5 ms·

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, tha

by 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
  > I've no problem paying taxes, they buy me civilization. This argument is vacuous because taxes aren't about what you pay, they're about what you can make others pay. You are always free to pay whatever you want out of your own funds for the things you think of as "civilization". That isn't a tax, because it's voluntary. The only reason to support a tax is that there are things that you want (your so-called "civilization") which you want other people to pay for, whether they want these things or not.
tareqak 8y ago
Please see this comment by a sibling poster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18658762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18658762 . It sounds like it is money well spent, but it could definitely be improved.
- jblow 8y ago
  Under this logic every agency deserves to have a bigger budget until the budget is equal to the amount of money it brings in -- i.e. bloat up to maximum size. I don't think anyone wants that. It makes sense to try to keep government agencies operating efficiently. Unfortunately I don't trust today's journalism to give me an accurate picture of whether what's going on falls into that category or not.
  - dooglius 8y ago
    No, it means the budget should increase until the marginal ROI becomes zero; the idea is to maximize profit rather than revenue.
    - jessermeyer 8y ago
      I apologize if my question is leading : why should the government be considering with the concept of profit at all? It's not a business.
      - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        Because resources in a society don't just grow on trees. The government using resources means that those resources are not available for other uses. We therefore care (at least somewhat) about the efficiency of government use of resources. That's not the same as "concern for profit". And yet, the question of cost-benefit is pretty much the same question, but in terms of society as a whole.
        nybble41 8y ago
        The key problem is this insidious idea that money brought in by the IRS is "profit", or even just "revenue". That's only the case if you're looking at the IRS in isolation. The government, and by extension the IRS, is supposedly working for society. Money moving from the private sector to the public sector is not "revenue" from society's point of view; it's more like shifting money between two different bank accounts within the same organization. Money which the IRS doesn't collect is still part of society, and still doing good—just not under the auspices of the government. So the question is, for every dollar spent on the IRS, how much money is shifted from the private sector to the public sector; but more importantly, per dollar spent on the IRS, how much benefit is there to having the government spend that money instead of the private party that earned it? (Some would suggest that this "benefit" is negative even if the IRS could achieve perfect enforcement of the tax code for free...)
linuxlizard 8y ago
A US military budget of $660,000,000,000 means each person the USA is paying $2030 to fund the military (including children). At the Federal minimum wage, after taxes, that's 47 full working days to pay it off. So that seems like a lot more to me.
- ohithereyou 8y ago
  Luckily, we can focus on more than one thing at a time. We can oppose foreign interventionist wars and reform the tax code at the same time.
- tick_tock_tick 8y ago
  So our whole military is funded from only 2k a person. That's amazing! I always thought military was a huge part of the budget but it's clearly not.
- jeffbax 8y ago
  The military budget being too big doesn't mean that the IRS budget isn't either. Our tax code is absurd, and held captive to interests that like to keep it that way (the wealthy who can dodge or bother to itemize expenses, and companies who get to tax us to figure out how it all works). We should fix that and reduce the IRS budget further, as well as reduce military spending.
- smsm42 8y ago
  I think having best military in the world for only $2K per year is not bad a deal. I spend more on gym membership. Of course, given that not each person in the US actually pays taxes, and of those who does, they are distributed very unevenly, my actual share is significantly higher, so I wouldn't mind some cuts there.
munk-a 8y ago
I don't disagree that it'd be better to simplify the tax code but the idea that one dollar spend yields seven dollars return doesn't actually work as you're describing. (this paragraph will assume funding for the IRS is done as a flat tax which is how $43 was arrived at) Most people might pay $50 per year to fund the agency while a lot of people are paying nothing. Increasing the budget to reduce evasion will lower how much most people pay closer to that theoretical $43 while also increasing revenue overall. Right now it isn't a problem of the common person getting extorted by the government, the issue is that some people are not paying their fair share and increasing funding to the IRS will catch and punish those people while increasing the funding for the government overall. I am with you on wanting a saner tax system but that isn't really in scope here. Some people are cheating the tax system and it isn't expensive to find and rectify the situation, it isn't even cheap. Tax law enforcement is so lax right now that lowering tax enforcement _costs money_ raising tax enforcement _yields money_ (for a while, there are eventually diminishing returns) So long as the IRS is taking in more money than it is spending to do so there is absolutely no rational reason not to make sure it can maximize that.
a_c_s 8y ago
For better or worse the federal budget for 2019 is $3,422 billion: spending a mere 0.004% of the budget on tax collection seems like a pretty good deal!
- ams6110 8y ago
  There's no budget, and hasn't been for years. Just a stream of continuing resolutions to keep feeding the locust
- DATACOMMANDER 8y ago
  $14B is ~0.4% of $3422B, not 0.004%. You’re off by a factor of 100.
sixothree 8y ago
I would certainly pay more to ensure equity in tax collection.

by jblow 8y ago

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
> I've no problem paying taxes, they buy me civilization. This argument is vacuous because taxes aren't about what you pay, they're about what you can make others pay. You are always free to pay whatever you want out of your own funds for the things you think of as "civilization". That isn't a tax, because it's voluntary. The only reason to support a tax is that there are things that you want (your so-called "civilization") which you want other people to pay for, whether they want these things or not.

tareqak 8y ago

Please see this comment by a sibling poster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18658762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18658762 . It sounds like it is money well spent, but it could definitely be improved.

jblow 8y ago
Under this logic every agency deserves to have a bigger budget until the budget is equal to the amount of money it brings in -- i.e. bloat up to maximum size. I don't think anyone wants that. It makes sense to try to keep government agencies operating efficiently. Unfortunately I don't trust today's journalism to give me an accurate picture of whether what's going on falls into that category or not.
- dooglius 8y ago
  No, it means the budget should increase until the marginal ROI becomes zero; the idea is to maximize profit rather than revenue.
  - jessermeyer 8y ago
    I apologize if my question is leading : why should the government be considering with the concept of profit at all? It's not a business.
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      Because resources in a society don't just grow on trees. The government using resources means that those resources are not available for other uses. We therefore care (at least somewhat) about the efficiency of government use of resources. That's not the same as "concern for profit". And yet, the question of cost-benefit is pretty much the same question, but in terms of society as a whole.
      - nybble41 8y ago
        The key problem is this insidious idea that money brought in by the IRS is "profit", or even just "revenue". That's only the case if you're looking at the IRS in isolation. The government, and by extension the IRS, is supposedly working for society. Money moving from the private sector to the public sector is not "revenue" from society's point of view; it's more like shifting money between two different bank accounts within the same organization. Money which the IRS doesn't collect is still part of society, and still doing good—just not under the auspices of the government. So the question is, for every dollar spent on the IRS, how much money is shifted from the private sector to the public sector; but more importantly, per dollar spent on the IRS, how much benefit is there to having the government spend that money instead of the private party that earned it? (Some would suggest that this "benefit" is negative even if the IRS could achieve perfect enforcement of the tax code for free...)

linuxlizard 8y ago

A US military budget of $660,000,000,000 means each person the USA is paying $2030 to fund the military (including children). At the Federal minimum wage, after taxes, that's 47 full working days to pay it off. So that seems like a lot more to me.

ohithereyou 8y ago
Luckily, we can focus on more than one thing at a time. We can oppose foreign interventionist wars and reform the tax code at the same time.
tick_tock_tick 8y ago
So our whole military is funded from only 2k a person. That's amazing! I always thought military was a huge part of the budget but it's clearly not.
jeffbax 8y ago
The military budget being too big doesn't mean that the IRS budget isn't either. Our tax code is absurd, and held captive to interests that like to keep it that way (the wealthy who can dodge or bother to itemize expenses, and companies who get to tax us to figure out how it all works). We should fix that and reduce the IRS budget further, as well as reduce military spending.
smsm42 8y ago
I think having best military in the world for only $2K per year is not bad a deal. I spend more on gym membership. Of course, given that not each person in the US actually pays taxes, and of those who does, they are distributed very unevenly, my actual share is significantly higher, so I wouldn't mind some cuts there.

munk-a 8y ago

I don't disagree that it'd be better to simplify the tax code but the idea that one dollar spend yields seven dollars return doesn't actually work as you're describing. (this paragraph will assume funding for the IRS is done as a flat tax which is how $43 was arrived at) Most people might pay $50 per year to fund the agency while a lot of people are paying nothing. Increasing the budget to reduce evasion will lower how much most people pay closer to that theoretical $43 while also increasing revenue overall. Right now it isn't a problem of the common person getting extorted by the government, the issue is that some people are not paying their fair share and increasing funding to the IRS will catch and punish those people while increasing the funding for the government overall. I am with you on wanting a saner tax system but that isn't really in scope here. Some people are cheating the tax system and it isn't expensive to find and rectify the situation, it isn't even cheap. Tax law enforcement is so lax right now that lowering tax enforcement _costs money_ raising tax enforcement _yields money_ (for a while, there are eventually diminishing returns) So long as the IRS is taking in more money than it is spending to do so there is absolutely no rational reason not to make sure it can maximize that.

a_c_s 8y ago

For better or worse the federal budget for 2019 is $3,422 billion: spending a mere 0.004% of the budget on tax collection seems like a pretty good deal!

ams6110 8y ago
There's no budget, and hasn't been for years. Just a stream of continuing resolutions to keep feeding the locust
DATACOMMANDER 8y ago
$14B is ~0.4% of $3422B, not 0.004%. You’re off by a factor of 100.

sixothree 8y ago

I would certainly pay more to ensure equity in tax collection.