The Texas Republican took to Twitter on Monday to propose doing away with the main federal agency responsible for collecting taxes. Cruz's tweet isn't the first time he, or other Republicans, have floated the idea. He also wasn't the only member of his party to use Tax Day to say it's time to end the agency and abiding Republican target.
"Abolish the IRS," wrote Cruz in a terse tweet that used the #TaxDay hashtag and offered no further specifics for how his idea would play out.
On Tax Day 2014, the conservative Republican tweeted a link to a clip from The Simpsons in which Homer boos the IRS headquarters. The tweet included the hashtag #AbolishTheIRS.
A year later, Cruz drew heavy attention on social media after bashing the IRS during a Republican presidential debate. "Washington is fundamentally corrupt," said Cruz. "There are more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible. And not a one of them is as good."
North Carolina's primaries are today, as are delegate-rich states Ohio, Florida and Illinois, where Ted Cruz made several campaign stops Monday.
He rallied before more than 3,000 supporters at the Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord on Sunday.
Earlier Monday, Heidi Cruz made a similar public appearance in Conover, outside Hickory.
In Fayetteville, Heidi Cruz, 43, stood on a stage with two American flags and spoke using a microphone.
In an interview before she took the stage, Heidi Cruz said her husband's plan to jump-start economies, such as North Carolina's, battered by overseas competition and the lost of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, includes lowering individual and corporate income taxes with flat rates. His tax policy would seek to promote exports of domestic goods and penalize foreign products imported to the U.S.
"We need to have incentives for them to want to do business here," she said of foreign companies looking to expand their markets into the United States.
Calls to get rid of the IRS entirely soon became more mainstream. In 2015, the Republican Party website included a petition on its website asking Americans to "Stand with the GOP and Fight to Abolish the IRS," according to WNYC.
A year later, the Republican Study Committee, which included over two-thirds of House Republicans, demanded "the complete elimination of the IRS." After taking office in 2017, Republican President Donald Trump renewed attacks on the IRS.
But a 2019 study found that slashing resources to the IRS made it less effective, and the treasury could have seen $34.3 billion more in taxes from large companies if it had $13.7 billion in funding. Further research from Syracuse University found that the underfunded IRS is more likely to audit low-income taxpayers than their wealthier counterparts who file more complex returns.
BUCK: So we’ve got much to discuss with you today, including the super-sizing, super-charging IRS on steroids. I think, Clay, one of the problems here is that until people feel the bootheel of the IRS on their neck and the hand in the pocket, so to speak, they won’t realize just how frustrating and how annoying this is. But I would want to remind everybody that the same Democrats who were sending the police onto the plane if your masks drop beneath your nose, now want tens of thousands of new IRS agents. That’s not gonna be fun.
CLAY: How do you ever get rid of them? This is my biggest issue with government expansion. When you add basically 90,000 bureaucrats to our federal government roles, how many people out there think that these people are ever not going to have jobs? Are we ever going to be able to bring back the IRS to the size that it was prior to this bill being passed?
I don’t think that we are, and that’s the challenge with government and Big Government growing like it does. Buck, I wish we could just fire half of all federal employees. I think if we fired half of all federal employees with one stroke of the pen, I don’t think the efficiency of our government would change at all. We’re never gonna get rid of these guys now.
Ted Cruz's wife told a Fayetteville audience her husband wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, dismantle Obamacare and ease federal regulations.
"Ted will do everything he can to get government off our backs," Heidi Cruz, wife of the Republican Texas senator, told a crowd of about 250 supporters Monday afternoon in a gymnasium at Fayetteville Technical Community College.
She said her husband would seek to retrain the 90,000 IRS agents to "protect our southern border," and on his first day in the White House, he would "rip to shreds every single illegal executive order that this presidency (has issued)."
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