12 ms·

The Golden Age of Rich People Not Paying Their Taxes

199 points by chadash 8y ago

hkt 8y ago
All very sad. It is time to bring the wealthiest back to heel. Companies and individuals cannot be above the law or the states which sustain their lives and businesses will crumble. Time to take back control.
- president 8y ago
  It is impossible to revert. Rich people own the world and unless they are willing to sacrifice their wealth/power, there is no other solution other than revolt/war.
  - standerman 8y ago
    Or you can organize and vote. This is still a democracy.
    - notdonspaulding 8y ago
      This (the USA, at least) is a constitutional republic. You have representation and you have constitutional rights. In a democracy, a plurality of the people can vote to do whatever they want to you. In a constitutional republic, a supermajority has to change the nature of your rights in order to violate them. It's an important distinction.
      - everybodyknows 8y ago
        A colorful illustration of the value of such checks on power would be the incident in which a single majority vote in the legislature of imperial Athens sufficed to send off a galley to their rebellious colony of Mytilene, with orders to put every male inhabitant to the sword. As it happened, the next day the assembly changed its mind, and sent off another galley rescinding the order. The second galley was indeed able to overtake the first in time. Thucydides attributed this to deliberate slowness by the captain of the first.
      - Kalium 8y ago
        The USA is a symmetric federalist constitutional republican representative democracy. This is a form of democracy. "Democracy" is a family of types of government, of which the absolute democracy many imagine in one form. A representative democracy is another.
    - president 8y ago
      In theory, yes. I won't hold my breath.
  - hkt 8y ago
    Go and read about Jeremy Corbyn. The UK at least stands a chance of fighting this.
mschuster91 8y ago
Classic "Republican" playbook: instead of killing a govt agency/service directly, slowly de-fund it over years until it's crippled, then use said crippled state as "you see, the state just can't provide healthcare/telecom/infrastructure efficiently, it must be privatized" justification, then deliver the remainders on a silver platter for the ultra rich to siphon the profits off.
- ataturk 8y ago
  The classic Democrat-socialist playbook: Destroy private industry, then tell everyone "see, the free market can't provide healthcare/telecom/infrastructure efficiently, so we must nationalize it." Continue to harbor a wealthy elite class that gets all the privileges. Then once the nationalizations and monopolies are in place, the rationing and high taxes really kick into gear, as we just saw with Obamacare. Also see: Venezuela. Argentina (they literally harbored Nazi scum). Okay, pretty much all of Mexico, Central and South America suffers from leftist interventions in their economies. Pinochet was right. As far as the ultra-rich siphoning off profits, it seems to me most of the ultra-rich people are Democrats. At the very least, the elite are all cut from the same cloth regardless of their political affiliation, both parties are a means to the same end. That end is you, prostrate, powerless, and dead as soon as your usefulness to them has passed. The Rs aren't wrong about doing away with massive government agencies that suck the lifeblood out of the economy. There must be some balance, of course, but we are pretty far down the road to a collapse due to top-heavy, unaccountable government.
- Florin_Andrei 8y ago
  That's how a country dies eventually.
- hkt 8y ago
  In the UK the Tories do that. They're even doing it to schools and hospitals.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    In the US this is charter schools (our current Secretary of Education is a big fan of charter schools) and nearly all hospitals already.
jblow 8y ago
An IRS budget of $14B means each person in the USA is paying $43 per year to fund the agency (including children). At the Federal minimum wage, after taxes, that's about a full working day to pay it off. If you have a non-working spouse and one child, three working days. So it seems like a lot to me. Here's an idea, why don't we simplify our Byzantine tax filing processes so that the whole thing doesn't cost so much. I know, I know, all that sweet H&R Block tax lobbyist money is addictive, but it would be better for the country if congress would put down the pipe.
- Florin_Andrei 8y ago
  > So it seems like a lot to me. I've no problem paying taxes, they buy me civilization. > why don't we simplify our Byzantine tax filing processes so that the whole thing doesn't cost so much That's actually a very good idea. Fewer loopholes too, which are exploited by the haves at the expense of have-nots.
  - jblow 8y ago
    > I've no problem paying taxes, they buy me civilization. They do, but this line of argumentation is kind of vacuous if you don't include the actual cost of taxes. If taxes could be 1/3 of what everyone is paying, thus buying the same civilization except much more prosperous since money is used a lot more productively and people have much more choice about where it goes, isn't that better? (This 1/3 isn't meant to be a real number; it's a thought experiment). Alternative way of looking at it -- if this argument works without cost, then why shouldn't everyone just pay 100% taxes?
    - sharemywin 8y ago
      But, the opposite it true too. If paying 10% more gets you 40% better outcomes wouldn't make sense to pay the 10%. The problem is a lot of times the desired outcomes aren't simple. Nor are the solutions. And experts and their opinions are generally for hire anymore.
  - nybble41 8y ago
theandrewbailey 8y ago
> "No business would fail to fund a unit that, on average, brought in $7 for every dollar spent. Shareholders would rebel and bring lawsuits, or at least oust the management or board of directors," Olson wrote in her preface to the report. "Yet this is precisely what we are doing with the IRS budget."[0] Sounds like the IRS should be the most funded government agency. [0] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/national-taxpayer-advocate-delivers-annual-report-to-congress-focuses-on-tax-reform-irs-funding-and-identity-theft https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/national-taxpayer-advocate-deli...
- anonymouzz 8y ago
  Yeah, especially because tax avoidance is an insanely difficult problem to fight once it gets big enough. I mean it's impossible to prosecute at once even 10% of the country for not paying taxes. Imagine the US going through a Greece episode, which was caused in big part by tax avoidance. To this day it's perfectly fine in Greece to ask for a ~20% "cash discount" in almost any shop, which of course means simply not paying the VAT tax (similar to the US sales tax). Edit: let me self-correct - this does not seem to be an actual problem in the US - with this plot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion#Government_response https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion#Government_respo...
  - hardtke 8y ago
    The US has a very high tax compliance rate because most of our income is reported through 3rd parties (w2, 1099, etc.). For income that is not reported through a 3rd party, we have low compliance rates as well. For income subject to little or no information reporting, the misreported income is 63% of total according to the IRS. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/p1415.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/p1415.pdf
    - sandworm101 8y ago
      >> because most of our income is reported through 3rd parties For most people and most of their income. I seriously doubt it true that most income, as in >50% of all income earned by all US entities, is so reported. Corporate income is massive. Corporations, the wealthy, private contractors ... their income is not automatically reported. Note too that "income" includes all income, not just net profits subject to tax.
RileyJames 8y ago
I take pride in paying my taxes. It reminds me that our society has a cost, and we all contribute towards it. I’d be interested to know how others feel. And how we could inspire more people to feel pride in contributing rather than make such efforts to avoid contributing.
- andyburke 8y ago
  I'm with you. But many people do not agree with us, and the last I heard, the ROI on each dollar spent at the IRS is higher than almost anywhere else in government. Hollowing out the IRS, and by extension the federal budget, has been a goal of one of our political parties for a very long time. It's sad to see them succeeding in a way that will cost our country dearly in the long term.
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    It's almost as if the person running that party has spent his entire adult life trying to find ways to defraud the IRS (and otherwise minimize his tax burden).
  - nybble41 8y ago
    > the ROI on each dollar spent at the IRS is higher than almost anywhere else in government It only looks that way because you're comparing the revenues and expenses of a profit center. This is like measuring the "ROI" of a company's invoicing department, while disregarding the fact that without the cost centers actually producing goods and services for sale there would be nothing to invoice. Properly measuring the worth of the department requires looking at the whole system, not just the IRS—and in this case, that includes both the public and private sectors. After all, the government supposedly exists to serve the public, and not for its own benefit. From that point of view, the IRS isn't producing much of anything; it's just moving money from one area of the economy to another. Any argument that this activity results in a positive ROI hinges on whether the areas they're moving money to are more beneficial than the areas they're taking money from. (Many would disagree.)
- AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
davidgrenier 8y ago
There has to be some clever way to privatize this.
- jmccaf 8y ago
  Provincial tax collectors were corrupt and despised in antiquity, I prefer a faceless centralized IRS.
- BoiledCabbage 8y ago
  Privatized prisons have worked out so well - I agree it's probably a good idea here as as well. /s
  - zeofig 8y ago
    We just didn't do it cleverly enough, you silly socialist!
- fwip 8y ago
  I'm sure we'll see an article about solving it with blockchain tomorrow.
exabrial 8y ago
The IRS has a $12,000,000,000 to spend, and we're worried about a few millionaires not paying their taxes? I'm much more concerned about the first part, how on earth did we give that astronomical amount of funding to that agency and what in the heck are they doing with $12b that couldn't be done with $12m?
- pchristensen 8y ago
  For easier math, let's assume that 330m Americans file 120m tax returns. So all in, collection, processing, auditing, technology, customer support (which is excellent btw), management, compliance, etc would be ~$0.10 per return? Even at ~$100 that seems pretty well run. Scale costs.
  - jlawson 8y ago
    The number is extreme... but it's worth noting that Facebook and Google both manage more users, often with more complex information, including people intentionally trying to break and trick their systems - at very low cost. (I'm not sure if Google/FB spend 0.10 per user, but it sure ain't anywhere near $100). I think with a sensibly simplified tax code, and FAANG-level technical innovation, IRS costs could enter that range.
- BoiledCabbage 8y ago
  I swear people dont understand the size of the US and the scope of problems they tackle. And think everything is a startup for 40 people putting up a SPA. There are 325 million people in the US and that's not counting any companies. 12B means ~$40 annual cost to validate each person's taxes. That's nothing. That's including tracking down fraudsters, costs of audits, ensuring correctness. One millionaire avoiding taxes is avoiding way more than $40 of responsibility...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- devmunchies 8y ago
  Agreed. I’d like to see the govt spend less on military and things like funding Israel. Spend the money at home.
PHGamer 8y ago
i guess there should be more enforcement but im not a big fan of an organization that presidents have used again their enemies. Also beauracies tend to grow over time and the amount of tax they need (both sides unfortunately). I would bet california breaks 10% sales tax this decade
danieltillett 8y ago
The political support for underfunding the IRS comes from the complexity of the US tax code combined with the extraordinary powers of the IRS. It leaves the average taxpayer with the feeling that could be audited and even jailed at any time for non-compliance with some obscure rule. I am an Australian and I fear the IRS more than the ATO, not because I owe the IRS anything (I am not a US taxpayer), but because I have US customers. There is probably some obscure form or reporting requirement I have missed or filled in incorrectly that could make me the target of some arbitrary action by the IRS. You can see why foreign financial institutions just won’t have anything to do with US taxpayers.
hulton 8y ago
So many people on here have no idea how income tax works. Laughable.
lvngdfns 8y ago
The IRS administers and enforces the income tax laws beyond the parameters of the laws passed by Congress and signed by the President as well as beyond the parameters laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Moreover, the IRS’s own internal procedures, manuals and literature itself indicate the IRS knowingly deceives the American public about the scope of its true income tax authority. In addition, consider this: https://www.numbersusa.com/news/irs-12-million-illegal-aliens-committed-identity-theft-fy-2017 https://www.numbersusa.com/news/irs-12-million-illegal-alien...
humanrebar 8y ago
> By that time, the Republican narrative had taken hold: The IRS had to be “held accountable” for wasting millions on lavish conferences and persecuting conservative nonprofits for their political beliefs. That is very dismissive of some very salient complaints about how groups were targeted. Read the Wikipedia article. This isn't moonbat pizzagate nonsense. Among keywords targeted were "open source software", "medical marijuana", and "Israel". A Democratic senator said: > U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said, "We should not only fire the head of the IRS, which has occurred, but we've got to go down the line and find every single person who had anything to do with this and make sure that they are removed from the IRS and the word goes out that this is unacceptable." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
- messick 8y ago
  More like “Democratic”. She played the “see, I can be a Conservative too!” game to try to get the “small government” voters, and it didn’t even work anyway. Might as well quote Rand Paul because the whole “IRS is mean to Republicans” was definitely not a bipartisan belief except for red state Democrats.
- rtpg 8y ago
  Definitely not great behavior. The idea this was purely an anti-conservative thing when OSS advocacy is on this list is where my eyes glaze over though. Just on its face there is a lot of evidence in the other direction >Ryun has stated he believes that Greenhouse Solutions benefited from its name (although the quick approval might also be due to the fact that Greenhouse Solutions was already operating as a nonprofit and was already on-file with the IRS.) Like “conservative claims bias (but here is the real explanation).” Might as well place “claims to be innocent “ in the profile of every person in Shawshank The insistence of people bringing up this thing as a conservative thing only when there were liberal groups also being targeted (There could have been a proper bipartisan effort against this!) is mind-boggling.
  - oTTjRQxkTz 8y ago
    In the TIGTA report from 2017, the Senate Finance Committee (and the IRS itself) found that most, but not all, of the potentially political applications set aside for scrutiny by the IRS were Tea Party and conservative groups. The committee also found that the IRS used names and policy positions in order to identify groups for scrutiny. I think there is evidence to say there was an anti-conservative bias. see TIGTA report: https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2017reports/201710054fr.pdf https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2017reports/2017...
gnadx 8y ago
This happened in the 1920s as well. And then something else happened immediately thereafter.
smsm42 8y ago
Maybe if we had simpler tax code instead of byzantine monstrosity that happens now, when even professionals can't be sure if particular payment is right, and there's no hope regular citizen can figure it out - we'd not need as much funding to the IRS as we need now. But that would mean giving up the power to control people's decisions by messing with taxation - one of the most powerful levers of control Federal Government can have over the private citizen (Obamacare individual mandate has been deemed a "tax", because that'd make it within Fed's constitutional powers) and one of the most powerful levers to control the economy. Having simple tax code removes that power, and that's why it would not become simple.
RickJWagner 8y ago
From the same source, for some context: "Proof the IRS Didn't Target Just Conservatives", from early on in the scandal https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/proof-the-irs-didnt-target-just-conservatives/276536/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/proof-t... After the evidence was overwhelming and denial was impossible: "New Documents Show the IRS Targeted 'Progressive' and 'Tea Party' Groups for Extra Scrutiny" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/new-documents-show-the-irs-targeted-progressive-and-tea-party-groups-for-extra-scrutiny/361125/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/new-doc...
didibus 8y ago
> letting the poor commit too much fraud > Cutting the IRS’s budget didn’t make sense to him. It was one of the few areas of government that had a positive return on investment > Since the IRS-reform bill in 1998, the agency is prohibited from evaluating agents based on how much money they bring in. Instead, they are evaluated on how efficiently they open and close audits I find these pretty interesting. It does feel a little fishy, given the IRS can actually be a revenue generating center for the government. Which would be very different if it was costing more then it brought in.
amaccuish 8y ago
Seems to me, though I'm not American, that many Americans take issue with the arduous process of paying tax in America. I suggest you take a look at Estonia's tax collection system and it's efficiency as a potential model.

199 points by chadash 8y ago

hkt 8y ago

All very sad. It is time to bring the wealthiest back to heel. Companies and individuals cannot be above the law or the states which sustain their lives and businesses will crumble. Time to take back control.

president 8y ago
It is impossible to revert. Rich people own the world and unless they are willing to sacrifice their wealth/power, there is no other solution other than revolt/war.
- standerman 8y ago
  Or you can organize and vote. This is still a democracy.
  - notdonspaulding 8y ago
    This (the USA, at least) is a constitutional republic. You have representation and you have constitutional rights. In a democracy, a plurality of the people can vote to do whatever they want to you. In a constitutional republic, a supermajority has to change the nature of your rights in order to violate them. It's an important distinction.
    - everybodyknows 8y ago
      A colorful illustration of the value of such checks on power would be the incident in which a single majority vote in the legislature of imperial Athens sufficed to send off a galley to their rebellious colony of Mytilene, with orders to put every male inhabitant to the sword. As it happened, the next day the assembly changed its mind, and sent off another galley rescinding the order. The second galley was indeed able to overtake the first in time. Thucydides attributed this to deliberate slowness by the captain of the first.
    - Kalium 8y ago
      The USA is a symmetric federalist constitutional republican representative democracy. This is a form of democracy. "Democracy" is a family of types of government, of which the absolute democracy many imagine in one form. A representative democracy is another.
  - president 8y ago
    In theory, yes. I won't hold my breath.
- hkt 8y ago
  Go and read about Jeremy Corbyn. The UK at least stands a chance of fighting this.

mschuster91 8y ago

Classic "Republican" playbook: instead of killing a govt agency/service directly, slowly de-fund it over years until it's crippled, then use said crippled state as "you see, the state just can't provide healthcare/telecom/infrastructure efficiently, it must be privatized" justification, then deliver the remainders on a silver platter for the ultra rich to siphon the profits off.

ataturk 8y ago
The classic Democrat-socialist playbook: Destroy private industry, then tell everyone "see, the free market can't provide healthcare/telecom/infrastructure efficiently, so we must nationalize it." Continue to harbor a wealthy elite class that gets all the privileges. Then once the nationalizations and monopolies are in place, the rationing and high taxes really kick into gear, as we just saw with Obamacare. Also see: Venezuela. Argentina (they literally harbored Nazi scum). Okay, pretty much all of Mexico, Central and South America suffers from leftist interventions in their economies. Pinochet was right. As far as the ultra-rich siphoning off profits, it seems to me most of the ultra-rich people are Democrats. At the very least, the elite are all cut from the same cloth regardless of their political affiliation, both parties are a means to the same end. That end is you, prostrate, powerless, and dead as soon as your usefulness to them has passed. The Rs aren't wrong about doing away with massive government agencies that suck the lifeblood out of the economy. There must be some balance, of course, but we are pretty far down the road to a collapse due to top-heavy, unaccountable government.
Florin_Andrei 8y ago
That's how a country dies eventually.
hkt 8y ago
In the UK the Tories do that. They're even doing it to schools and hospitals.
- jandrese 8y ago
  In the US this is charter schools (our current Secretary of Education is a big fan of charter schools) and nearly all hospitals already.

jblow 8y ago

An IRS budget of $14B means each person in the USA is paying $43 per year to fund the agency (including children). At the Federal minimum wage, after taxes, that's about a full working day to pay it off. If you have a non-working spouse and one child, three working days. So it seems like a lot to me. Here's an idea, why don't we simplify our Byzantine tax filing processes so that the whole thing doesn't cost so much. I know, I know, all that sweet H&R Block tax lobbyist money is addictive, but it would be better for the country if congress would put down the pipe.

Florin_Andrei 8y ago
> So it seems like a lot to me. I've no problem paying taxes, they buy me civilization. > why don't we simplify our Byzantine tax filing processes so that the whole thing doesn't cost so much That's actually a very good idea. Fewer loopholes too, which are exploited by the haves at the expense of have-nots.
- jblow 8y ago
  > I've no problem paying taxes, they buy me civilization. They do, but this line of argumentation is kind of vacuous if you don't include the actual cost of taxes. If taxes could be 1/3 of what everyone is paying, thus buying the same civilization except much more prosperous since money is used a lot more productively and people have much more choice about where it goes, isn't that better? (This 1/3 isn't meant to be a real number; it's a thought experiment). Alternative way of looking at it -- if this argument works without cost, then why shouldn't everyone just pay 100% taxes?
  - sharemywin 8y ago
    But, the opposite it true too. If paying 10% more gets you 40% better outcomes wouldn't make sense to pay the 10%. The problem is a lot of times the desired outcomes aren't simple. Nor are the solutions. And experts and their opinions are generally for hire anymore.
- nybble41 8y ago

theandrewbailey 8y ago

> "No business would fail to fund a unit that, on average, brought in $7 for every dollar spent. Shareholders would rebel and bring lawsuits, or at least oust the management or board of directors," Olson wrote in her preface to the report. "Yet this is precisely what we are doing with the IRS budget."[0] Sounds like the IRS should be the most funded government agency. [0] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/national-taxpayer-advocate-delivers-annual-report-to-congress-focuses-on-tax-reform-irs-funding-and-identity-theft https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/national-taxpayer-advocate-deli...

anonymouzz 8y ago
Yeah, especially because tax avoidance is an insanely difficult problem to fight once it gets big enough. I mean it's impossible to prosecute at once even 10% of the country for not paying taxes. Imagine the US going through a Greece episode, which was caused in big part by tax avoidance. To this day it's perfectly fine in Greece to ask for a ~20% "cash discount" in almost any shop, which of course means simply not paying the VAT tax (similar to the US sales tax). Edit: let me self-correct - this does not seem to be an actual problem in the US - with this plot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion#Government_response https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion#Government_respo...
- hardtke 8y ago
  The US has a very high tax compliance rate because most of our income is reported through 3rd parties (w2, 1099, etc.). For income that is not reported through a 3rd party, we have low compliance rates as well. For income subject to little or no information reporting, the misreported income is 63% of total according to the IRS. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/p1415.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/p1415.pdf
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    >> because most of our income is reported through 3rd parties For most people and most of their income. I seriously doubt it true that most income, as in >50% of all income earned by all US entities, is so reported. Corporate income is massive. Corporations, the wealthy, private contractors ... their income is not automatically reported. Note too that "income" includes all income, not just net profits subject to tax.

RileyJames 8y ago

I take pride in paying my taxes. It reminds me that our society has a cost, and we all contribute towards it. I’d be interested to know how others feel. And how we could inspire more people to feel pride in contributing rather than make such efforts to avoid contributing.

andyburke 8y ago
I'm with you. But many people do not agree with us, and the last I heard, the ROI on each dollar spent at the IRS is higher than almost anywhere else in government. Hollowing out the IRS, and by extension the federal budget, has been a goal of one of our political parties for a very long time. It's sad to see them succeeding in a way that will cost our country dearly in the long term.
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  It's almost as if the person running that party has spent his entire adult life trying to find ways to defraud the IRS (and otherwise minimize his tax burden).
- nybble41 8y ago
  > the ROI on each dollar spent at the IRS is higher than almost anywhere else in government It only looks that way because you're comparing the revenues and expenses of a profit center. This is like measuring the "ROI" of a company's invoicing department, while disregarding the fact that without the cost centers actually producing goods and services for sale there would be nothing to invoice. Properly measuring the worth of the department requires looking at the whole system, not just the IRS—and in this case, that includes both the public and private sectors. After all, the government supposedly exists to serve the public, and not for its own benefit. From that point of view, the IRS isn't producing much of anything; it's just moving money from one area of the economy to another. Any argument that this activity results in a positive ROI hinges on whether the areas they're moving money to are more beneficial than the areas they're taking money from. (Many would disagree.)
AlexTWithBeard 8y ago

davidgrenier 8y ago

There has to be some clever way to privatize this.

jmccaf 8y ago
Provincial tax collectors were corrupt and despised in antiquity, I prefer a faceless centralized IRS.
BoiledCabbage 8y ago
Privatized prisons have worked out so well - I agree it's probably a good idea here as as well. /s
- zeofig 8y ago
  We just didn't do it cleverly enough, you silly socialist!
fwip 8y ago
I'm sure we'll see an article about solving it with blockchain tomorrow.

exabrial 8y ago

The IRS has a $12,000,000,000 to spend, and we're worried about a few millionaires not paying their taxes? I'm much more concerned about the first part, how on earth did we give that astronomical amount of funding to that agency and what in the heck are they doing with $12b that couldn't be done with $12m?

pchristensen 8y ago
For easier math, let's assume that 330m Americans file 120m tax returns. So all in, collection, processing, auditing, technology, customer support (which is excellent btw), management, compliance, etc would be ~$0.10 per return? Even at ~$100 that seems pretty well run. Scale costs.
- jlawson 8y ago
  The number is extreme... but it's worth noting that Facebook and Google both manage more users, often with more complex information, including people intentionally trying to break and trick their systems - at very low cost. (I'm not sure if Google/FB spend 0.10 per user, but it sure ain't anywhere near $100). I think with a sensibly simplified tax code, and FAANG-level technical innovation, IRS costs could enter that range.
BoiledCabbage 8y ago
I swear people dont understand the size of the US and the scope of problems they tackle. And think everything is a startup for 40 people putting up a SPA. There are 325 million people in the US and that's not counting any companies. 12B means ~$40 annual cost to validate each person's taxes. That's nothing. That's including tracking down fraudsters, costs of audits, ensuring correctness. One millionaire avoiding taxes is avoiding way more than $40 of responsibility...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
devmunchies 8y ago
Agreed. I’d like to see the govt spend less on military and things like funding Israel. Spend the money at home.

PHGamer 8y ago

i guess there should be more enforcement but im not a big fan of an organization that presidents have used again their enemies. Also beauracies tend to grow over time and the amount of tax they need (both sides unfortunately). I would bet california breaks 10% sales tax this decade

danieltillett 8y ago

The political support for underfunding the IRS comes from the complexity of the US tax code combined with the extraordinary powers of the IRS. It leaves the average taxpayer with the feeling that could be audited and even jailed at any time for non-compliance with some obscure rule. I am an Australian and I fear the IRS more than the ATO, not because I owe the IRS anything (I am not a US taxpayer), but because I have US customers. There is probably some obscure form or reporting requirement I have missed or filled in incorrectly that could make me the target of some arbitrary action by the IRS. You can see why foreign financial institutions just won’t have anything to do with US taxpayers.

hulton 8y ago

So many people on here have no idea how income tax works. Laughable.

lvngdfns 8y ago

The IRS administers and enforces the income tax laws beyond the parameters of the laws passed by Congress and signed by the President as well as beyond the parameters laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Moreover, the IRS’s own internal procedures, manuals and literature itself indicate the IRS knowingly deceives the American public about the scope of its true income tax authority. In addition, consider this: https://www.numbersusa.com/news/irs-12-million-illegal-aliens-committed-identity-theft-fy-2017 https://www.numbersusa.com/news/irs-12-million-illegal-alien...

humanrebar 8y ago

> By that time, the Republican narrative had taken hold: The IRS had to be “held accountable” for wasting millions on lavish conferences and persecuting conservative nonprofits for their political beliefs. That is very dismissive of some very salient complaints about how groups were targeted. Read the Wikipedia article. This isn't moonbat pizzagate nonsense. Among keywords targeted were "open source software", "medical marijuana", and "Israel". A Democratic senator said: > U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said, "We should not only fire the head of the IRS, which has occurred, but we've got to go down the line and find every single person who had anything to do with this and make sure that they are removed from the IRS and the word goes out that this is unacceptable." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

messick 8y ago
More like “Democratic”. She played the “see, I can be a Conservative too!” game to try to get the “small government” voters, and it didn’t even work anyway. Might as well quote Rand Paul because the whole “IRS is mean to Republicans” was definitely not a bipartisan belief except for red state Democrats.
rtpg 8y ago
Definitely not great behavior. The idea this was purely an anti-conservative thing when OSS advocacy is on this list is where my eyes glaze over though. Just on its face there is a lot of evidence in the other direction >Ryun has stated he believes that Greenhouse Solutions benefited from its name (although the quick approval might also be due to the fact that Greenhouse Solutions was already operating as a nonprofit and was already on-file with the IRS.) Like “conservative claims bias (but here is the real explanation).” Might as well place “claims to be innocent “ in the profile of every person in Shawshank The insistence of people bringing up this thing as a conservative thing only when there were liberal groups also being targeted (There could have been a proper bipartisan effort against this!) is mind-boggling.
- oTTjRQxkTz 8y ago
  In the TIGTA report from 2017, the Senate Finance Committee (and the IRS itself) found that most, but not all, of the potentially political applications set aside for scrutiny by the IRS were Tea Party and conservative groups. The committee also found that the IRS used names and policy positions in order to identify groups for scrutiny. I think there is evidence to say there was an anti-conservative bias. see TIGTA report: https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2017reports/201710054fr.pdf https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2017reports/2017...

gnadx 8y ago

This happened in the 1920s as well. And then something else happened immediately thereafter.

smsm42 8y ago

Maybe if we had simpler tax code instead of byzantine monstrosity that happens now, when even professionals can't be sure if particular payment is right, and there's no hope regular citizen can figure it out - we'd not need as much funding to the IRS as we need now. But that would mean giving up the power to control people's decisions by messing with taxation - one of the most powerful levers of control Federal Government can have over the private citizen (Obamacare individual mandate has been deemed a "tax", because that'd make it within Fed's constitutional powers) and one of the most powerful levers to control the economy. Having simple tax code removes that power, and that's why it would not become simple.

RickJWagner 8y ago

From the same source, for some context: "Proof the IRS Didn't Target Just Conservatives", from early on in the scandal https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/proof-the-irs-didnt-target-just-conservatives/276536/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/proof-t... After the evidence was overwhelming and denial was impossible: "New Documents Show the IRS Targeted 'Progressive' and 'Tea Party' Groups for Extra Scrutiny" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/new-documents-show-the-irs-targeted-progressive-and-tea-party-groups-for-extra-scrutiny/361125/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/new-doc...

didibus 8y ago

> letting the poor commit too much fraud > Cutting the IRS’s budget didn’t make sense to him. It was one of the few areas of government that had a positive return on investment > Since the IRS-reform bill in 1998, the agency is prohibited from evaluating agents based on how much money they bring in. Instead, they are evaluated on how efficiently they open and close audits I find these pretty interesting. It does feel a little fishy, given the IRS can actually be a revenue generating center for the government. Which would be very different if it was costing more then it brought in.

amaccuish 8y ago

Seems to me, though I'm not American, that many Americans take issue with the arduous process of paying tax in America. I suggest you take a look at Estonia's tax collection system and it's efficiency as a potential model.