While the OP is absurd and wrong in nearly every way, there is one unintended way in which it is correct. The IRS does "discriminate", it accurately discriminates (i.e., "to recognize a distinction") between tax returns that are likely be cheating the Fed out of large amounts of owed taxes and those that are not. That alone can fully explain every valid fact that the OP presents.
So from a moral standpoint when is discrimination OK? When it's not illegal? When it's based on things like race that you can't change? That was someone’s argument in this tread. Say in 20 years you can change your skin color on a whim (with the CRSPR/cas9 stuff this is probably going to happen faster than anyone things), then can we go back to discriminating against black people?
Arg. Your argument basically amounts to "If eating people is wrong, then eating itself is wrong. IF eating is not wrong, then we should be able to eat people."
Discrimination merely means identifying a difference between things. Every time you ever make any decision among options, you have discriminated. It is a fundamental and neccessary aspect of nearly all human thought and action. Thus, 99.9% of acts of discrimination are amoral, without ethical implications, and the tiny remaining fraction can be either moral or immoral depending on what is being discriminated and on what basis.
It only becomes a potential moral issue when it is about discriminating among persons, and even then its okay 99% of the time, such as when you discriminate between a man and a women as a sex partner or spouse, or between a uneducated violent criminal and an educated non-criminal to tutor your child, be an employee, or just be your friend.
Its not okay when you are doing it just to trying and harm people because of the group they belong to, in contrast to what the IRS is doing which is trying to protect all of us from people doing us harm. Even when the goal is protection or recovering losses due to others harmful actions, the discrimination must based upon qualities that are objectively and rather directly relevant to identifying the responsible person.
Every single act of law enforcement is an act of discrimination. Among all the people on the planet, the investigator must discriminate between who is a suspect and who is not, based upon factors that are objectively and somewhat directly link to the actions in question, such as evidence of opportunity, means, motive, and actual behaviors empirically associated with the criminal act. That is just what the IRS is doing. They are trying to catch people who stole or accidentally took notable sums of money, because this matters more than people who took some pocket change off the dresser. The means to steal large sums via tax reporting requires large sums of income and wealth in the first place. Thus, rich people are the ones with the means. In addition, the fact that they stand to gain larger sums by intentionally lying, gives them more motive. And the more complex nature of their reporting and various forms gives them greater opportunity to both intentionally and accidentally increase the gap between what they pay and what they actually owe. This justifies given them a closer look and trying to find "red flags" in their behavior (the details of their current and past returns, and evidence of other economic activities) that would indicate probable under-reporting. In contrast, skin color has no plausible direct causal relationship to whether a person has the means, motive, and behaviors of a person that would use tax reporting to steal from the Fed. Whatever, correlations might exist would be in the direction of white people being more likely, but that is highly indirect and incidental to the actual causal factors of income. Thus, use of race in this case would be unethical because it targets people at a group level who often do not have any of the actual qualities that are causally relevant to the behavior under investigation.
The other train of thought in this tread (which I mentioned in the OP) was that this strategy provides the best bang for the buck. Another way of saying this is that we benefit at the expense of others.
No, that is not a way of saying it. The "others" in question are dishonest thieves trying to steal from us or negligent people causing us harm. We are protecting ourselves from others. The IRS is not going after "groups". They are going after individuals cases in which their are indicators directly related to likely under-reporting. Among those instances of people with suspected under-reporting, they must decide whether any plausible result will wind up costing the Fed more than it recovers. If they go mostly after those instances where the cost is less than what is recovered, this will happen to result in a higher % of the rich getting audited. But again, the rich that get selected are being audited because of specific info the signals under-reporting, not simply for being rich.
Which is odd when juxtaposed next to the evil 1% meme. If they are so powerful and beyond reproach why are their audit rates do high?
Total strawman of the arguments about the 1%. The argument is not that they have absolute direct authority over every aspect and every person in government. The argument is that their power is extremely disproportionate to their 1% of the population that they comprise. IOW, if they had 60% of the total power, that would still mean they have 60 times the power that they should in any just and remotely democratic society. Yet, it would still allow for 40% of the total power to be used against their interests. Since the IRS audits are a tiny fraction of the government power, it could even mean that those audits are completely outside their power, while other areas are almost entirely under their power. Regardless, the evidence suggests that they are actually using some of their power to constrain the IRS. The power of the rich is likely why their audit rates are not nearly as high as they rationally should be given the indicators of % of them who are actually under-reporting and ripping us all off for massive amounts. Their audit rate should likely be closer to 25%-30% rather than 12%. IOW, their power stops about half of the audits against them that should occur in a just and rationally acting government.
