Jeff Crouere whined about government employees in his Jan. 22 Newsmax column:
Last month, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report, astute analysts noticed that the U.S. government was the second largest growth area for employment. In November 2023, the federal government hired an astonishing 49,000 new workers.
In contrast, private employers experienced 45,510 job losses. Through November 2023, the overall number of job losses totaled 686,000, the highest since the pandemic year of 2020.
It is no surprise that Bidenomics is poison for the American economy. With high interest rates, nagging inflation, multiple wars raging and record debt, private companies are reluctant to expand. However, one entity that always expands is the federal government.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was a core driver of this expansion of government jobs. Despite boasting a workforce of 90,000 employees, the IRS announced it would seek to hire an additional 20,000 workers by the end of the 2024 fiscal year.
Traci DiMartini, the head of human resources for the world’s largest tax collection agency, pledged to “use every tool that is available to us” to accomplish that goal.
The growth of the IRS was guaranteed by the passage of the monstrous “Inflation Reduction Act” in 2022. It budgeted an additional $80 billion for the agency over the following 10 years.
This expansion ensured that the feared agency would achieve even more power and control over the lives of the American people.
Crouere offered no evidence that any IRS employee is trying to exert “more power and control over the lives of the American people,” or even that doing so is in any IRS employee’s job description. He then unsurprisingly invoked the old right-wing talking point of replacing government employees:
Unfortunately, the ignored alternative is to make greater use of impeccably efficient private sector options. Efforts to replace the private sector have become commonplace throughout the federal government, especially within the IRS.
These misguided actions contributed to the increasing U.S. national debt, which recently climbed over $34 trillion, equaling an astonishing $264,000 per taxpayer. As noted by Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, it was “a truly depressing achievement.”
Crouere offered no evidence that private-sector jobs are “impeccably efficient.” Then it was back to ranting about the IRS, complaining that “the agency spent 14 times more for enforcement than customer service.” He didn’t explain why the IRS shouldn’t try to get people to pay the taxes they owe.