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IRS Collects $1B in Back Taxes from Millionaires
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ddoolin 2y agoThis is why Republicans are trying to defund the IRS.
- exabrial 2y agoThe problem isn't tax revenue. The problem is the federal government spends $1billion dollars every 1.46 hours. We collect an _absurd_ amount of taxes. Far Far Far Far too much. The vast majority of it is wasted. Collecting more isn't going to solve the problem and it never has.
- halfmatthalfcat 2y agoI personally don’t feel like my tax dollars are wasted, by and large. I also live in a large metro where I see my tax dollars being spent all over the place on worthwhile projects. Is every dollar spent as efficient as possible? No, but humans don’t operate at peak efficiently and never will.
- mythrwy 2y agoThe projects you see in the metro would probably be mostly from local (county/ city) taxes as opposed to federal taxes no? (I do realize the feds sometimes contribute partially). Someone could probably make the same arguments for/against local taxes, but OP appeared to be referring to federal taxes as wasteful.
- apothegm 2y agoFor some things yes, for some no. Fwiw, urban areas contribute FAR more in federal taxes than they get back in services. Those taxes then are used to support suburban and rural areas that receive much more in services than they pay in taxes. Either way, it’s very evident in many urban areas that taxes paid result in both economic and quality of life benefits.
- FireBeyond 2y agoAnd then proponents of an antiquated system try to post memes about how 95% of the counties in the US are red and the electoral college makes sure "cities" don't have an outsized say in government. Perhaps there's a correlation. I do find it amusing how one of the reasons for the "original" (I know) settlers of the US was to get away from feudal landholders dictating politics and life, only to speed run a system where 33,000 sq mi in Wyoming that holds 90,000 people (3 people per square mile) have the same weight as 20 million people elsewhere. This system made sense 200 years ago. Probably. I don't understand why there's this belief that the Founding Fathers were infallible. They certainly weren't. Or this belief that they were all wizened old men. > It’s a simple question—perhaps so basic that it’s been overlooked: How old were the leaders of the American Revolution? > As it turns out, many Founding Fathers were younger than 40 years old in 1776, with several qualifying as Founding Teenagers or Twentysomethings. The Declaration of Independence was signed by: A sixteen year old, a 21 year old, 2 26 year olds, a 27 year old and a 29 year old. Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/08/how-old-were-the-founding-fathers-the-leaders-of-the-american-revolution-were-younger-than-we-imagine.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/08/how-old-were-the...
- lotsoweiners 2y agoMy guess is that you haven’t worked for the government. I’ve spent 20 years working for multiple government agencies and the one commonality is that they are all very wasteful. I’ve spent countless hours working on pet projects for some middle manager or executive who leaves three months later and the project gets scrapped. I’ve seen plenty of passionate developers, both employees and contractors, come in and leave after a year once they’ve understood that no one cares and that they will always be wading through bureaucratic sludge in order to get anything done.
- rhelz 2y agochuckle My guess is you haven't worked much in the private sector :-) You wouldn't even believe the private jets, yachts, huge bonuses, and other things they spend on which have nothing to do with making money. Why, Elon Musk just got Tesla to pay him $50 billion. For what, exactly?
- tiltowait 2y agoThe private sector doesn't have a mandate to serve the people and doesn't take money from me at the threat of imprisonment if I don't comply.
- selfmodruntime 2y agoThe private sector is entirely dependent on the willingness of people to pay them money. Private company revenue is not comparable to tax revenue in orders of magnitude.
- rhelz 2y agoThat doesn't mean it is more efficient. The administrative costs of Social Security, for example, are around 1/2%. That compares very favorably with most of the funds in my 401k.
- selfmodruntime 2y agoGreat. Now, do military spending. Or, you know, the money the Pentagon just loses every year.
- yunohn 2y agoThe unspoken point being made here is about corruption, not efficiency per se. I want all my tax money going towards the public good, not just fractions/percentages of it.
- selfmodruntime 2y ago820 billion dollars (and counting) are spent on war by the US government every year.
- rangestransform 2y agoEven though I use publicly funded infrastructure every day (and I like it, too!), government spending inefficiency in the US is a problem, even compared to “western liberal democracies” as we would say in competitive debate https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html#:~:text=The%20recently%20completed%20Second%20Avenue,place%20even%20as%20the%20M.T.A https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-....
- guywithahat 2y agoIt depends a lot on where you live. In CA they’re spending 100 billion dollars on 500 miles of high speed rail, while in Florida a private high speed rail project spanning 230 miles of rail cost 5 billion. It’s hard to imagine that extra ~85 billion is being well spent, especially given it will almost certainly go further over budget
- Klonoar 2y agoAfter paying taxes in other countries, and then seeing their standard of living, I think there’s probably more room between US tax spend and “peak efficiently” than your comment would lead someone to believe.
- Qiu_Zhanxuan 2y agoEuropean talking but do you feel the proportion of tax being wasted has increased or decreased since the last 2 decades ? Did public service got better or worse ? Social program ? Education ? Foreign Policy ? I always felt that America had low taxes and most of it was used to deliver the bare minimum services (police, defense, public servant, social program) or even below (public schools, teacher, justice, IRS...) what is necessary for a society to sustain itself.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoI see tax wasting increasing. For example my local and state government spend lots of taxes on funding activist / social justice programs that are simply not wanted by most citizens but are still pushed through by dedicated extremist activists. These programs always have generic names and goals like “community building” and they achieve nothing, except handing out our hard earned money to politician’s friends (who they can count on for election support) and their political causes. Meanwhile basic government functions like policing and prosecution and education are failing. Here’s one example among a LONG list of grifts that illustrates how reckless politically biased elected officials can be with everyone else’s money - spending millions so some activist group can run a minor survey: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-spent-3-million-on-research-to-reimagine-public-safety-the-black-brilliance-project-is-the-result/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-s... Another example: here, funding for public schools has increased a huge amount - it is more than double what it was a decade ago. Our schools spend something like 20-25K USD per student per year now. But the schools are in poor physical condition, the quality of education is low, programs like music are on the chopping block, many schools are being closed to save money, the teachers and their unions are unaccountable for performance, and the school/district leaders are focused on political battles like injecting ethnic studies into math (https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/new-course-outlines-prompt-conversations-about-identity-race-in-seattle-classrooms-even-in-math/ https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/new-course-outlin...). The thing is government programs are generally not held to any standard of performance and accountability, and citizens don’t have much time to watch over them. Spending and budgets always go up not down, because there is always some dedicated group fighting to extract something for themselves. The leaders who are enabling all this act in ways that ensure election and re election, not good results for their citizens. And they act in favor of their personal political and ideological goals instead of being neutral. This type of “corruption” then causes many people to want to just reduce taxes because they’re not even getting the basics they thought they already pay for. I don’t have a solution, I just think it is some kind of spiral that leads to people believing taxes are wasted more as time goes on.
- Larrikin 2y agoWhat is it wasted on specifically and what do you think taxes should be spent on specifically?
- lotsoweiners 2y agoIn my 20 years govt experience, it is wasted on pet projects and failed projects created by contractors.
- trust_bt_verify 2y agoIn my 20 years in gov I saw it spent on productive infrastructure projects. Your anecdotes are weak.
- mpalmer 2y agoThere is no "the" problem. You identify one problem to exclusion of the very real, salient problem that the average taxpayer sees the wealthy as not paying their fair share.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI wonder how that perception problem can be tackled? The top 1% of people pay 45% of federal income taxes. The top 10% of people pay 75%. Rates are already highly progressive. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/#:~:text=The%20share%20of%20income%20taxes,policy%20during%20the%20coronavirus%20pandemic https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in....
- rhelz 2y ago// The top 10% of people pay 75% // 75% of what? Income tax? Very misleading--there is more than one way to make money, and those in the top 10% are probably not making most of their money via income. Warren Buffet famously said his secretary has a higher tax rate than he does. // I wonder how that perception problem can be tackled? // The best way would be an even distribution of wealth. The top 1% own half. The other 99% share the other half. You can quote any statistic you'd like, but when 1% own half, the other 99% are not going to think they have a perception problem.
- timcavel 2y ago[dead]
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI said "income tax" in the sentence before the one you quoted.
- BugsJustFindMe 2y ago> The top 10% of people pay 75% Well they own more wealth than the entire bottom 90%, so it seems like they're still underpaying.
- nitwit005 2y agoYou don't actually believe revenue doesn't matter.
- selfmodruntime 2y agoRevenue does matter only if spending has real consequences and if the income stream depends on how your business fares in the market. In this case, revenue is nearly unlimited, earned from an unwilling party without any requirements and there is zero oversight on how it's spent. I think economics is a lot like physics, in a sense. Part of it breaks down when the powers that be become incredibly dense, heavy, and large.
- janalsncm 2y agoThis isn’t about increasing revenue. It’s about making people pay their fair share. Hard working people like us have to pay more in taxes to make up for tax cheats. Tax cheats are basically stealing money from our pockets. So when the IRS comes for them I’m not going to be upset. And I am sure these are people who would say they love America if you asked them. I bet. If you love America so much then pay your taxes.
- oliwarner 2y agoWhy is that too much to spend? What's the right number? How would you achieve that? I hold the opposite opinion. You don't have universal healthcare and who your parents were has a greater determination over your life than you will ever have. Those without rarely get the opportunities you and I ignore every day. You don't pay nearly enough tax for a first world country.
- trealira 2y agoIf the revenue and spending of the US doesn't change, it will default on its debt within the next 20 years. > Under current policy, the United States has about 20 years for corrective action after which no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could avoid the government defaulting on its debt whether explicitly or implicitly (i.e., debt monetization producing significant inflation). Unlike technical defaults where payments are merely delayed, this default would be much larger and would reverberate across the U.S. and world economies. https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2023/10/6/when-does-federal-debt-reach-unsustainable-levels https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2023/10/6/when-... We need to reduce spending and increase taxes, but that's politically unpopular. Ideally, when the economy is good, one should try to pay off the national debt, so that you can run a deficit when the economy is in recession. But the US just spent the last eight years running up incredible deficits; now, the debt needs to be reduced ASAP.
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoOne interesting thing is that the us government can.leverage its national debt....or so it claims.....as this is why we are apparently not freaking out over the debt crisis. The government has learned to use debt as a measure of "progress" like sure technically every us citizen is responsible for that debt but when every vote gets to decide on a handful of people.... Millions could disagree with the representative and yet they still are responsible. Like imagine if the average person could just decide they arnt going to be able to cover interest on the debt they have, yet they still could print tons of money. Money that's only backed by their word, and the debt gets used in your local town negotiations as a weapon.
- mythrwy 2y agoThe federal treasury also spent 140 billion paying just interest on the national debt in June alone (nearly 900 billion year to date). So, this isn't even a drop in the bucket.
- anon373839 2y ago> The cuts were couched as preventions against the IRS “targeting hardworking Americans”—but enforcement actions in general have focused on individuals making $400,000 or more Is the assumption here that if one’s skills are worth $400k, one isn’t hardworking?
- mylastattempt 2y agoIt's all political rhetoric. Whenever you see wording like this ("hard working Americans", "blue collar" vs "white collar") your bs detector should start beeping. These are not factual and substantive discussion points, but political rhetoric to incite the masses. Divide, distract, and thanks for all the money while we keep doing the same as in the past few decades.
- throawayonthe 2y ago[dead]
- mylastattempt 2y agoThis only affects the IRS's cashflow, it's a matter of collecting as the title states. No new policies or tax laws are responsible for this $1B. Just working harder or more focussed at collecting. A good thing, for sure, but not something new or newsworthy for HN if you ask me.
- snotrockets 2y agoThere is a new policy: the IRS was funded to allow investigating and collecting that. For years it was starved, just so it wouldn't be able to. The ROI in investing in the IRS is amazing.
- mylastattempt 2y agoWhile I was aware that the IRS is begin systematically underfunded, you just helped me learn that this $1B was a direct result of a change in that funding/policy. Thanks for sharing!
- snotrockets 2y agoIt’s part of the inflation reduction act https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2024/02/08/empowering-the-irs-understanding-the-full-potential-of-the-inflation-reduction-acts-historic-investment-in-the-internal-revenue-service/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2024/02/08/...