Damn right it is. Over at the National Review, hot shot author Noah Rothman, whose best-selling book, The Rise of the New Puritans, trashing those damn West Coast hippies grown old and rich and censorious, which, if I read it, I’d probably agree with more often than not, is on a tear, tearing into those damn hippies at the New York Times with this brief but intense diatribe, The New York Times Stumbles into a Real Systemic Discrimination Scandal, Yawns, blasting the Times for its, well, ho-hum coverage of a “confession” from the IRS, I.R.S. Acknowledges Black Americans Face More Audit Scrutiny:
The Internal Revenue Service said on Monday that Black taxpayers have been far more likely to be audited than others and that it is considering changes to its case selection process to address discrimination in how the tax code is enforced.
Ok, that’s the set-up. I’ll let Noah take it from here:
With this, we have an honest-to-goodness case of systemic discrimination by one of America’s most disliked federal law-enforcement agencies. The allegations are specific. They relate to both algorithmic racial antagonisms, of which anti-racism activists have long warned, and the agency’s supposedly crippling resource deficit. This should have been the New York Times’ bread and butter. So how did the paper of record cover the story? With as little enthusiasm as the institution could muster.
In all of eleven paragraphs, the Times presented just the facts. The conspicuously colorless copy summarizes Werfel’s confession. It made note of Democratic displeasure, observing that Senator Elizabeth Warren, in particular, hopes to see the IRS reform its racial data-collection methods. It indicated that the IRS intends to use at least some of the $80 billion Congress allocated to it last year to “improving outreach” to minority communities and to “reduce disparities in tax enforcement.” And that was that.
Uh, really, Noah? In your story, you mention, and link to, “a study” that provided the evidence of this “honest to goodness case of systemic discrimination”, your linking taking diligent readers like myself not to the “study”, but a story about the study, Black Americans Are Much More Likely to Face Tax Audits, Study Finds, in, guess where, the fucking New York Times (1/31/2023 edition)—a fact that you somehow neglected to mention—a story, moreover, running 27 fucking paragraphs, which I had to count all by my fucking self!
Furthermore, the write up of the Times, on both occasions, as well as Noah, and, well, everyone else, all make the mistake of assuming that we really have a case of systemic discrimination against blacks. The only problem is, we don’t. Blacks aren’t being audited by the IRS more often than non-blacks because they’re black. They’re being audited more often because they’re more likely to file returns that the IRS can identify as appearing to underreport income. The authors of the study on which all this hullaballoo is based acknowledge this implicitly rather than explicitly, and, in the two Times articles I’ve read, at least, don’t go out of their way to “correct” the woke outrage that everyone else is expressing.
The actual study, Measuring and Mitigating Racial Disparities in Tax Audits, originated at Stanford’s Regulation, Evaluation and Governance Lab, with Hadi Elzayn and Evelyn Smith as first authors. The gist of the report, as I read it,1 is this: black people, filing tax returns claiming a tax credit under the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)—which they are more likely than the average taxpayer to do, because they are more likely than the average taxpayer to qualify for it—are much more likely than non-blacks to be identified by the IRS has having underreported their income.
That’s it. There is nothing to indicate that the IRS is using technology that somehow allows them to identify returns as coming from black people and then deliberately holding a disproportionate number of them for examination for underreporting their income for no good reason—just that a disproportionate number of blacks claiming the EITC are being identified as underreporting.
Maybe black people are more likely to underreport their income. Maybe black people are more likely to make mistakes in reporting their income—failing to attach a W=2 form, for example. Maybe black people are more likely to underreport their income in ways that are easy for the IRS to catch. Who knows? What is clear is that the IRS is not identifying taxpayers by race by any means whatsoever. This is not analogous to cops stopping black motorists for “suspicious” behavior far more often than whites, or blacks receiving longer prison sentences than whites for similar offenses. The review of tax returns at this level is done by machines, which are not coded to identify taxpayers by race under any circumstances. The results are “valid”. “Everyone” knows—though many on the left are very reluctant to admit—that a disproportionate percentage of the murders committed in the U.S. are committed by blacks. This “finding” is not a matter of “systemic discrimination”. And neither is the finding that the IRS is discriminating against blacks when it identifies a disproportionate percentage of blacks who claim the EITC as having apparently underreported their income. What Noah is arguing for, in effect—though clearly he does not know it—is the standard “woke” argument that he detests—that any procedure that disproportionately disadvantages blacks—the SAT, for example—is inherently racist. The Times and the IRS may or may not be woke in fact, but both clearly know it is best—and safest—to be seen as woke.
The authors of the report (remember them? ) “suggest” without explicitly stating that the IRS ought to be embarrassed about disproportionately identifying black taxpayers for underreporting their income and suggest a way to redirect their efforts: instead of focusing on the easiest to “catch”—those filing simple, machine-readable returns, whose errors will almost always involve small income amounts—focus on returns that are likely to involve larger errors (or “crimes”)—those in the higher, or highest brackets, who are disproportionately non-black. But why the IRS should be making EITC payments to people whom it has good reason to believe are underreporting their income is not explained.
The IRS has told me on several occasions that I underreported my income. About 50% of the time, they were right.
For more (a lot more) on “race”, check out my extended foray into the woke jungle, CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.
1. I didn’t read the whole report, which is 94 fucking pages, so I hope Stanford doesn’t sue my aged, white, capitalist, male ass.
