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The main reason for this is taxes. It is the same reason why India's government is also trying to ban cash (with very negative results for the economy). You se
by hristov 4y ago
The main reason for this is taxes. It is the same reason why India's government is also trying to ban cash (with very negative results for the economy).
You see rich people have to use banks. Because over certain sums, using cash just becomes way too dangerous. So they use banks which means the banks report to the government and the government gets their taxes. But rich people also often influence the government (or even outright run it). And they hate paying taxes. So they want to shift some of the taxation burden on to the middle class and the poor. But poor people often use cash and sometimes skim on taxes. I am sure this happens with some of the more adventurous middle class too. For smaller sums cash is perfectly manageable.
Thus, the government becomes very concerned and does everything it can to "help" the poor move to more modern electronic payments.
- idan 4y agoThis is totally unaligned with my experience. Yes, the wealthy can afford to find ways to cheat on everything. But all segments of society are dodging taxes. As a middle-class salaried employee, your income is taxed down to the last decimal place. But if you work in the trades, or anything else where many transactions are handled in cash, then tax evasion is _rampant_. And you know who is usually party to that? The tradespeople AND the relatively wealthier folks giving them envelopes of cash in exchange for a "discount" because the transaction isn't reported. Will those stop? Probably not. But at least in larger sums it should make people afraid of dodging their tax burden.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tpoacher 4y ago> The main reason for this is taxes The reason doesn't really matter. What matters is that it's happening.
- radiKal07 4y ago> they hate paying taxes. So they want to shift some of the taxation burden on to the middle class and the poor. I don't understand how making middle/poor class pay more taxes spares the rich from taxes.
- octagonal 4y agoIt acts as a "pre-emptive" tax shift. If more people pay taxes there's going to be less pressure on the government to set an ever higher tax rate, because now they receive more money while levying the same amount.
- PietdeVries 4y agoIf more taxes is the reason for this rule, then why try to justify it with references to terrorism?
- cracrecry 4y agoAs someone who has lived in socialist countries for a long time... the Government always wants more money until they have it all. It is as simple as that. "Less pressure" on the Government is a joke. The more it has, the more it wants. If you give your power away, they take it, and want more. Power 101. The money will be spent on things like public Media and public education to make propaganda for the Government. And on making the people in power mega rich, just like in China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela or Argentina.
- yucky 4y agoGovernments only get bigger, never smaller.
- josephcsible 4y agoThe government needs a certain amount of revenue. If some people get away with cheating on their taxes, then the tax rates for everyone else need to be higher to get that much revenue.
- wsc981 4y agoIncome tax should be abolished though. Wealthy people can avoid it easily (get 1 USD wage as CEO and remainder in stock, for example). Only consumption and wealth should be taxed. Wealthy people tend to consume more anyways. For some goods & services (energy consumption for example) a progressive tax rate might be appropriate, with tax exception for people who consume the least (as poor tend to do). Luxury goods and services (private planes and yachts, luxury car brands, etcetera should also have a higher than normal tax rate, since for wealthy people the barrier to buy would still be low and poor or middleclass people can’t afford such goods and services anyway. A system without income tax could also result in very simple tax reporting for most people, an additional benefit.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoCash transactions seem to be on the way out in most Indian metros. However, once you move out of the big cities and into the small towns, cash still rules.
- mirekrusin 4y agoNowadays you have to have payment terminal if you want the luxury of begging when living under the bridge.
- cm2187 4y agoIt’s hard not to see financial repression as another likely motive. Make it impossible for someone to operate without a bank account, then use the banking system as a mean to retaliate against your political ideas like Trudeau did already. It’s similar to covid apps being used to prevent protests in China. There is a worrying return to authoritarianism everywhere. People forget that none of their rights would have been won if there wasn’t any wiggle room in the system, for people to do illegal things before they get accepted as legal, like smoking pot, being gay, being pro-democracy, etc.
- dannyw 4y agoThe freezing and debanking of protestors is a shockingly dangerous precedent. You are literally removing people's functional access to food, water, and shelter.
- dmurray 4y agoWait till you hear the rest of what Israel does to certain protestors...
- blfr 4y agoCanada used to be a normal country though, even kind of nice, not an apartheid state. Expectations are different.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Cameri 4y agoCanada has a very dark history of violence against natives. The reputation of "being nice" is a recent media myth.
- blfr 4y agoVirtually every country has a dark history of violence. And Canada doesn't even crack the top 10 there. I meant it within a reasonable frame of reference, like say 90s and 00s.
- asah 4y agofwiw, NIS 6K (USD$1.7K) single transactions is exceptionally rare for poor people.
- tinus_hn 4y agoAnother ‘neat’ aspect is that this makes society shun even more those undesirables that can’t get a bank account.
- softgrow 4y agoAustralia tried to introduce a similar thing with reporting of cash transactions of AUD10,000 except buying a car. https://treasury.gov.au/policy-topics/economy/black-economy https://treasury.gov.au/policy-topics/economy/black-economy The proposal died, I'm not sure why. Personally I wouldn't be affected, but apparently 3% of Australia's GDP is in the "black economy".
- netsharc 4y ago> reporting of cash transactions of AUD10,000 except buying a car. I wonder if the exception is easily abused. "Here's a 1980's beater and a suitcase which does not contain cocaine, that'll be 30 thousand dollars please!".
- pas 4y agothere's still a paper trail for buying a car (plus unreasonable prices stick out more than simply reporting to buy art in cash or whatever)
- beagle3 4y agoThe Israeli version is not new. It was introduced 3 years ago (perhaps more?) with the sums that are legal to transact in cash reducing every year or so. At first, it was sums that only affected people who were (likely) doing things illegally (e.g. drugs, bribes, tax evasion, money laundering, etc). So there was little to no protest -- very few people realized where this was going. Now, it basically affects everyone - the current threshold is in the between minimum wage and average wage, closer to minimum, with exceptions for effectively 5-year-or-older-common-cars and a couple more things. In a couple of years, the threshold would likely be lower than minimum wage (either by rule change, or by inflation that would bring minimum wage above current threshold), and at that point, the threshold would be "money you can give your kids to buy to stuff for themselves at the store, and not much more". Slow boil, works great on populations.
- from 4y agoRelated: The $10,000 reporting threshold in the US has not been updated since the 70s. There have been multiple bipartisan attempts to update it to $20-30k (which is still half of what it should be according to CPI) but for some reason they have not gone anywhere. Most CTRs are basically spam at this point. A lot of people are seeing that the current BSA system incentivizes filling out SARs on everything possible to absolve yourself of liability instead of providing actionable intelligence but no one wants to change anything because they will look "soft" on crime/terrorism/Russia/whatever nonsense. Something like 95%+ of SARs don't result in any sort of criminal referral which is a pretty bad false positive rate in my view.
- unmole 4y ago> It is the same reason why India's government is also trying to ban cash (with very negative results for the economy). The Indian government is not trying to ban cash. Demonetization replaced old currency notes with new ones and the total cash in circulation increased after demonetization played out. In India, only the salaried class fully pays their taxes. Businesses which deal in cash don't and anything that makes tax evasion difficult is a Good Thing⟨™⟩.
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- rwmj 4y agoIf they're already doing something illegal (avoiding tax, buying drugs or whatever), surely they'll ignore this law on cash transactions as well?
- lordgrenville 4y agoNo, people should pay taxes that they owe. Allowing people to hide income as a form of progressive taxation is inefficient and unjust. This kind of framing of everything as class war is such a terrible way to discuss policy. I acknowledge that there are valid privacy grounds to oppose the move to cashless/less-cash. I just don't accept the argument that it should be easier for middle-class plumbers to not declare their income.
- oleganza 4y agoYou understand that "taxes you owe" are defined as an optimization function (Laffer curve), not some kind of moral imperative? By the very definition of the process you cannot possibly "owe" these taxes.
- lordgrenville 4y agoThe Laffer curve is a theoretical tool used by economists. The tax you owe is whatever is specified in the tax code.
- shepherdjerred 4y agoYou don’t think tax evasion is morally wrong? How do you think governments raise funds for your roads, utilities, and military?
- FpUser 4y agoI think that the governments encroaching on rights is what really morally wrong. Wake me up when they are personally responsible for the harm they do.
- yucky 4y ago>You don’t think tax evasion is morally wrong? You can easily make the argument that tax evasion is morally right, since much of our tax money goes to a military that destabilizes "unfriendly" governments around the world and spills as much blood as needed to maintain our globalist economy.
- 4y ago
- inglor 4y agoIsraeli here - large cash transactions have already been banned for a few years mostly successfully - this just lowers the limit from ±$5000 to ±$2000