Barrasso says voters “right to be concerned” over IRS expansion

Republicans have had little hesitation in pointing out the stagnant job-creation numbers during the Obama administration, but to be fair, they’re also predicting a big hiring boom, too. Unfortunately, that hiring boom would come at the IRS, which is tasked with enforcing the individual mandate in ObamaCare and in determining what kind of medical coverage qualifies. The Obama administration denies that it will hire more IRS agents, while HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius predicts no more than a couple of hundred extra agents. With the CBO estimating new costs to the IRS between five and ten billion dollars over the next ten years, someone’s going to have to do a lot of work. Fox News talks with Senator John Barrasso about the controversy, and the orthopedic surgeon prescribes a lot of concern for taxpayers:

Even taking the low end of the CBO estimate, it amounts to $500 million in enforcement costs each year for the next decade. If each IRS agent costs $100,000 a year, that makes for 5,000 new IRS agents. At the top end ($10 billion), that’s 10,000 new agents. That may not be the 16,000 figure quoted by Republicans, but then again, IRS agents may cost considerably less than $100,000 per year, too. It’s certainly a lot more than a couple of hundred, or zero.

Of course, Democrats can always argue that the CBO numbers are completely inaccurate. Republicans would loooooove to hear that defense.

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