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throwawaygogo

If you make a lot, it is important to keep it private.

1. People kidnap your child, knowing you can pay ransom.

2. People jump in front of your car, knowing you can pay when sued.

3. People break into your house, knowing you have things worth stealing.

4. People hack into your private photos, knowing you can pay blackmail.

Anonymity is the most important defense against the evils of man. They don't hurt you now, because they don't _know_ to hurt you.

The government provides no bodyguards. The police investigates only after the crime. Anonymity is the most important defense. Don't take it away.

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The US isn’t Mexico or Colombia. The government is in charge and organised corruption is so difficult you get amateur hour stuff like $100,000 bribes that legislators hide in the freezer[1]. That is a tiny bribe and a ludicrous way to hide it. There are Bangladeshi civil servants that get bigger bribes and they get away with it. The joy of living in a country where the most corrupt state is a battle between Illinois and New Jersey is that mostly things work and mostly there are no bribes and when there are mostly people go to prison. A country like that is impossible to run a kidnapping gang in. The police can and do stop it if you try. Without an organisation all you have are fools. Fools don’t even shave and dress to blend in when they travel to the suburbs where there’s more money. Fools do pantomime crime instead of figuring out where the money is. The US has small areas of highly localised high crime, committed by morons. It’s worse than Switzerland or France but kidnapping, blackmail? The police are mostly reasonably competent and rich people either live in areas the police will take care of it or have security. If Jeff Bezos doesn’t try to hide his money why should you worry?

[1]http://edition.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/21/jefferson.search/...

Jeff Bezos is in another league. If you don't have quite as much money as him, but still a lot (relative to the average), you are probably an easier target. Not just by obvious criminals, but even leeching family members or gold-diggers. The latter may leave you much worse off!

It can happen in the US too.

http://amp.timeinc.net/time/money/5498143/eddie-lampert-tryi...

Even if everything you said had been true (e.g. Harry Reid became a millionaire just doing smart investment of his public servant salary) dealing with the fools trying to rob and kidnap you is not going to be pleasant.

I can tell all these things just by casually visiting a mall car park. I get to vote on the CEO's wages for the stocks I hold. Every public company executive in the country is a google search away.

Hell, I could probably locate a large list of rich people to go kidnap/rob/extort within 15 km of you just from online sources from the other side of the planet.

These problems you posit already exist for people with wealth and they (hopefully) take appropriate steps to protect themselves.

In Mexico, and other countries I'm sure, wealthy people don't drive expensive cars (I suppose those who do, have drivers and bullet-proof cars). I've had friends held up at gunpoint while waiting for traffic to move, even in an old car. It's too easy to call attention to yourself with a nice vehicle.

Well that's a complete lie. I know plenty of people in Maseratis, high end BMW, mercedes, and Audis, amongst others. Only one of them has body guards, and none of them have ever been mugged, kidnapped, etc (or even know someone who has been kidnapped). No one has a driver or bullet proof cars either.

We must know very different people! I'm really glad you haven't had friends who have experienced trauma. It's really, really awful when it happens.

This is true only for those that flash their wealth. I might be worth millions, but if I am driving a 10 year old Toyota, you wouldn’t know. Obviously this doesn’t apply to high profile jobs like the CEOs etc

Many people that flash their wealth aren’t in fact wealthy.

It's also possible to purchase cars that are extraordinarily expensive that the average person walking in the street wouldn't think twice about:

- Renault 5 Turbo: now worth anywhere between £60,000 and £120,000

- Peugeot 205 GTI: £15,000 to £20,000

- Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500: one recently sold for £113,000 (https://www.evo.co.uk/ford/ford-sierra/20210/ford-sierra-cos...)

If you don't flash your wealth but people have a way of knowing it you are still being safe thanks to the fact that there are many more rich people to attack, flashy or not.

You can tell that somebody has 100k to spend on a car but not that this person has 10 millions.

Any data broker will happily sell you a list of high net worth individuals for a few dollars, customized any way you like it.

And I will not appear on such a list.

I don't want to live in a cage. I keep my assets private, to protect my family.

This article is about income tax being public, not assets. Though if you own assets like property or a home that info is public already.

> The government provides no bodyguards. The police investigates only after the crime. Anonymity is the most important defense. Don't take it away.

Does people that make more money keep it private thou? I see what cars people have, what neighborhood they live in, what clothes they wear, ... The tax returns mainly show how fare people is taxed and gives you information on how are your skills valued in the system.

Your arguments can also be used to not show public prices for cars, houses, clothes... but, we do it. It is just salaries that are hidden. But my manager knows my salary. And big corporations know the salary of hundred of thousands of employees. So, it is hidden only of part of the population.

This seems an appeal to fear without much justification.

> 2. People jump in front of your car, knowing you can pay when sued.

People drives Ferraris. I do not need to know your economic situation to know that your Ferrari has a good insurance. Is people constantly jumping in front of Ferraries?

> 3. People break into your house, knowing you have things worth stealing.

Thieves know which neighborhoods are richer than the others.

> 4. People hack into your private photos, knowing you can pay blackmail.

This has been done to rich and poor alike.

> The government provides no bodyguards. The police investigates only after the crime. Anonymity is the most important defense. Don't take it away.

I cannot understand how a comment with false information is the top comment. Of course police investigates suspicious activities even before there is a crime. What are you talking about?

I think that your fear is real. But it is not justified. The goal of letting others see the salaries is to get a more efficient job market. I can know if my salary is 30% below the average, or if I should change industry. It is a very useful information for the general population.

Sweden's tax disclosure laws keep a record of who requested this information, which is a good solution for your concerns

Not to mention that there are many other already public & private records that already can provide information on wealth (company ownership records, house ownership records, etc...)

There are regular news articles in Swedish tabloids like "Who makes most money where you live?". So this isn't correct.

Speaking from Norway, the media gets access to the complete tax lists, and are assumed to publish information contained in them responsibly. They have to use "journalistic discretion" and cannot make the full list available. For everyone else, lookups in the list are logged and available to the person that has been looked up.

Personally, I'm not sure I'm so super happy with this system, but it's very much in tune with our culture where being in a significantly better position than the average is seen as suspect.

In Sweden, the default is to make everything public, public domain style, so with income taxes for example, the amounts are public, but the sources of the income are not (because of personal integrity, not to be able to map military, police etc. employees).

A perhaps internationally unusual thing this creates is that entire police investigations, including interview transcripts, are usually available to download as soon as court proceedings begin.

It’s probably even more important to know income sources of government employees (I write this as a former employee of state and federal government). And FWIW you can lookup the salary of all federal employees, and that of government employees in certain states.

As a side note, this transparency helps expose potential corruption in handling evidence, awarding defense contracts, etc.

Yes and no.

All incoming and outgoing correspondence is kept on a public record and can be requested. So if you send in a request per e-mail or post, it can be accessed. But you can still can in anonymously or walk in to their office and request it physically, without having to identify yourself.

Source: Used to work as a journalist in Sweden, dealt a lot with requesting information from governmental and military organizations.

Everyones's reported income, address, date of birth, family and a whole lot more information is publicly available on request. If you have particular reasons (e.g. threat of violence), you can request to have your identity hidden and exempt from public disclosure.

What additional information--since you mentioned anonymity, I mean in an entropy/information gain sense--is learned from income taxes? I should say from the get-go that I assume these public income tax disclosures would map names to income, but not names to addresses.

I would think we already have extremely predictive, though broad (e.g. interval censored), indicators of income and wealth that are sufficient to cause the threats you mention. Currently, we can map ZIP code to income. And we can map targeted names to ZIP code, or use consumer files to map large numbers of names to ZIP code.

There may theoretically exist a class of recluse who lives in a shack but makes a gajillion dollars. That person would be partially de-anonymized by this process. But under the current threat model, there are paper-poor people living in expensive or apparently expensive places who face additional risk as well. Net-net, hard to say which group has more people.

If the costs are the same, then the argument should focus primarily around the comparative benefits. That's a case I expect the article and other comments can articulate better than I can.

This is only true for the super rich. See Norway or Finland where the taxes are public. They have lower crime rates than the US. It seems that the publication has the opposite effects by reducing inequality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/world/europe/norway-kidna...

That is one incident. Do you have numbers for the US and Norway per capita?

I think that's a huge stretch. Norway and Finland have tons of other things going on that reduce inequality beyond just publication of taxes.

Why is it a huge stretch? I didn't say that it is the only one.

I'm saying that publicly releasing all tax returns would do nothing to release inequality unless many of those other factors (mainly high redistributive taxes) were in place, and at least the US has shown 0 appetite for those types of measures.

I fully agree, but at least by having the information what other people earn in the same company gives them a lever in salary negotiations.

The US public has great appetite for inequality-reducing measures, as any poll will tell you. The political class does not. But perhaps publicly releasing tax returns would spur enough public disgust when people realize just how little in taxes the ultra-wealthy are paying that the above dynamic could change.

It’s a huge stretch because you haven’t provided a plausible causal mechanism. All you’ve done is point out correlation and correlation is almost meaningless on its own.

So maybe if rich were visible in the US they would have more incentives to make sure there's not so much inequality that poor people would think kidnapping their kid is a good course of action in terms of risk-reward.

I live in post-comunist country and I've seen crimes on the street back then and now.

I can't tell you how wonderful it is that people you meet on the streets have something of their own, something they would risk loosing by attacking you.

It is not much comfort to the Norwegian familes extorted, that crime rates are low.

Publication of tax returns does nothing to reduce inequality. A state which supports people does a lot to reduce inequality.

TFA claims that it does, because it galvanises people to do something about it.

Reduced income inequality is, according to TFA, a second order effect of publishing tax records.

This isn't the only difference between us and these countries

This is fear mongering. Other commenters have pointed out that in other places on our planet, public information of wealth is, apparently, not followed by a deluge of targeted crime locusts.

No. The salary of every public company officer is well known, nobody has these problems.

Untrue. Many people are victims of kidnap, extortion.

Who in the United States?

It’s not a very reliable defense. I wouldn’t want to have to rely on only it.

There are many cases of this. And if you want to travel, you have to keep this in mind.

you can find that stuff with a phone book or other public directory of wealthy zip codes

If someone lives in Palo Alto it's a very high likelihood they have a lot of money or insurance that will pay out a lot.

> The government provides no bodyguards.

Fairly common to hear that some person has been placed under police protection.

This is mildly paranoid. Everyone has public record that gives this kind of information away, as well, like records of housing sales data. Besides which we should also drastically reduce economic inequality which would reduce the motive for these kinds of activities, anyway.

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