Once upon a time, Republicans portrayed themselves as the party of small government and family values. Recently, though, GOP leaders have been cobbling together a new coalition, welcoming insurrectionists, white-nationalist tiki-torchers and people who think Bill Gates is trying to microchip them. The latest recruit to the Big Tent? Tax cheats. Here's the backstory. Each year, about $600 billion in taxes legally owed are not paid. For scale, that's roughly equal to all federal income taxes paid by the lowest-earning 90 percent of taxpayers, according to Treasury Department data. These unpaid taxes — often called the "tax gap" — are predominantly owed by wealthy individuals. The richest 1 percent alone duck an estimated $163 billion in income taxes each year. To be clear, rank-and-file wage-earners are not necessarily more honest or patriotic. It's just much harder for them to shortchange Uncle Sam. Workplace grunts have taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks. And, critically, most labor-related income — as well as income from dividends, interest and other sources — gets reported to the Internal Revenue Service through W-2s, 1099s and other common tax documents. So it's difficult to sneak unpaid liabilities past the IRS. There are some types of income, however, for which little or no third-party reporting exists. These income categories — including partnership, proprietorship and rental income — accrue disproportionately to high earners. The government has much less ability to tell when these filers are misreporting; as a result, they can more easily get away with cheating. And some of them do. This is evident from IRS data on "voluntary compliance," or how accurately people report their income and tax liabilities without the government having to come after them. When it comes to ordinary wage and salary income, taxpayers are remarkably forthcoming, with noncompliance averaging only 1 percent; for those more "opaque" income sources, noncompliance is an estimated 55 percent. Tax cheating is not a victimless crime. When (disproportionately high-income) people don't pay their bills, everyone else must pay more to fill the shortfall. One solution is to have the IRS conduct more audits. Audit rates for big corporations and high-income individuals should be higher, given that tax enforcement has plummeted as the IRS has been starved of resources. But indiscriminately increasing audit rates alone is unlikely to solve the problem, and might irritate a lot of honest taxpayers in the process. Not all high-income people (or people with rental or partnership or other "opaque" income) are cheating, of course.