I completely support the idea of the IRS sending individuals a default tax return which you can just use as-is if you don't have anything to dispute or amend and be done.
But that doesn't work for small businesses. If you sell hamburgers, the majority of your customers won't have informed the IRS of the transaction. If any part of your supply chain includes normal retail outlets, same thing. Small business tax returns are pretty horrific. (They're at least as complicated for large businesses too, but they actually like it that way for all the usual reasons.)
> I don’t believe the driving force is protecting small buisinesses from Audits- anecdotal, but small businesses in my family are still audited frequently.
And they typically don't uncover major tax fraud, right? Evidence that the existing level of enforcement is, if anything, too high.
> I believe it has to do with how unpopular the IRS is with the conservatives for ideological reasons
That doesn't make any sense. Both of the major parties are ideologically bankrupt and ruthlessly pragmatic. Some part of their constituency wants it this way -- and it's probably the small business owners who keep getting audited even though they're not evading taxes.
> Our president bragged about how dodging taxes was an admirable quality- that kind of attitude is the driving force in american rhetoric, not protecting small buisiness owners.
Not paying taxes you don't actually owe is textbook capitalism. The idea that we should be outraged at companies for not paying what the law we passed says they don't owe instead of replacing the tax laws with ones that cause them to actually owe taxes is some kind of nonsense populist rhetoric.