Here's a graph of America's national debt. Its rate of increase clearly starts spiking...right after the Bush tax cuts. https://www.statista.com/chart/28393/u

Here's a graph of America's national debt. Its rate of increase clearly starts spiking...right after the Bush tax cuts. https://www.statista.com/chart/28393/us-public-debt/ https://www.statista.com/chart/28393/us-public-debt/ I think it's indisputable that tax policy has an impact on a government's health. Yes, that's not exactly the same thing as prosecutable tax avoidance. But my sense is the real problem here is quasi-legal tax avoidance, and that this small $1.3 billion figure is just hinting at how easily more taxes could be recovered with less lenient tax policies. (As well as better-funded enforcement officers...) But that gets dangerously close to also saying, "let's raise the tax rates on millionaires (not just billionaires) back to where it was a few years ago..." And let's be honest: that's why we're having this discussion. Government spending is bad and part of the problem, according to one side - with taxes just a way of enabling it. There's been a lot of words devoted to extolling the values of lower taxes in creating jobs and innovation. So I think at some point, people just start rooting for tax avoidance.