THIS was the part that baffled me ...
According to IRS data, more than half of the audits performed in 2021 targeted taxpayers making less than $75,000 per year, as reported by The Washington Post. Additionally, over 40 percent of audits were aimed at taxpayers who received the earned income tax credit, which is a measure to help reduce poverty.
Now, aside from the fact that persons making that little often owe very little tax, the people getting the earned income tax credit owe NO tax, and this could only be catching FRAUD (and having done a tax season, yeah, it's there). Sending armed IRS agents after drug dealers isn't going to happen - for one thing, it's doubtful they keep their W-2s or other tax records, and secondly, if they KNEW where all the drug dealers lived and operated, sending IRS agents is crazy.
So what I see is a case of penny wise, pound foolish, because I don't see how you pay tens of thousands of IRS agents to collect a few hundred or thousand dollars here and there.
There's at least one solution that avoids all this "lost revenue", and that's a national sales tax - and a slow elimination of income tax. Although the very rich can operate quite handily on zero income, they still spend money like the rest of us.