Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

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> Axios reported that as much as half of all unemployment insurance paid out has been stolen.

I can't help but notice that people tend to talk about unemployment in terms of percentages instead of in terms of dollars. While 2020 was obviously an exception it looks like the US has paid out generally around $30billion most years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W825RC1

Lots of companies make more than every year in pure profit, not just revenue. Apple and Google made more than that last quarter:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/gross-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gros...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/gross-p...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/gro...

These companies are all doing the "Double Irish" tax dance, so how much of that profit do you think is flowing back into the USA? I feel like if it were really about the dollars we would be fighting these corporate tax arrangements instead of trying to make poor peoples' lives even worse than they already are.

Your argument is that high levels of fraud by international crime syndicates isn't the real problem, the problem is that we don't tax corporations enough to be able to withstand that fraud?

I'm sorry, that's completely ridiculous.

When you profile code, do you spend your time fixing the most resource-intensive function or the function whose name you don’t like?

Maybe you disagree with the suggestion that there are way, way bigger fish to fry, and we should prioritize our limited resources accordingly. But to say that it’s “completely ridiculous?” That’s a little over the top.

In your analogy your implication would be that the software engineer should spend their effort in the corporate boardroom arguing for changes in product requirements rather than in fixing bugs in the current product.

The requirements are fine, the requirements are to pay 20% tax on your profits.

The bug is in the code, the interface with international trade. It's allowing many orders of magnitude more tax to disappear than the pesky unemployment fraud code.

So no, I think his analogy is solid, the requirements are clear, the implementation is at fault.

I am sure many including myself are going to disagree with the assertion that the "requirements are fine"

For fucks sake one is breaking the law. Corporations are following the law. There is no requirement that corporations pay 20%, that is crap you made up.

The law is quite clear on fraud.

In the analogy the law is the requirements, enforcement is the implementation. You don’t like the requirements, sure. The implementation is still broken because it doesn’t address the fraud. It can’t do anything about the requirements because those are outside the scope of things that can be changed by the implementor.

The analogy is absolutely shit because it presumes the same actor writing the code can change the requirements, which is not true in software engineering nor in the US government.

It’s completely ridiculous because those companies aren’t breaking the law.

To your code profiling analogy, we’ve seen a problem and the solution proposed is just to buy more hardware to workaround it.

> It’s completely ridiculous because those companies aren’t breaking the law.

Yes, that makes it worse, unless you think the poor can afford to do a lot of lobbying for more favorable tax laws.

So your answer is we shouldn’t enforce laws because there exist law abiding rich corporations? It’s not even logically coherent.

I’m all for passing laws to repeal tax exemptions but that has jack shit to do with massive fraud.

You don’t encourage reproduction to deal with a murder problem.

it's that we don't really tax them at all. we spend so much money and time chasing pennies rolling away on the floor while the vault is being robbed.

The GDP of the US last year was less than 21 trillion, and we're talking about fraud that's allegedly 400 billion. Ergo, we're talking about ~2% of GDP. That's not "chasing pennies."

To put that in different context, 400 Billion is about 4x as much as the federal government spends on education. It is about 15x what we spend on energy infrastructure.

400 billion is a 2% of GDP but >10% of the federal budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...

400bn is so patently false.

The money is taxed when individuals finally get it, assuming they are US residents or citizens and earn above the minimums required to pay taxes. Corporations don't need to pay taxes at all in theory; it just double-taxes the same income and leads to the govt adjusting rates accordingly to achieve the same outcome (e.g., avoid driving corporations overseas with an uncompetitive high tax regime, which the US currently has).

The money is taxed before it reaches individuals. That’s all still future tax money.

Double Irish doesn’t even exist anymore. The least you could do is keep your off topic rant up to date.

The dollars are relevant, but the widespread fraud is the more important aspect.

> the widespread fraud is the more important aspect

Agreed!

In the five years preceding 2020 the US averaged ~2million people claiming unemployment (high of ~2.4, low of ~1.7): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCSA

Amazon's employee headcount alone could make up half of that figure, at ~1.3 million in 2020: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number...

Add a few more big corporations and I agree we have a very widespread problem:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/num...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...

They told me the wealth will trickle down, so why are we looking at the people already on the bottom to get the money flowing when there's a clog? I guess we're on the Golden Standard after all.

The number of employees has what to do with people defrauding unemployment insurance?

You do know that the discussion is about people who are abusing unemployment, not unemployed people, right?

> You do know that the discussion is about people who are abusing unemployment, not unemployed people, right?

The effect of combating so-called "abuse" can only make it harder for everyone who legitimately needs unemployment. These people are already time-poor in many other ways (e.g. riding a bus vs owning a car), and every additional hoop you make them jump through means a certain percentage will just give up and suffer. You understand this, right?

> The effect of combating so-called "abuse"

We’re talking about people who are stealing money meant for unemployed people and you can’t even bring yourself to admitting that is even a problem. If you’re going to scare quote “abuse”, why don’t you steal from unemployment as well since you don’t seem to think there is anything wrong with it?

> percentage will just give up and suffer.

This is already happening with the existing paperwork. What are you doing to advocate that people don’t even need to pick up the phone or get out of bed to get their unemployment?

> You understand this, right?

You understand that rampant fraud can cause the collapse of the entire setup right?

So you’re presented with a massive amount of money that is being stolen and your answer is to just raise taxes to make up for it?

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