National Review
Disclaimer: This article may contain the personal views and opinions of the author.
Over the past several years, local, state, and federal governments and corporations have become obsessed with ‘equity.’
“Equity occurs when the outcomes of all people are equal.” That is not the same as equality.
To ensure everyone ends up in an equal place, the disadvantaged need a hand or a handout. In an equitable system, merit and personal responsibility have no place.
How long can a system like that last? How long before everyone gives up their hard work and personal responsibility?
America was built on the idea that everyone is treated equally and has an equal chance to get ahead. The same outcome for everyone is never guaranteed.
This idea has worked well for almost 250 years but the Communists who are trying to take over this country have decided to push equity rather than equality.
This idea of equity has invaded every governmental department, including the Internal Revenue Service.
It appears that the IRS is using ‘racial equity’ to target White and Asian Americans.
America First Legal Foundation (AFL), a nonprofit group committed to fighting against overreach by the executive branch, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request aimed at a recently-signed executive order.
On February 16, President Biden signed an EO “directing all federal agencies to produce an annual ‘equity action plan’ aimed at removing barriers to agency resources for ‘underserved communities.'”
AFL believes the executive order demonstrates the administration “intends to alter the IRS’s audit algorithms to target white, Asian, or mixed-race taxpayers.”
The latest executive order follows a previous EO signed in 2021 dedicated to “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” which asked agencies to launch a “whole-of-government approach to equity.”
AFL’s FOIA request calls for all records of communication from “specific individuals” at the Treasury Department and the IRS “referring to ‘discrimination,’ ‘discriminatory,’ ‘race,’ ‘racial,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘color,’ ‘BIPOC,’ ‘Asian’ ‘Indigenous,’ ‘Black,’ ‘Brown,’ or ‘White’ on the one hand, and ‘audit,’ ‘enforcement,’ ‘NRP,’ ‘RAAS,’ ‘algorithmic,’ ‘selection,’ ‘sampling,’ or ‘strata,’ on the other.”
The group wants to see the communication records starting the day President Biden took office through the date of the FOIA request processing.
The request includes communications from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and several other “deputies, senior officials, and appointees.”
When America held up equality as a virtue of our society, the IRS’s National Research Program would randomly choose tax returns for audit.
The concern that the FOIA request addresses is whether or not Biden’s executive order and his “order that Yellen conduct an ‘equity assessment’ on whether underserved communities face systemic barriers and produce an Equity Action Plan to address those alleged barriers” will influence which tax returns get audited.
The FOIA request also cites additional actions by the Biden administration that overrun “rules set by Congress concerning the collection of data by the IRS and other agencies in their efforts to collect tax data related to race and ethnicity.”
Additionally, AFL’s request contends that this administration’s plan to hire 87,000 new IRS agents and its “deep-seated racial fixations,” present “a clear and present danger” to “White, Asian and mixed-race” taxpayers.
Equal treatment has gone out the window in favor of equity. The consequences of these feckless policies will be far-reaching.
