America, and the world, should see everyone's tax returns.
What's the big secret? If you're proud of what you earn and the taxes that flow from that then show it. If you're not proud, then that should be exposed too.
What's the big secret? If you're proud of what you earn and the taxes that flow from that then show it. If you're not proud, then that should be exposed too.
1) There are many people in my life who would make it much more difficult if they knew how much I make. I've kept it from them for a very good reason and they're definitely the kind of people who would just go and look that kind of stuff about random people they know. This would tell them how much I have in investments and property as well.
2) It would necessarily reveal far too much personally identifying information or not serve the purpose you'd want it to. If I had ran away from an abusive or stalking relationship, they could simply look up the state and municipality I pay taxes in, and what company I worked for, making it almost trivial to find me. This could also mean finding (and targeting) anyone that works for a certain company.
3) It would be far too easy for companies to use this information for any number of purposes. I'm currently getting a huge amount of mail about moving companies and brokers because my landlord publicly put my condo up for sale. It could get much worse than that.
4) If I'm the daughter of an extremely conservative family but I'm working at a strip club, even if I'm "not proud" of what I do that give no good cause to expose it to the world.
These are the situations from off the top of my head and already it would reveal far more information than I'm comfortable with. "If you have nothing to fear than you have nothing to hide" is never an appropriate excuse to curtail anyone's privacy.
Why would "strip club" be exposed? Only the amount you make should be. Your arguments all seem rather selfish. I realise the proposal might be extremely uncomfortable for some, but consider the overall benefits.
Because the EIN is listed on the W-2, which is filed as part of the return.
And if you're going to reply that you meant some abbreviated form of the tax return, then:
The "what have you got to hide" class of arguments you're using to insist we expose an abbreviated version would also apply to expanding the abbreviated version to full disclosure. And you might be reasonable enough to stop, but that doesn't mean others will be.
People have strong motives to want to dig into political opponents or people they don't like, and we know from history the "what have you got to hide" question and friends are routinely used in trying to eviscerate 4A and 5A rights.
But my argument is not so much "what have you got to hide", but more "we're all in this together".
(And yes, people jumping to entirely the wrong conclusion is another potential issue...)
Do you think your 4 examples are endemic problems in those countries?
Because what you pay in taxes has been public information in my home country Norway for many decades. None of the problems you mentioned have been an issue.
As hard as it may seem, Norway values BOTH transparency AND privacy more than the US. So there are lots of laws which protect your privacy.
1) It does not state HOW you make your living. Just roughly how much you pay in taxes and how much you earn. The details are left out.
2) There are always systems in place to help protect citizens with special needs for more privacy.
3) Companies in Norway cannot pass around information about you to each other or store information about you it does not strictly need. It is not like the US where companies can en masse huge amounts of data about customers and sell it to each other. Information gathering for commercial purposes is quite restricted.
4) As a rule in Norway, you are informed about people obtaining information about you. E.g. if a company does a credit history check on me, I will get a mail stating exactly what company credit checked me and word by word, what information they where provided. The credit check info leaves out a lot of the details that would be available in the US.
Same goes if somebody checks your taxes and income. You are informed of who makes the check and what info they have been provided.
I hope this gives an idea of how you can in fact embrace greater transparency while at the same time promote stronger privacy laws.
I can remark that Norwegian politicians and CEOs are among the lowest paid in the world despite Norway being among the richest countries in the world. I think our long tradition for transparency is a contributing factor to that. Not so fun to be greedy when it is obvious to everyone.
Most of your examples also seem to impact those that present differently than they really are, I’m not saying that that’s not a valuable ability but it’s interesting. I wonder how much of our current political situation is due to believing or rejecting how others present...
But if salaries were transparent, there would be much less reason to beat about the bush regarding job offers - It would be quite clear what the going rate was, and how that related to executive pay, etc.
If I ask for you credit history or how much you earn or make in taxes, then you will be informed by the government in letter form, exactly what information I was given about you, as well as my name and address.
That makes it a lot less attractive to snoop around in people's data. Hence in Norway it is mainly news organizations that do these kinds of things in relation to writing articles. Otherwise you make yourself look foolish.
Also it is a bit odd that Americans should be so concerned with privacy as you privacy laws are rather weak to begin with. E.g. unlike Norway you can administer drug tests to any employee in the US or do criminal background checks on all new hires. That would be highly illegal in Norway. Only business which can prove to the government that such checks are vital to the type of the business they do would be allowed to do such checks. E.g. working with children.
Basically the US focus its "privacy" laws on hiding information important to the wealthy, while those at the bottom of the latter have most of their sensitive information easily exposed.
The reason I don't want to share my tax return is that it reveals my income. The last time I revealed my income it created a lot of negative relationships.
It could also be that Waterluvian had a low income and that affected his relationships.
Or it could be that it just differed in a direction (up or down) that his peers didn't expect or appreciate for whatever reason.
I can think of a lot of reasons revealing my income would affect various relationships I have (whether that's a good thing or a bad thing isn't relevant), even though I wish it wouldn't. Information about money does change the way people treat you.
When I was a kid, people knew my family wasn't doing so well and I'd get lots of well-intentioned charitable offers from friends and friends' parents that just made me feel really bad about myself, so there's one way that having a lower income revealed can affect relationships in an apparently positive way that's still uncomfortable.
Why? With coworkers who were jealous?
No, in laws and neighbours. Mother in law assumed all tech is paid the sams: poorly. Because her son is paid poorly for his IT job. So when I bought a house that was significantly larger than hers, the relationship changed. She felt lied to all these years.
I also made the mistake of speaking to a neighbor forgetting that everyone comes from different walks of life. So my house that will be paid off in 7 years with one income was "a humble purchase" while my neighbor and his wife are apparently struggling to keep their house with two jobs. I felt awful about my misstep in words. Really a slap in their face.
Although with those friends we've danced around the income part enough that we know the general income range of each other. I had a situation with work co-workers where we were all the same level and years of experience and we shared salaries, and people got a little salty over <$500 / yr differences.
People ask for a lot of fixes to say, pay inequality between men and women, but I think transparent salaries would go a long way and are a fairly simple mechanism. I have very rarely made the experience that pay inequality, if properly justified, was taken the wrong way.
Market transparency is good!
Frankly, I am not that interested in what others are payed. This is something I can negotiate with my boss myself and isn't my business for other people. And I don't want others to know about my income either. You can be sure that people will judge you by your income and feel superior if they make even 10 bucks more. Even your friends might get jealous about your income.
Some people see a value in discretion and some people do not. I belong to the former. There is just so much baggage attached to that shit that it isn't attractive to me at all.
For modest earners, their public income can become a kind of super credit rating; it can gate access to some businesses and services, or establishments that want an aura of exclusivity, like social clubs. In effect it can make it harder to jump levels on the ladder.
For high earners, their public income can lead to gouging and an unwillingness to discount. A car dealership or a contractor might use it to gauge price sensitivity.
I'm sure there might be complicated social outcomes too. Would dating change in a world with transparent salaries? Would neighborhoods and neighborhood diversity? For the worse, or better?
In most cases it ended up skyrocketing as a result. CEOs could see exactly what every other CEO was on when negotiating. Meanwhile boards didn't want to pay under market rate and be blamed for cheaping out if things went wrong.
That's the wrong intention and not what I described in my post. Maybe in those countries CEO salaries were non competitive or too low compared to the value that a CEO provides. I explicitly said that I see transparency as a mechanism to rationalise salaries, not make them more egalitarian everywhere.
But where I think it without a doubt will have an equalizing effect is between people doing equal work but being compensated differently. That effects ordinary workers more than extraordinary talent.
Try it, it's fun! You get more leverage that way.
I'd rather not have the in-laws knowing exactly how much I make or have my next employer know exactly how much more they're offering than the last one thank you very much. While I understand that in some countries tax returns are public, those countries are very different than the US in a multitude of ways (which are beyond the scope of this comment, I'm not going write a wall of text, those invite nit picking).
But on the flip side, you'll know exactly how much your colleagues make.
Can’t you also ask your co-worker if you care to know?
My thought is this also risks creating unnecessary resentment in the office. (Most people will react negatively finding out a colleague makes $10k more, even if that colleague has more years of experience - people don’t think about compensation rationally)
For most large companies you can already research what the average salary is for a specific position on sites like glassdoor.
Taking privacy away from people and giving them something of no value to them in trade is a poor justification for change.
> If you're not proud, then that should be exposed too.
What if I'm not proud because I earn only half of what my neighbor earns?
Really, so much is wasted to display wealth superiority.
That alone is reason enough not to do it.
upper middle class people are juicy targets, rich enough to get some profit, not enough to have proper security. what could go wrong exposing them all in a nice list, indexed and sortable, right?
How is public financial exposure different from living in an affluent area, having an expensive car, etc, etc?
On the other hand, someone driving an expensive car is not necessarily well off, there are quite a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck that drive "expensive" cars.
Kidnap? It seems a little ridiculous for most cases.
I know a guy - we'll call him Mr. Frugal - he's worth, I'd estimate, $5 to $10 million based on what I know about his income and assets over the last 30 years (I know a fair bit to make that estimation). An old family friend, he's in his 70s at this point. He built his wealth from nothing, very slowly, and is a notorious penny pincher (the most extreme version of it I've ever seen). He lives in the same house he has owned since the 1960s; it's worth $150k-$175k today.
This man would be a very ripe target for any number of schemes. Targeting his bank accounts / investment accounts / personal identity, credit, and so on. That's entirely ignoring any kidnapping or blackmail type risks. It doesn't take more than a few moments of consideration to understand how his finances being made so public would make him a target for all sorts of criminals. That despite the fact that he lives very modestly and there is nothing in his home to indicate such wealth. His wealth is held outside of his home, and that's where you would target him. Frankly, given this is HN, I think it's pretty silly obvious that the physical contents of a home often are not the best target for thieves / criminals today.
They become millionaires and stay millionaires because they don't change their frugal spending habits.
Now certainly these people living modestly don't have assets at home that are juicy targets, but they would be juicy targets for kidnapping and extortion.
If they don´t - someone else will take their stash and have fun with it.
Win-win.
If tomorrow nobody could keep it quiet, it doesn't mean the 60% would all get kidnapped, because today the 40% aren't getting kidnapped.
What benefit are we trying to achieve and how does applying that to most corporations get that? Saying we should have it for publicly traded companies makes a lot more sense than every private company let alone every person.
It can be made to work in societies that are already pretty open and equal, but in a highly unequal society like America?