The IRS is being investigated for using location data without a warrant
vice.com
vice.com
This is a common trope but is hugely misleading.
The issue is that the IRS can spend e.g. $40 on enforcement to collect $100. But what they're really doing is auditing several totally innocent people to find someone who has significantly underpaid and covers the costs of the audits for the others. The problem with this is that it imposes expensive and extremely stressful audits on several totally innocent people, and if you count their side of the cost, the "profits" are totally destroyed. The taxpayer has a better expected value to eat the cost of a certain amount of tax fraud than to pay the higher cost of a certain number of fruitless audits.
Moreover, the purpose of the IRS is to collect money to fund government programs, not to collect money to fund IRS audits. The money spent doing audits is a dead-weight loss which can't go to programs. Meanwhile the ordinary IRS collection efficiency is >99%. Inverting that and doing audits until the efficiency fell to zero would be a tremendous increase in inefficiency and dead-weight losses, but that's where you would be if the metric was "positive ROI" from the perspective of the IRS.
Is that's what's happening though? Although the budget cuts have reduced the amount of audits across the board, audits of the rich has dropped faster than everyone else[1]. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that the rich has benefited from this policy more than the average joe.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted
The problem with audits of "the rich" is that the gains realized in practice often aren't that large, because their audits are the most expensive even if they have the most potential for uncovering fraud. So they go out and audit several "rich" small businesses, impose major costs on each of them, and uncover significant fraud in one. Which covers the costs of the IRS in doing the other fruitless audits, but not the costs of the other small business owners, who are understandably pretty upset at having to pay a bunch of uncompensated costs and their own time for an audit that didn't uncover anything.
What they ought to do is have the IRS compensate the subjects of an audit for their time and costs, but you can imagine how expensive that would be for the government. (It's already that expensive for the taxpayer.)
Also, they haven't actually stopped doing audits, so enjoy playing Russian Roulette with three bullets in the chamber. Still doesn't sound like a good idea even if there used to be four, does it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Greece#Extent_of...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/days-before-trump-takes-office...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
I completely disagree with what they should be allowed to ask politely for; but, isn’t that the state of the world?
Since Hammurabi.
This is correct, but not intended to be the source of law(1). In fact, Supreme Court decisions aren't a law per se, but a deterrent in creating legally questionable situations.
(1)A Supreme Court decision is made moot by legislation, as per any law, but the deterrent is significantly weaker in practice than a written law as it's scrutinized more closely as a matter of interpretation, court makeup, and public opinion.
Minor nitpick: Not all decisions can be overridden by law. Cases dealing with constitutionality particularly. If the Supreme Court says something is a Constitutional right, only two things can overturn it: (1) a Constitutional Amendment, and (2) another Supreme Court decision[a].
[a] Brown v. Board, for example, overturned Plessy v. Ferguson[b]
[b] Well, not exactly. They didn’t say they were overturning that decision, but it made the old one moot by saying the opposite of it (leading to the same result).
No dude, that's the point of having written laws.
For reference and consistency.
The same reason judicial decisions (especially appellate ones) applying those laws are also put in writing, and the same reason that such decisions are binding on lower courts, and considered persuasive though not binding authority for other courts in applying the same law.
https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/lawschool/pre-law/intro-to-....
In 7000 years of existence, most major cultures that survived gave hero-like status and higher offices to elders that survived to old age.
They were the source of knowledge, experience and truth.
It is only in our degenerate times in which we think 71yr olds are more than a hindrance and less of an asset.
We turn around and instead give a platform to a 15 year old Greta who could not even narrate what it is like to have a baby and has no clue about life. We send 18yr olds to collegr to criticize the foundations of western society. They are still living off their parent's dime.
We are truly in a mess
Our country is truly destined to fail
IRS should write an app...
Just don't make enough income to interact with them. You don't have to be paid above $19,700 a year, you choose to be paid.
Until there is real privacy enforcement here, and it's clear that location data is owned by the person being tracked and not some third party that happens to have their hands on it, I don't see this pattern going away.
I think privacy should be seen as a spectrum, not just a binary private/public.
Would that be legal without a warrant?
That isn't a disincentive...they can continue to violate the law, because there is nothing stopping them...merely laws that prevent them from using the illegally acquired information if the defendant has a competent lawyer. But never a penalty for illegally acquiring the information in the first place.
"The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."
https://www.justice.gov/crt/deprivation-rights-under-color-l...
...acts under "color of law" include ... acts done beyond the bounds of that official's lawful authority, if the acts are done while the official is purporting to or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties.
But often it's not, and like anything, the way we do it is figure it out in court. Which is crazy but that's it.
Our system 'incentivizes rule testing' because it's the only way to find out where the boundaries are.
It's ridiculous: the best lawyers in the world enact laws that are summarily overthrown by other lawyers who are Judges. That shouldn't be possible.
It would be cool if lawmakers and the judiciary had a way of finding the limits without having to test them and wait years in court.
We have to spend 10 years for the courts to decide what the hell we meant when we wrote copyright law? It's just dumb.
At very least, for national security we could have a Judicial oversight team who can maybe make rulings and then clear actions before they are taken.
After a few nullifications the legislators will learn to be more careful. Painful but positive process.
But, but, but, muh criminalz amok! You say. And yet convictions are thrown out all the time for unlawful searches.
All laws are unclear.
Particularly the most important one, the Constitution.
They are forever in refinement.
We do. See, e.g., 18 USC 241, Conspiracy against rights, and 18 USC 242, Deprivation of rights under color of law.
Its just that the people who would prosecute those charges are often not inclined to do so for federal government agents doing so as a matter of policy rather than as rogue actors.
The issue is there is no repercussion for doing something unconstitutional and having a court strike you down years later. Prison time fixes this calculus fast; there should be new legislation on this ideally.
I'm not saying we wouldn't have a host of other problems.
It would make the revolving door situation even worse. Can you trust a legislator to deal impartially with industry-specific legislation if they have to find a job in that industry 5 years later?
Now like I said I don't think there's any way to get back to that, but even the notion of a revolving door situation presupposes professional legislators. Term limits in general would help the revolving door problem by limiting the amount of influence any one individual could ever have.
Members of Congress also have mortgage and college tuition bills to pay. How likely are they to go against the hand that might feed them tomorrow? How motivated will they be in their final 1-2 years of office, knowing it's worth nothing for re-election? How hard would you try at your job if you knew you were getting fired next year no matter what?
> the intent was for "legislator" to never be a full-time job, or even a job at all. It was supposed to be a public service that citizens took on when necessary for the betterment and representation of their communities.
Which is all noble-sounding and Roman and all, but so what? Times change, countries and societies change. Legislation today is incredibly dense and complex and even the full-timers rarely read through all of it, let alone understand it. Part-timers would do even worse.
FWIW the age restrictions on holding office are/were supposed to accomplish what you said about politicians having real-world experience.
1. Someone who has been in the private sector takes a sabbatical to serve in Congress for a term or two. When they're done, they go back to their old job.
2. Someone spends their life working on campaigns and for politicians, then gets elected and holds the same Congressional seat for 50 years.
I think my earlier comments make it clear I think #1 is an ideal and #2 is at best a bastardization of what we should have, but I tried not to editorialize the two options too much.
* You got married, divorced, or became a widow[er]
* You had or lost a child
* You paid mortgage loan interest on a primary residence
* You paid student loan interest
Or any number of other things that could have changed your adjusted gross income, which is what you're actually taxed on.
The only way the IRS can bill you for actual taxes owed is if the tax code is simplified (an objectively good thing). The only way the tax code is simplified to that level is if most deductions and credits disappear, and whether or not that's "good" is arguable at best.
3. Mortgage companies already report mortgage interest to the IRS on form 1098. Not much of a leap for mortgage companies to keep track of whether a mortgage is on someone's primary residence and report that.
4. The IRS has this information from form 1098-E.