something inherently improper about the very concept, and named Elizabeth Warren, AOC and Bernie Sanders as people who abhor the very concept that there are rich people. He said the income tax is the tool by which people who are successful get punished, and invited the audience to imagine what the country would be like without an income tax. He said the country had a period of great economic growth after the Civil War and until the income tax, and in the first few years after the income tax, and that it managed to enjoy economic growth, a better standard of living and longer life expectancy without an income tax. He stated the core principle of taxation as the more you tax something, the less you have of it, and therefore the more that you tax income, the less income that is produced. He compared taxing the activity of earning money to taxing breathing and making people cut their breathing in half.
Zadek then turned to what he called the special character of the agency. He said the Biden administration is allocating $80-plus billion dollars to the Internal Revenue Service, and that the Service is special in a bad way: it is the only federal agency that has as its goal taking property from people who did nothing wrong. He contrasted it with law enforcement agencies that punish people and protect us from somebody else doing us harm, saying that somebody else earning money is not a threat to me. He said the founders feared the tax collector the most, and contrasted the income tax with taxes paid voluntarily, such as sales tax, which he said does not make him resent the restaurant when he sees the number at the bottom of the check. He called evil not too strong a word for an income tax, describing it as a tax that takes property away from people who did nothing wrong other than crash into a piece of legislation whose only purpose is to take property.
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development across episodes: the IRS appears in a 2013 episode as the source of the taxpayer-migration data behind Travis Brown’s How Money Walks, and in 2023 episodes as the subject of a hiring and funding dispute discussed by Bob Zadek and Ashley Varner. The two treatments share no question, no speaker and no argument.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the Internal Revenue Service was founded, how it is organized, or what statutes beyond the Internal Revenue Code it enforces. They do not give the name of the legislation funding the 87,000 agents, the date it was signed, or the precise dollar figure beyond Zadek’s $80-plus billion. They do not report the outcome of any audit, enforcement action or court case involving the agency, and the Janus decision named in one episode’s resource list is not discussed in the excerpts themselves.