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That's not how it works lmao. You can't just trade your house for $0 to your friend and agree that there's no tax to be assessed. The government has its own opinion on the fair market value that they use.

Otherwise EVERYTHING would be "valued" at $0 right before it's sold and then people would "gift" the sale amount to dodge taxes. The IRS isn't dumb.

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It's absolutely how it works. The fact that you live in an authoritarian country that requires a threshold of $600 to report payments is unnatural. It's like saying that the CCP has its own opinion on whether you should be able to go out of your house at any given time, or if you should be locked in for X more weeks due to "covid" or any other bullshit excuse. Or, that Canada govt has its own opinion on whether your bank account should be freezed based on what protests you attend to, and so on.

Here's the thing: abstractions (or "man-made horrors horrors beyond your comprehension") are feeble. With a big enough catastrophe, natural or not, the IRS along with any US intitution will cease to exist.

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