Richard Rubin

They are federal police officers in the truest sense.

So they are people with guns.

Those people are, they're highly trained.

They're like a cross between police officers and nerds.

Yeah, they caught Al Capone.

These are the agents who go after money laundering, transnational narco terrorists.

It's these criminal special agents who have guns because they're often going to arrest dangerous people who are not just committing tax fraud, but they're committing tax fraud along with drug crimes or whatever else.

Oh, so this is actually really interesting.

If you look at the data about what enforcement actually does, it's really just adding, you know, $80, $90 billion a year on top of what people just pay.

So this has gone through boom and bust cycles, tax enforcement.

And so I think there's been this sort of steady cycle of it mattering to people in power and then it kind of retrenching a little bit.

And we're right now in one of those retrenching cycles.

Trump has complained about his own audits.

That was both before he was president, and he had a business in those audits, and his tax returns have been written about extensively.

And also, while he was president, there's a mandatory audit of presidents.

And he's also, at the same time, suing the IRS for a contractor's disclosure of his tax returns.

So it's like a very convoluted kind of relationship, and he's still in charge of the IRS.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, headcount isn't the absolute perfect measure, but it's one of the best ones that we have over time.

And the IRS headcount is now around 70,000.