The IRS is getting 87,000 new agents.  It would take only 25,000 to audit every millionaire, and the bottom 57% pay no taxes.  They will target the middle class.
 
The terribly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act contained an $80 billion increase in the IRS budget.  
The IRS says they will hire 87,000 new agents with the money.  In defense of those hirings, they claim they will increase government revenue by $204 billion.  As I often say in the classroom, “on the other hand…” you could properly say they hope to remove $204 billion from the productive sector of the economy.  In economics we often use the phrase “opportunity cost.”  We want to know where that $204 billion would be if the IRS did not extract it from the productive part of society. 
The purpose of taxing is to maintain a civil society in a fallen world.  One of my fellow Christian economists, Art Lindsley says it this way, “The government should punish evil but not do good.  The church should do good, but not punish evil.”  If the $204 billion is being used to punish evil, Christians would be pleased about it.  But, it’s not.  Remember, it’s the government, not the "givernment."  Their role is to govern.  But instead of governing, the money will be used to perform the federal government’s view of good.  For more on that, take a listen to podcast #69 titled, Who Cares?
So, if the church’s purpose is to “do good,” how does your church increase revenue?  When’s the last time your church hired more “fund-raisers?”  Uh-huh, just what I thought.  Your church operates by free-will giving, not by forcibly extracting revenue from its parishioners.  It seems like your church is raising money the right way, don’t you think?  Isn’t society better when we reduce the use of power?
In I Samuel 8, the Israelites asked Samuel to appoint a King.  Apparently, they wanted to be just like the other countries.  Samuel warned them that a King would take their sons and make them serve in the army.  He continued his warning in verse 16: “ Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”  Seems like that’s what’s happening, when the IRS takes 87,000 of the best workers out of the productive economy. 
 
Three Buckets
OK, let’s make this simple.  Money can go only three places: Saving, spending, or taxes.  We’ll include giving in the spending bucket for simplicity’s sake.  Saving is the best place for your money, because it lowers the interest rate and encourages the development of the economy.  It happens to be Biblical also.  Spending is the second-best place, because the money gets multiplied throughout the economy.  If you buy a new dress, the shop pays rent and labor and the supplier of the dress.  They, in turn, pay their rent, employees, etc, and the money gets multiplied.  Taxes is the worst bucket.  As mentioned earlier, it gets diverted from the other two buckets and put into the “protection” economy.  Here’s what I mean by that.  Police and accountants consume wealth, they don’t create it.  They consume value that is created by others.  We need police and accountants – and you can add IRS agents in that mix – because we live in a fallen world.  But the less we spend on them, the richer we all become.  Keeping money in the value creating system,