IRS gets permission to go after taxpayers who don't report crypto transactions
justice.gov
justice.gov
1) Market collapse
2) Complete market shutdown by government action
3) De Facto Legitimization by being taxed and/or regulated in some fashion.
With 33T debts and deficit spending being the norm, why should I pay taxes? How much of what we pay as taxes actually go to fund "the country"? Part of me still wants to believe I as a responsible citizen should feel good that I pay my taxes but it increasingly feels to me a very small part of what we pay as taxes actually go to things that matter and ultimately deficit spending will be the only way by the time I would be entitled to enjoy some of the social security benefits to fund them.
I live in a state that does not have income taxes.
Things rarely turn out exactly the way any individual wants, but that's the nature of any collective action -- taxes, voting, picking a restaurant to eat at, etc.
Medicare is not a well-liked system by almost anyone on it. Gen X, Millennials, and now Zoomers see no purpose in social security (they most likely won't get it). Military tax consumption is insane. The federal law enforcement agencies take quite a bit too.
I'd imagine when surveyed Americans would generally be negative on most, if not all, of these. Yet, for some reason they allocate to these things. Is this the "collective action" you are supposing exists? Because it sure sounds like theft-by-fiat to me.
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...
> I live in a state that does not have income taxes.
Why is this relevant?
The US government gets a big pool of money, which includes your taxes. That pool of money pays for a huge variety of things like roads, air traffic control, research grants, the military, NASA, justice system, and the list goes on and on.
A portion of the money services debts — just like in your personal budget. Those debts paid for things in the past — perhaps an infrastructure upgrade in your area.
If the pool of money isn’t big enough to cover every expense, it goes into debt to get the money — just like you would to buy a house.
None of this means the government has a huge amount of credit card debt with 20% APR. It’s not irresponsible thing to spend more than you have if it will propel growth, resulting in more future income. Businesses do it all the time. Debt is used as a useful tool at this scale — which is very different from how debt works (or how people use debt) for individuals.
Regardless of deficit or debt, your tax money is still funding many things directly. Whether or not you agree with those things is one thing — but your comment didn’t really touch on that. Personally, I’d like to see less defense spending and nationalized healthcare.
But I’m still “happy” to pay taxes which allow me to live in a very stable country.
Whatever you do, don't look at how your tax dollars are actually allocated. I'm afraid you may be very disappointed.
Name anything that collects money and you'll find behaviors you don't like.
How much you wanna bet that they’re following up on a whistleblower tip?
> Specifically, the IRS summons seeks information about customers of SFOX, a cryptocurrency prime broker, who used banking services that M.Y. Safra Bank offered to SFOX customers engaged in cryptocurrency transactions
They said it was to catch tax-cheating billionaires. Oops. "Sorry, we lied".
It's time for average Americans to benefit from personalized IRS service! "Claw back better."
Seriously, pay your taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_allegations_of_misuse_...
That said, I'm fine with punishing people who abuse the IRS.
Also, where's the 87k number coming from? The treasury department got funding which lets them hire about 87k new employees by 2031, but most of those aren't going to be IRS agents. The number also doesn't account for the number of employees you need to just keep the number of employees steady; people quit and get fired and retire.
Poorer people are significantly more likely to be audited: https://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/latest/679/ - I suspect that it's not that the IRS likes going after poorer people specifically, but that they're more successful in extracting money from people with less money to pay professionals to structure their finances and tax strategy or to defend themselves from an audit.
> A critical limitation in the IRS’s ability to audit millionaires is the availability of IRS revenue agents. Only this class of auditors, given sufficient training and experience, are qualified to examine complex tax returns – the types of returns typically filed by high-income individuals and large-scale businesses.
> With severe budget constraints, IRS has tended to trade off the replacement of revenue agents with hiring more tax examiners. These certainly are paid less, but they are also less knowledgeable. While revenue agents used to outnumber tax examiners, this has slowly shifted over time.
> Since the end of FY 2010, the number of IRS revenue agents has dropped by 41 percent. Initially, the number of tax examiners also fell although not at the same rate. By FY 2016, tax examiners began to outnumber revenue agents for the first time. During FY 2020 and FY 2021, major increases took place in the hiring of tax examiners. Thus, the number of tax examiners has regained all of their lost ground and were actually 1 percent higher than in 2010. See Figure 4 and Table 3.
Middle-class who owns a business (think a Coffeshop, a dental clinic, a small construction contractor, etc...). These medium-small businesses are ripping the IRS big time. With mundane things like claiming everything as deductible, to accepting some cash on the side, to doing the odd unreported transaction, etc...
There are some restaurants in the US that accept only Cash. I don't think the owners of these joints knows what the IRS stands for.
The goal of the current elites is to either materially destroy the middle class or to make them poor.
IRS has limited staff for those cases, can only really nail 200 a year.
Wrong on both marks.
The bulk of tax evasion, both in amount evaded and number of incidents is at the lower end of income.
Every waiter that doesn't report their tips, every side gig, every commingling to the small businesses funds they own, etc...
The ultra rich are audited every other year, and have an army of tax accountants going over every single thing to make sure the report is accurate and compliant with the law.
There is no "wealthy elite dodging taxes and taking money out of the poor people mouths", there is only a morally bankrupt lower class whose every accusation of malfeasance is a confession.
Well, I don't know about I that. I think they just have access to far more sophisticated ways to avoid taxes [0].
No, not right. There are relatively few ultra wealthy elite. 25 million people or families claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the IRS estimates that about a quarter of the payments for EITC claims were issued improperly in 2020.
The IRS doesn't have the ability to verify the claims in an automated way since they don't have the data on child eligibility and not all income is reported by employers. So if they are going to get compliance, they would need to audit on a massive scale.
That’s a world of difference in a courtroom.
The groups that underreport the most are contractors, followed by small business owners, though this usually comes in the form of over-claiming expenses rather than understating revenue.
Wealthy taxpayers pay accountants and lawyers to do tax planning on them. While some of them do cheat on their taxes, most of them simply find ways to owe less...though as someone who used to provide these services, between about $500k in annual income and around $10 million, there's a donut hole where the fees paid to tax advisors and the expenses incurred to reduce taxes (i.e., charitable donations, etc.) usually exceed the savings from reduced taxes unless the client is willing to maintain the planning structure for 5-7 years.