GOP Hates IRS Except When Doing Uterine Audits
The Republicans claim they want to minimize the powers of the IRS, except if it comes to prying into women's personal lives.
Have an abortion? Hope you kept the receipt, because the tax man is coming…
Via Mother Jones:
Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?
In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans’ “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops—that is, during an audit, they’d have to determine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion.
Between uterine audits to see if your abortion was tax deductible and investigations for miscarriages to ensure that it wasn’t “prenatal murder,” the GOP couldn’t possibly come up with more excuses to examine our ladybits.