Get Outta Here! You’ll Never Understand!

We’re old enough to remember “the Queen of Mean.” The flamboyant and tyrannical New York (and other places) hotelier Leona Roberts Helmsley (1920-2007) with a net worth of over $1 billion, infamous for not or under-paying contractors, who was indicted by Rudy Giuliani in 1988 on charges of tax-fraud and extortion.

She was ultimately convicted on more than thirty charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, tax evasion, filing false personal tax returns, assisting in the filing of false corporate and partnership tax returns and mail fraud and served twenty-one months  in federal lockup. 

The Queen of Mean earned no friends with her infamous brag “We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.”

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Reporter Maggie Haberman and her team of reporters from The New York Times and other reporters from The Washington Post were awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. She has also been honored by the White House Correspondence Association with the Aldo Beckman Award for Journalistic Excellence.

Tuesday, October 4 saw the release of her new book on the life and times of the 45th president of the United States. In this work, Haberman, who has followed the repeated bankrupter for decades and had three interviews with him in preparation for her tome, describes the scene on the lead Republican candidate’s plane just before Super Tuesday, March 1, 2016. Haberman reports that the candidate’s campaign manager and press secretary had noted that every American president or nominee since Richard Nixon had released his or her tax returns. The candidate from New York refused to do so and, when he secured his party’s nomination, it would become a problem.

Haberman writes: 

“[He] thought for a second about how to ‘get myself out of this’, as he said. He leaned back, before snapping up to a sudden thought.

“‘Well, you know my taxes are under audit. I always get audited,’ [He] said … ‘So what I mean is, well I could just say, ‘I’ll release them when I’m no longer under audit. ‘Cause I’ll never not be under audit.’”

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Brother Vincent Dominic Hall, FMS was old school.

Like really, really, really old school.

Shaped somewhat like Popeye the Sailorman (we couldn’t tell how big his arms were because he always wore a black cassock), he had a voice best described as “gravelly.” 

And, despite being borderline ancient, he did not take kindly to retirement.

As a result, at the beginning of my senior year in high school, Brother Vincent barged into our classroom and ordered the young monk who was supposed to be teaching, “John, get outta here. I’m taking over.”  

From that moment, things only went downhill. On day three, Brother Vincent shouted, “Flynn, get outta here. You’re never gonna understand this.”

When Daddy went to question my expulsion, Brother V just repeated, “He’s never gonna understand. Let him sit in the library and read and write.”

Nonetheless, in addition to my A-B-Cs, I learned my numbers and I have some basic understanding of simple math. (I even managed to pass the Statistics course in my doctoral program.)

But first, a few words from Carroll D. Wright, the first U.S. Commissioner of Labor (1885-1905):

“The old saying is that ‘figures will not lie,’ but a new saying is ‘liars will figure.’ It is our duty, as practical statisticians, to prevent the liar from figuring; in other words, to prevent him from perverting the truth, in the interest of some theory he wishes to establish.”

One-hundred-and-twenty-plus years after Mr. Wright, Americans struggle with distinguishing between figures and liars. 

And, just as I had to learn to add and subtract, multiply and divide, before I could go on to algebra (which I really enjoyed) and geometry and basic physics, we have to understand some basics – facts or the Truth – in order to recognize the lies of some of the political advertising that has been flooding our airways in recent days. 

In 1992, the population of the United States was 256.5 million; by 2022, that number had grown to 332.5 million – an increase of roughly 76 million Americans. Granted, nowhere close to all of them are taxpayers, but that’s still one heck of an increase. In 1992, the Internal Revenue Service had approximately 117,000 employees – 38,000 more than today. In addition (no pun intended, ‘cause if we were punning, we would have said “in subtraction.”), the service is presently losing 10,000 employees a year, even as the number of tax-fillers continues to grow. 

But on August 11, Representative Kevin McCarthy offered a shining example of how “liars can figure”:

Democrats in Washington plan to hire an army of 87,000 IRS agents so they can audit more Americans like you. That’s more than the entire population of Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, PA.

McCarthy chose to reference “an army” – implying 87,000 armed IRS agents planning to knock down the doors of every-day Americans.

In an August 25 op-ed at Yahoo!finance, Charless P. Retting, the 49th Commissioner of the IRS, pointed out that more than 97 percent of those IRS employees do not carry weapons. Weapons are restricted to Criminal Investigations special agents – men and women overseeing the entirety of the work related to criminal violations of the tax laws and other financial crimes. IRS Criminal Investigations agents investigate criminal tax violations typically related to money laundering, Bank Secrecy, National Security and National Defense matters. They’re involved in dismantling terrorist financing efforts and criminal cartels, as well as eliminating child exploitation operations in the Dark Net that have led to the arrests of hundreds of criminals around the world. They do not perform civil tax administrative functions such as audits of our tax returns. 

At present, less than three percent of IRS employees – the Criminal Investigations special agents – carry firearms. They are charged with overseeing the entirety of the IRS work related to criminal violations of tax law and financial crimes.

Among the problems currently facing today’s IRS,

“They have about 8 million unprocessed 2021 returns and only answered about 11% of calls in 2021… There’s been a 17% reduction in the [IRS} workforce since 2010,”

according to Bill Smith, national director of tax technological services at the CBIZ MHM National Tax Office in Washington. [With more than 100 offices and 6,000 team members across the United States, CBIZ provides top-level financial, benefits and insurance services to individuals, organizations and corporations of all sizes.]  

In Congressional testimony, Commissioner Rettig has pointed out that the IRS workforce is aging and, with retirements and other departures, the agency will lose between 50,000 and 80,000 workers over the next five years.

Simply put, the IRS needs somewhere around 87,000 new agents just to keep up and in order to “rebuild and “revitalize” the agency. All those new employees will be needed simply to maintain the status quo. 

Commissioner Retting assured voting Americans,

“The majority of the new hires the IRS makes will be those who answer the phones, work on processing individual tax returns or go after high-end taxpayers or corporations who are avoiding their taxes. Less than 1% of new hires will be in our Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) area, which currently has a total of 2,100 special agents and is currently hiring about 300 more. “

Finally, the proposed funding will allow the agency to modernize operations with technical enhancements and the provisions of the new funding law provide that audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000 – the overwhelming majority of Americans. According to Commissioner Rettig, “Enhanced IT systems and taxpayer services will mean that honest taxpayers will be better able to comply with tax laws, ultimately resulting in a lower – yes, lower – likelihood of being audited and a reduced burden on them.” 

So, despite how badly I performed in Sister Mary Paraclete’s and Sister Charles Borromeo’s math classes. even I can put the lie to some politicians’ electioneering advertisements and their declarations that the Internal Revenue Services is preparing to hire 87,000 armed agents to hunt down and arrest every-day American tax payers. 

Is it possible that politicians and political parties might lie when they repeat – ad nauseum – the fearmongering canard “They’re coming for your guns!”? Would any politician use that lie just to get elected?

And, perhaps we ought to ask ourselves, “If they are willing to try to frighten us into a vote with these lies, are they also lying to us when – like the senior senator from the Sunshine State – they tell us ‘The radical left will destroy America, if we don’t stop them. They indoctrinate children and try to turn girls into boys….’?”

Such claims are as genuinely wrong as just about any answer I might ever have given on one of Brother Vincent’s Calculus exams. They have no basis in Mathematics, Science, Medicine or Psychology. They are as fearmongering as claims about 87,000 armed IRS agents preparing to invade American homes.

Daddy never did get me into Brother Vincent’s Calculus class.

But he taught us two valuable, lifelong lessons. He taught us the importance of Honesty and Truth and he never cheated – not one penny – on his taxes. He was one of “the little people.” 

One of the People of God.