Xavier Becerra: “One of the easiest things you can do to get people to cheer for you is to bash someone or something that everyone loves…”

“One of the easiest things you can do to get people to cheer for you is to bash someone or something that everyone loves to hate, as you have heard it said before. I don't know if there is a better example of this than the IRS. Everyone loves to hate the IRS. At the end of the day, though, if you want to have our troops paid, if you want to have our security handled at our airports, if you want to make sure that our national parks are protected, you need to have the revenues; and so we need the IRS so that all of us who voluntarily are supposed to pay our taxes do so and pay our fair share. Again, we could all point to the story of the case where the IRS flubbed it, didn't do a good job, and so it is easy to pile on. If we could create a pinata that looked like the IRS, I guarantee you it would be the hottest selling pinata in the history of pinata making. So let's just put that on the table. Let's grant that to everyone. It is easy to bash the IRS. Let's go to this bill, though. What will this bill do? First, it does some really strange things, and then it does some really harmful things. But worse than that, it is never going to become law. So we are spending time talking about something that is never going to become law. But on what the bill does, let me give you a clear example of why it is so unfortunate that we do this IRS bashing.…”