Sounds like the IRS should be the most funded government agency.
[0] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/national-taxpayer-advocate-deli...
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_respo...
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.
The difference between the US and Mexico in terms of corruption is not that the people in the US are pure of heart, it’s that coordinating corrupt and illegal activities is next to impossible when law enforcement are clean.
What are some differences between law enforcement in the US and Mexico?
> "Yet this is precisely what we are doing with the IRS budget."
They might, if $8 out of the $7 brought in by that unit were cannibalized from other units.
If all the money were to go to the IRS, congratulations, you achieved communism.
> IRS Funding Decisions Fail to Take Into Account “Return on Investment.” On a budget of $11.8 billion, the IRS collected $2.52 trillion in FY 2012. That translates to an average return-on-investment (ROI) of about 214:1. Yet the appropriations process treats the IRS like any other discretionary spending program, with no explicit recognition that each dollar appropriated for the IRS generates substantially more than one dollar in additional revenue. Last year, the IRS Commissioner estimated in a letter to Congress that proposed reductions in the IRS budget would cause tax collections to fall seven times as much. > > “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.”
Even if the money it brought in came mostly from the shareholders, and disproportionately those most engaged in corporate governance?
And that's only counting the IRS's side of the costs.