This was buried in the same legislation supposedly drafted to help the poor. But of course, the fattest handouts were all to big banks and the rest of too big to fail corporate America.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-18/u-s-house...
In other words, it's a one-off. Failing to mention that is highly misleading.
Source with both numbers: https://taxfoundation.org/us-households-paying-no-income-tax...
but liars can figure.
Then let them file and report it and pay no taxes like the current system intends
Yes. But when it was temporary there were also very little in terms of federal social programs that people have become quite fond of. Do you propose we get rid of those safety programs along with the income taxes that help pay for them?
There are tons of potentially productive members of society languishing because if they made any serious progress toward improving their lives they'd lose their benefits. The outcomes for children born into such households are... not great.
Have a little perspective and focus your ire on our ridiculous military budget (which is also a welfare program, mind you) instead.
I.e. close all tax loopholes, and make the tax code more sensible, so that you're not forced to cheat or end up uncompetitive.
Napkin math, I'd guess avg $5k from 100m people. Are we really collecting half a trillion dollars a year from people earning subsistence wages?
I’m not saying it come tax is oppressing lower socioeconomic classes or that they disproportionately pay into it.
My point is the opposite. The income tax system helps those classes by funding social programs and we would either need to pare back those programs or find alternative ways of funding them
> Whatever happened to “Hey, I have some apples, would you like to buy them?” “Yes, thank you!” That’s as complicated as it should be to open a business in this country.
With sympathies to Ron Swanson though, I don't think it can really be that simple.
Now, if you're selling apples (and other foods), you may have to deal with health code regulations. If you open a dentist office, you'll probably fall under other regulations. You can argue if those regulations are too heavy or not.
But many products/services in do not have many (if any) regulations governing them in most states/municipalities in the US. Just say you're in business and voila, you are.
Do all these requirements protect people from their employers? Well… maybe kind of. But no, in most circumstances you can't simply start interacting with other people without a lot of red tape.
This new thing is just the payment processors filing their own that just gives the IRS insight into which tax filings to match up.
A single mother selling arts and crafts already had to report earnings. Reporting doesn't mean there is a tax due. The single mother likely has many tax deductions possible just like the mega corps do.
Gusto Contractor plan does look good. Just the right price.
Or is another possibility that these institutions are positioning themselves to become actual banks with their own ATMs so that one could entirely bypass the reporting that banks do for the IRS? Can people extract money from these institutions without interfacing with a bank throughout the transaction?
(Two party system is broken and neither does a good job of serving the interests of their voters. "Vote harder" isn't practically effective and displaces blame to the victims. Ineffective, selfish and corrupt leaders have captured the majority of political positions, and until we get rid of them change is impossible.)
[0] - https://www.oecd.org/development/stats/the07odagnitarget-ahi...
The US and nearly everybody else. The biggest exceptions most recently? Sweden, Luxembourg, Norway. Gee, I just can't figure out why the US doesn't match Norway (or other tiny hyper affluent European nations) on such a matter. The only real exceptional outcomes in that list are Britain and Germany, and France to a lesser degree - outside of that the entire world is largely failing badly at that supposed test.
Meanwhile during that time the US supplied nearly half the world's food aid, while only representing 4%-5% of its population. A tradition of food aid going back more than a century now.
For example:
"The U.S. contributed $3.4 billion to WFP [UN World Food Program] in 2019, which was 42% of all contributions last year." - from the UN WFP homepage. And that's just to one entity.
Globally at present the US is supplying around 40% of the world's food aid all by itself (the number used to be slightly higher in the past and I think the US should do more, however that's still astounding coming from one nation).
You know what the US should do? It should pull its military entirely out of Europe and Asia, and let Russia and China run wild (they'd promptly conquer and pillage like it was the 1930s all over again). North Korea would be in South Korea before the final US troops were out of Asia; South Korea would cease to exist as we know it today within a decade. Then we should cut that related defense spending, and redirect that former defense expenditure to meeting that 0.7% GNI target (and helping the people ravaged by the inevitable large wars, which is how we used to approach the problem circa the WW1 & WW2 eras).
I agree that the military budget is problematic, but it's short sighted to spend too much time worrying about foreign aid. It's a very cheap way to wield influence.
Entitlement costs already dwarf defense spending, and it's going to get a lot more dramatic over the next 20 years.
Entitlement costs aka the people getting money.
> Instead people take out loans and go into debt to keep up
Well that certainly depends on who you're talking about. US households at the median and above are in decent debt shape, including debt interest expenses in relation to household disposable income. The payday loan context trap for the working poor is still every bit as bad as it has ever been.
The biggest household financial threat right now are real consumer prices - including rent/housing, education, energy - rising considerably faster than wages.
~~https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/presidents_fy_2...
the military budget is 50% of the US budget for FY22
https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...
Sure, but this accepts the premise that a million small Etsy shops are worth the government's time, which protects the 0.1%, which is why this argument exists. To quote one of my favorite blog series:
> When they talk about raising taxes on the rich, why do they pick a "low" point and push it higher? Should the highest rates be at $250k/yr? $300k? Another way of doing it, which is precisely why they cannot do it, is start at the top and move down. "We need $1T. Ok, top five guys pay 90%. Not enough? How about top ten guys pay 90%. Not enough? Top...." I'm not advocating this or any other policy, not my place, I am pointing out that doing it the way it's done protects the 1% by letting [everyone else] act as human shields. They take the bullets, the unknown mega-rich take tinted window rides to the Hamptons. During those tumultuous 80 seconds of OWS [...] the majority of the personal attacks were against people who made <$300k, not >$50M. It's easy to hate, and so the media nudges you in the wrong direction.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_sta...
If anything this is the problem. No one thinks they should pay any taxes. Everyone basically wants to free roll the structures built from taxes without paying anything.
I am hardly rich but I gladly pay taxes. I would prefer to pay less but that is the reason I vote.
If you want to blow it all up then I think the counter to that is Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents.
I even might gain personally in that world but overall it is a miserable world to live at the systems level. It is better to just pay taxes.
1099-K threshold in 2021: $20,000+ AND 200+ transactions
1099-K threshold in 2022: $600
For a person on the cusp, making a $600 a year may help. Now, erode that with the additional costs of filing (both financial and time) can make it no longer worthwhile.
The alternative is that the person that goes and gets a W-2 job for $600 has a mechanism which forces them to pay taxes, but the person that does odd jobs and gets paid here and there via an app has no mechanism to force them to pay taxes. How is that fair?
The requirement is for Etsy to provide the 1099 to report income that the Etsy seller already should have been reporting on their income tax return (hopefully along with corresponding expenses to offset that income).
In fact, the whole point of this requirement is to make it easier for small sellers to properly report their income to the I.R.S., because now they don't have to dig through a year's worth of receipts to figure out how much they made from what source.
If you want to lower the taxes on single moms, increase child credits and raise the 0% tax rate bracket to cover higher incomes. Simple. If there are tax reporting issues that make it hard for side-hustle self proprietors to claim real expenses, which could be the case, let us fix it.
But not reporting this income just because it was on a payment processor is just helping people cheating their taxes regardless of income level. That's not okay just because some of them are single moms.
The difference here is that megacorps use legal loopholes (and pay accountants and lawyers plenty of money to find those loopholes and make sure they are allowed) to avoid paying tax while the single mother probably thinks she can get away with not doing it while she may be obligated to
You can't go after companies for follwing the law, you'd have to change the law first.. which I don't see happening personally
Edit: Don't get me wrong - I'm all for making things easier for small businesses to enable them to grow
What bothers me is cases where people are taxed when being paid back for things like dinner out, or splitting a vacation rental. That income was already taxed. Using e.g. venmo to split the bill should not result in that money being double taxed as it changes hands.
Unless you're splitting your bill using commercial transactions, you're fine.
Laws apply to everyone.
The idea is that it is a structure that effectively prefers larger scale businesses who have the means to mitigate both of those
A single member LLC defaults to a "disregarded entity" for income tax purposes, meaning it has no bearing on taxation or this discussion. And opting into being taxed as an S-corp (or partnership) creates even more paperwork.
Having said that, one of the great inequalities of our tax code is that individuals are not allowed to take most deductions that business take. It's patently ridiculous that a W-2 employee driving their car to work every day cannot deduct that necessary expense to have worked. But really the whole filing process needs to be simplified, the IRS needs to release tax forms as executable programs (eg python) rather than this archaic "add the lesser of line 25 or line 27 to line 3 from form 1138", and the formulas need to be set and published ahead of the tax year as to stop being ex post-facto laws.
Not a trivial amount especially for people making some money on side.
Now, to structure it properly with all the proper recordkeeping and documentation to ensure you really get the protection of an LLC when it matters, is another matter.
https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-ameri...
Though I was referring more generally to things like known pedophiles getting slaps on the wrist by the feds, the spouses of politicians making millions insider trading, politicians not facing consequences for deleting public records, ect
At least in my region, the ACLU has sued and won a ruling saying that cops can't ticket people sleeping rough if the shelters are full/not accepting people.
The sociology of this counter-narrative is super interesting though.
For whatever reason, we just don't want to take on power laws directly.
We live in this deluded world that power law distributions are something not "natural". Nature gives everything at a normal distribution. Obviously, that has nothing to do with nature. If anything it is the opposite.
Personally, I think this is the power of narrative and the way Francis Galton poisoned statistics that we haven't recovered from.
Riiiight. Which is why a corporation uses a team of well-paid lawyers, rather than the single less well-paid lawyer that the single mom would use.
Those same companies own your media, too, but they probably care far less about who you vote for.
This is what many of us politically homeless have been saying about the Dems for years. They're not here for us.
The young and idealistic see that they're not Trump and wha the bills are titled and slogans repeated on MSNBC.
But they're actively attacking working people's income. Are they giving a higher min wage? M4a? Tuition debt relief? No.
They get up at campaign time and try to put-progressive AOC but when push comes to shove, they're 90s Republicans
Under the current federal electoral system, Democrats have no power to go further. They barely got a compromised ACA passed in 2010, and the votes at the federal level have moved in Republicans' favor since then. As we just witnessed, they do not have the numbers to get paid parental leave passed.
The young and idealistic should be able to understand that AOC is not going to be able to accomplish anything on the federal level.
Why are you in favor of people cheating on their taxes?
Edit: There's a clear anti-government push in this comment section, which I don't think is representative of HN at large. I'm curious where it's coming from, if not organically, though I admit my lizard brain is more likely just pattern matching despite there not being any actual pattern at all.
a) Vietnam
b) Afghanistan
c) Iraq
That's what your tax money goes to, folks.
Is that what Etsy moms should be paying for?
I pay my US federal taxes, because it's illegal not to.
But, at a fundamental level, it's immoral to do so.
I don't think all taxes are immoral. Just US Federal taxes.
Remember that the Federal government now exists almost purely to serve lobbyists and interest groups - not the people and not the states.
There is no "them" in this false "us vs them" narrative you're constructing. It's just us. We do this to ourselves.
More detailed explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo (this is the famous CCP Grey video with the animals, for those who have already seen it).
Also, even if it WERE the will of the people, it's still wrong, and immoral.
Democracy is only as good as the demos is moral. I judge the American demos to be insufficiently honest and thus insufficiently moral. Basically, each half of the country thinks that about the other half; I simply agree with both sides.
And while it's true that, on the margins, the will of the people can be nudged one way or another, you still have to find a whole lot of people to vote for you in order to get elected, and those are your fellow countrymen who do believe those wars you mentioned made sense at the time (for example). You may call those people as many names (e.g. "immoral") as you like, they're still entitled to their votes, exactly as you are.
There is no "them", it's just "us". The divisive rhetoric you're employing is, in my opinion, more problematic than the voters themselves.
I only still reside in the US because I don't want to pay the exit tax to expatriate. I'm being kept against my will. But I'll make it out eventually, when I can make it make sense tax-wise. Good riddance.
By the way, I live in a US territory, so I have no federal representation, even in theory, personally, even though I pay federal tax. Which is OK, since when I lived in the states proper, my "countrymen" never elected people I believed to be reasonable.