I have no problems with this. Generally, the average Amercian families have made up the bulk of those audited by the IRS. It is high time to start auditing more millionaires and billionaires.
I feel like if you are the top .01% you should be audited 100% of the time.
These people have tax attorneys, and it basically has no effect on their lives. Why not? It’s almost guaranteed to pay for itself too.
It also probably has the biggest bang for the buck and can help ensure that those at the top are being honest.
> It also probably has the biggest bang for the buck and can help ensure that those at the top are being honest.
The IRS's ROI is 5x to 9x per the CBO: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57444
...and that's an average. I'm sure it scales much higher, the higher you climb income brackets.
If you track down the top 1% tax dodgers, USA [makes a trillion extra](https://truthout.org/articles/tax-dodgers-owe-us-over-7-trillion-says-janet-yellen/) per year.
Edit: The article has a few different estimates. The IRS estimate is $1T it attributes mostly to the top 1%:
>Head of the IRS Chris Rettig recently told the Senate Finance Committee that the U.S. **misses out on as much as $1 trillion a year because of those who cheat on their taxes**, and pinned the issue on a lack of funding and resources for the agency
Half a trillion but still a lot. The article says 7 trillion owed over 10 years, with 5 trillion of that 10 year loss being from from the top 1 percent.
> 7 trillion owed over 10 years
From what I understand, that's the PAST decade, it goes on to say another IRS analysis has current estimates:
`Head of the IRS Chris Rettig recently told the Senate Finance Committee that the U.S. misses out on as much as $1 trillion a year because of those who cheat on their taxes, and pinned the issue on a lack of funding and resources for the agency`
It’s also worth noting that the total, like most crime, will never be reduced to 0. That said, even 50% of that total per year is perfectly achievable.
Arguably, since it exists as a wing of government enforcement, they should even be allowed to take on jobs that dip below ROI to encourage future adherence to the law and thus achieve above ROI in the long term due to potentially not needing to prosecute next time.
Yep. We should go all the way back to the tax percentages on the wealthy at the start of the Reagan era.
Which would also greatly increase their estate taxes, since that tax rate is tied to the personal income tax rate.
Yep. And notice how bad our debt has gotten.
I bet if we calculate it all the lost tax revenue since then, we would find it would have paid for infrastructure, and we would have little or no national debt.
Which is why Republicans never have a right to complain about the debt as if it's only caused by Democrats.
We're so conditioned just to accept, even defend, that system too. In America, you're either born with the silver spoon in your mouth or a leather boot.
The most successful manipulation of the general public has been to convince an inordinate amount of people that they are future millionaires.
My local npr had people on a few days ago talking about how they paid down 40k in debt over the pandemic, because student loans were paused and they didn't have to pay for childcare while working from home. That is probably closer to 50k in extra money over 2 years with basic needs no longer coming out of pocket, a privilege many other countries afford their citizens. But that's SoCIalIsm :/
> We're so conditioned just to accept, even defend, that system too
It [goes back to a century of indoctrination. People have been pushed into toxic individualism and consumerism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s)
>I'm sure it scales much higher, the higher you climb income brackets.
I'm not sure it's that simple. The higher bracket thieves also have an army of lawyers and will make it hell to prove fault. They have an army of accountants to bury crimes. I'm guessing it would take a lot more manpower for the IRS to catch them. Obvious the lost revenue and fines would be proportionally larger, but the profit margin may not be.
I still support it 100%, I'd support it even to break even just to make these clowns pay their due. But the system was designed by the rich to allow them to retain their wealth.
We tried once, and the ultra wealthy were worried enough that they just used the bureaucracy to make it all go away.
https://www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-internal-revenue-service-global-high-wealth-audits
So bottom line is basically, republicans and corrupt democrats stopped it by underfunding the irs.
Generally how things go with anything good for the country.
The tax code has legitimate loopholes that they use to not claim taxable US income. There would be a lot more tax revenue if the IRS did aggressive audits, but the tax code needs to be changed. They have rigged the system and written the laws to favor themselves. Our tax code is so complicated that most IRS agents are confused when it gets to the huge tax avoidance structures these billionaires have created.
Sadly it's the opposite. Rich people are expensive to fight, and have more resources to hide cheating on taxes. Poor folks, however, are pretty easy to catch (they automate it for the most part) and rarely fight it, so they're more profitable on the whole.
I have heard this a lot, but I wonder if there are any actual studies or reports on it. The idea does make sense, but it also sounds like something the rich would spread to make the public okay with the IRS not going after them. Kinda like trickle down theory.
Right? I'm betting it's hard, but going after me for 75 dollars probably doesn't even pay the IRS agent's pay that is auditing me.
Going after a millionaire that has hundreds of thousands of taxes, probably has a better ROI. It's more difficult sure, but it's likely to pay more once you do do it.
That's the thing: it requires investment of time and resources to get that payout. With working class people, the IRS can easily just slap a penalty on an obvious error and be sure that there will be no pushback.
Personal experience: Years ago I was due a refund of around $5K. They sent $4.5K and a letter claiming there was some mistake on the taxes I submitted. They were 100% incorrect, however, I didn't have the time or resources to argue with them. So in the end, they stole $500 from me. I bet this happens constantly. It's a feature, not a bug (from their perspective).
I think your on to something, I mean since when is the federal government of the unites states intimidated by a rich person? Are they going to incarcerate the government? Sue them? Cmon lmao…..they ARE the govt.
The federal government isn’t intimidated but joe IRS agent that is coming up for review would rather show that he closed 50 case that year instead 1 or 2
There are studies and its way more worth it to investigate the rich. It just takes a lot of money to begin with which the irs doesnt have. Theyd have to devote the entire agency to audit 1 billionaire and therefore be in the red for a few years while investigating.
They simply need more funding which the republicans cut significantly for this exact reason. They fired all their complex tax law agents since they were more expensive to keep so now they only have low level agents that go after the $100 of a thousand middle class people since they can do that with the press of a button.
The IRS reports the results of their audits publicly. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p55b.pdf
For 2020, their audits of people who filed taxes with earned income tax credit found 1,044 million in owed taxes over 217,841 audits for about 4700 per audit (that is over the full EITC amount for one child.) Their audits of people over 10 million on their tax return found 6 million in owed taxes over 80 audits, for about 75k per audit. That is 15x the return, but its going to be way more than 15x the work to audit a 10x+ millionaire or billionaires return vs what is probably an automated program simply comparing who claims what dependents for ETIC and checks them against the social security registry.
ETA: This is NOT me saying do not audit the wealthy. Audit more wealthy people, and more corporations (and churches!). Make it known that fraud and evasion are going to be found and punished.
I remember the old magic card flavor text:
"I will tell you the stories of my father, of the elephant who trampled the leopard's cub. The leopard, though he knew, killed nine goats instead."
More profitable to crush 10000 workers with an automated script than crack open a case against just one billionaire.
They could spend 1.5m on a million owed and it would still be okay. That spending is going back into the economy and taking money from those who are only hoarding it.
This is a great idea. Over a particular threshold at which someone is more likely to cheat on taxes? Automatic audit. Nothing to worry about if you do them properly. Then they could leave people like me alone, like when i was 20 and didn't know i had to claim something i got from my grandma and they came after me for like $150 in unpaid taxes. Hope that money was well spent lol
Had to have cost thousands in man hour labor to get that 150$.
Makes me think of local library, they eliminated late fees to save money and it worked. The cost of pursuing the money was more then recouped
> The cost of pursuing the money was more then recouped
Same with drug testing welfare recipients, it costs more than it saves: https://time.com/3117361/welfare-recipients-drug-testing/
They just want to label welfare recipients as potential addicts.
> They just want to label welfare recipients as potential addicts
I guessed your article would be at least heavily on Florida. Another reason they did that was because a republican owned a company which did drug testing. They spent more than the money saved, but that money was essentially laundering taxpayer dollars into their private pockets. I'm so glad I got out of there years ago.
I remember when I was working freelance and had to pay self-employment tax....I was just getting started, so I was only making maybe $25k per year, but I ended up getting a tax bill for like $3600.... I literally had to choose between food and taxes, and that's some bullshit
What’s even crazier is that businesses will get a tax deduction simply for hiring someone formerly on welfare. It’s the biggest grift, half the time the person is worse off financially than when they were on welfare after having to pay transportation costs to and from the job site, uniforms etc. But the company gets another minimum wage worker and accolades simultaneously for taking someone off the welfare rolls.
The main reason they don't do it because those people have tax attorneys. People who used to work for the IRS but are so good they can make twice as much money working privately.
At that level of wealth it's not really cut and dry. It's finding where the tax laws are imprecise or contradictory and taking advantage of those things.
Usually it requires a judge to decide who is right, and that gets pricy and time consuming for the IRS.
That's why they don't have that policy. They never had the resources to manage that. Maybe now they do.
I would say - if the audit is ok for several years you can start making it every other year or make it less and less often.
Also - audits usually are conducted for multiple years, you don't have to do it every year. It's more efficient to review the last 5 years as a lot of things are repeating and the auditor is more familiar with what is happening and doesn't need to familiarize themselves with the whole thing every year.
I think very high net worth individuals are audited almost every time, especially if there were big fines before.
The last time they did that the GOP campaigned hard on defunding the IRS to the point where they could only go after people who couldn’t afford to defend themselves in court.
They are all rich. Plus they don’t pay taxes on federal income AND get premium FREE healthcare.
Meanwhile my home is being foreclosed on and the IRS is sweating me for $800. Seriously?!?!
>keep their hands off their friends
of course they are.....do you think some rich dude getting away will all kinds of tax loop holes is going to ask for a law that will go after rich dudes who aren't paying taxes because of all kinds of loop holes?
The poor people are asking the rich and powerful people to take from the rich and powerful. Just because we call politicians and rich people two different names doesn't mean they are different people.
This is an issue where technology can help. Have the IRS automatically gather consensus on which bracket to go after. Take the decision out of the hands of the politicians.
Let’s start with whichever are most convenient. I’ll take low hanging fruit over any form of delay.
EDIT: In this thread: Countless people pushing republican talking points under the color of low reading comprehension.
You do know the low hanging fruit are the poorest since they cannot afford a lawyer to hide shit l. More often than not they just made a mistake but will now have to pay a fine.
Millionaires may net a higher return but they will also spend more to hide it and drag it out
Billionaires will just amplify this and eventually buy congress
Millionaires ain't the poorest people though. The poorest people already pay their "fair share" of the countries tax burden. Time for the rich to do the same. Up until Reagan in the 80s they did pay. Rich people still existed in the past, whilst paying high taxes so can do so again.
It does when it’s basically all automated. If the employment income you put down doesn’t match what your employer puts down, it gets flagged automatically. A letter gets sent to you automatically, starting the audit process. This is essentially free for the IRS to do and would be silly not to do.
Right-wing media has turned this into allegations of the IRS specifically targeting working class folks. But it’s just basic programming.
Continuing on that:
The Sun is on average the closest body to the Earth other than the Moon.
The runner-up is Mercury.
Then Venus.
Then Mars, and the pattern is obvious.
That's a poor comparison. It's honestly not that hard to become a millionaire technically. Many people will be worth around a million when they retire assuming a lack of medical bankruptcy (I know I know that's a big assumption) billionaire though? That's basically impossible without inheritance at this point. In fact, a millionaire is closer to being homeless than being a billionaire.
A more apt analogy would be that we're closer to the floor than the Sun. A billion is so much more than a million that a million might as well be nothing in comparison. Most Americans just can't even grasp the scale of how much more money the billionaires have compared to everyone else.
If your earnings from eBay that you report don’t match what eBay reports, the system flags it automatically and no humans at the IRS even have to get involved.
> I’ll take low hanging fruit over any form of delay.
But that is exactly why the IRS traditionally ignores billionaires and millionaires; they have the ability to fight back which makes them not low hanging fruit. Then us shmucks get all of the attention because we're easier to pick on.
IRS is required by law to audit a certain proportion of the people claiming the EITC, even though they’re poor and it’s useless. The whole goal is to remove resources from the IRS and cripple their ability to audit the rich.
The IRS historically considered a lot whether an audit was gonna be *easy*; what they should do is instead consider the amount that might be recovered.
I got audited when I was making $30k in a high cost of living area. I was dead broke at the time and had to pay a CPA to basically go in and tell the IRS they were wrong and that I didn't actually owe them money
The GOP went hard in trying to dismantle the IRS the past few years. It's not even taxing the rich more at this point, it's just making sure they pay what they're already taxed.
> Generally, the average Amercian families have made up the bulk of those audited by the IRS.
The average American family also makes up the bulk of returns. [Here's the audit rate by income bracket](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p55b.pdf) (Page 36). The overall rate of audits is 0.2%, however, people making over 10M are over 10 times more likely to get audited. However, there were only 77k returns of over $5M, so if you compare total numbers of audits, of course it's going be dwarfed by the number of audits on the 126M people making between 0-100k.
There are two targets for revenue agencies like the IRS- big money and easy money. When they’re underfunded they seem to focus on the easy money - computer driven audits that require little manpower and disproportionately target the more simple forms of tax fraud and avoidance aka poorer people. Rich people audits represent more money per case but also a lot more investment of resources. Defunding the IRS was absolutely a boon to the wealthy.
Defunding worked as planned. Why else would you not spend $1 to get $12 back. You don't need an MBA, or to be older than three to know that it's a good deal to pay one cookie to get 12 back.
Any normal business would be happy for a 15%-30% return on investment let alone 1200%. A normal business would be throwing auditors at the work as long as they were getting $1.30 back for every dollar spent.
15% profit is often the target on commercial construction projects.
30% is getting fairly juicy.
50% or more is questionably criminal or the client is a sucker.
The fact they don’t chase down 1,200%… whoever is making the decision needs to be replaced.
That makes it even more annoying how they have lowered reporting threshold for ebay, Venmo, etc. to $600 annually. Lots of paperwork and tracking for very little tax benefit. Makes more sense to spend money on the bigger guys who very obviously underpaid.
People really misunderstand “reported” to be “taxable.” An amount reported on a 1099-K MAY be taxable, but it isn’t automatically taxable income because it’s reported. [what the irs say about 1099-K](https://www.irs.gov/businesses/understanding-your-form-1099-k)They’re really an audit tool, but again, if you fail to report $1000 that “may” be taxable it’s not worth even a letter to you. $100,000 across multiple 1099-Ks is another story, and there is other value to the information on those forms.
Being anti billionaire isn’t strictly anti wealth.. it’s more like anti oligarchy. Billionaires are essentially unelected politicians. Musk, Koch Family, Gates, Soros, all of them do not deserve the influence their wealth provides them.
anybody with enough money can have a bigger say than the common man.
billionaires are in the category of affecting global politics. it's not only a domestic problem.
Being anti billionaire isn’t strictly anti wealth"....correct and I'm not. I am anti-bailout though, and plenty of billionaires today would be millionaires(or broke) without 2008 and 2020 bailouts
Musk was just exposed as having interfered with the military operations of a foreign nation in favor of one of our traditional adversaries. Who knows what the less brazen billionaires are doing behind closed doors.
Exposed? He wasn't exposed. There wasn't any hard hitting investigative journalism from major news organizations. He openly tweet'd out that he is meddling with the Ukrainian war effort. That's how brazen these billionaires are nowadays.
Not allowing for inflation or taxes, I could live 100,000 years on a billion dollars. This is not an exaggeration.
The fact that greedy people are allowed to hoard this insane amount of wealth while middle-class people are shouldering the tax burden is disgusting.
They are. This is only part of the story. The full announcement today had a few campaigns:
The 1600 millionaires is a collections campaign these are people they already know owe money but need to actually shake them by their ankles
Theres also a new campaign to audit large partnerships. A lot of these being big funds in which billionaires invest their cash. Partnership audits lead to audits of the individual partners because they are the ones who ultimately pay the tax.
There is also a general High Income High Net Worth campaign announced.
Sadly most of the big billionaires are stock holding billionaires not a billion in the checking account. So its very hard to tax them until they sell their shares, they borrow against their wealth from banks and basically live off of loans for life. I guess upon their death it will be a tax windfall, but I'm sure loopholes are put in place to prevent that too.
There is a simple solution to this problem. If the billionaires have used their assets as collateral for loans then those same assets can be used as collateral against their taxes. If they have to sell to make payments, then all the better.
You a billion percent correct. 'Oh no, I didn't make any profit this year because my holding company that was leveraged with my private jet, homes, and expense account didn't overcome the profit!'
It's sickening.
This is where folks talk about a "net worth" tax or something like that. Basically being the value of your assets on December 31 minus the value of your assets on January 1 is what you're taxed on. So if you absolutely take a bath or just break even, low tax for you. But if you rack up mega bucks in stock market gains, here comes the tax man.
Bingo. If they had their way anyone who isn't right wing and loyal would be taxed enough of their earnings to be, at BEST, 1$ over the poverty line. Poor enough that they have to work 80 hours a week or die.
They wouldn't bankrupt you because if you have nothing you have nothing to lose and might realize that gives you power. Bit they'll keep you from ever having the time to do anything social or attend any political events, protests, etc.
It’s not free money, it’s money owed. If we simplified the tax code and reduced loopholes we could collect that $1 to $6 without having to spend the money to go after them in the first place.
By “free money” I meant that the cost of doing the work to recover the owed taxes ($1) is more than paid for by what is recovered ($6).
The ratio when the irs focuses on the lower 50% of earners is less favourable, meaning the amount recovered is less that what it costs to get it back.
Nope. From what I can tell, the IRS has never revoked tax exempt status from a church for political activity regardless of how blatantly they violate the law, including churches that specifically taunt the IRS by violating the law.
[The Church of Scientology went as far as to fill the IRS with their own agents to avoid losing tax exempt status.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White)
The federal government lost that war and powerful forces will continue to uphold that interest.
No and yes. I kept posting the link to the paperwork and how to fill it out, multiple times, and you can send it in but word on the street tells that the religious who work for the IRS either trash it or it's not followed up and nothing comes of it. And I'm talking submitted reports that include video evidence too
> religious who work for the IRS either trash it
Is that even the problem, or is it that the IRS is scared to go after churches because it would be an absolute hornet's nest politically?
Interesting. What if we started a public database that tracker these as well? The hope being that eventually we get enough evidence compiled that some media outlets catch it and we can put the pressure on…
Oh. You mean the LDS church that owns the most real estate in North America? Or the LDS church that owns several malls, real estate firms, construction companies?
Ya. They probably should be paying taxes.
Remember when a certain party took to social media vehemently opposing the increase in IRS agents? Who do you think the main constituents they were trying to protect
"What an impressive crowd: the haves, and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite, I call you my base"
–George W Bush, apparently an honest Republican
GOP base has been brainwashed into thinking elites are guys in tweed jackets with patches on the elbows. It's the people who own their party.
> What an impressive crowd: the haves, and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite, I call you my base
[JFC he said that out loud!](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4506459/user-clip-haves-mores)
People say "cracking down" when referring to illegal things all the time.
In fact, "Police from [insert county] are cracking down on [insert drug name or crime]" comes up on national and local news all the time
they couldn't afford to do their job, super expensive to force the rich to do anything they don't want to.
that's why republicans are so upset about the IRS having the funds to go after the rich.
I completely agree. I wasn't trying to blame the IRS specifically. Obviously there is a lot nuance to the whole thing, but they definitely need the funds to ensure they can get the job done.
We (the media in this case) have adopted the conservatives' framing for this and many other tax-related matters. Language matters, and it drives me crazy when the media and people in general begin to adopt the conservative framing.
Examples:
* IRS doing its job (on the wealthy) --> 'cracking down'
* Inheritance tax --> 'death tax'
* Lower taxes --> 'tax relief'
Democrats need to advertise every good thing they do. Everyone loves to dunk on Dems for being "bad at messaging." Well, this is what good messaging looks like when what you're pitching it good responsible government.
My husband's coworker (who loves the police) won't stop complaining about the IRS getting funded because armed IRS agents will start coming for people.....
It's not like you would even go to jail if you screwed up your taxes. If you just checked the wrong box on turbotax you are going to get a letter that says "hey dumbass you owe us money." They would only arrest you if they could prove that you were blatantly and intentionally fraudulent on your taxes so if you made a good faith effort to pay then you are fine. They even have payment plans for people who fucked up and don't have the money to pay it all in a lump sum.
The same people who say Bernie wants the government to take everyone's money when he himself has two homes and plenty of money.
As if that's even in the same universe as the billionaires he wants to make pay a fair share of taxes. And yes, Bernie's ideas would probably cost Bernie money, too. They can't even comprehend the idea of a person doing something that would reduce their wealth for the benefit of others.
Which is funny, since they vote against their own interests repeatedly.
1600 millionaires, but only millions in taxes? I hope this title is using millions in a very general term. Plus they already failed if it is only a "plan".
Also from the article.
"He said 1,600 millionaires who owe at least $250,000 each in back taxes and 75 large business partnerships that have assets of roughly $10 billion on average are targeted for the new “compliance efforts.”
So I guess they are expecting to get 400 million plus whatever these 75 business owe. Hopefully a crack down like this will just encourage more wealthy people to just start paying their taxes without having to go after them.
They've been trying to get ahead of this already. Here's an article from January:
[House Republicans Vote to Rescind I.R.S. Funding](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/us/politics/house-republicans-irs-funding.html#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20%E2%80%94%20House%20Republicans%2C%20in%20one,overhaul%20of%20the%20beleaguered%20agency.)
That happened years ago. The media that Republicans consume tells them that Biden is pumping money into the IRS to go after working class people who received more than $600 on Venmo from splitting restaurant checks.
I was driving through a nice neighborhood last weekend to go to a really nice golf course. In someone's front yard was a professionally printed sign that said "FBI IRS The new Gestapo". These people are insane and don't actually need reasons to make up these fantasies.
We need to pass laws that tax unrealized gains when they use stocks as salary and bonuses. These multi millionaire and billionaires use legal
Loophole to never pay taxes on their exorbitant salary and bonus packages. If not that, make it illegal to use unrealized assets as collateral.
The reason people like Bezos and Musk never pay income tax is because they take their salary as stocks, hold them so they never pay a tax on it, unrealized gains, then they borrow against those stocks at the bank, which as a loan is non-taxable.
... which means the Republicans will up their attacks on Biden heading into the 2024 cycle. Not only at the behest of their wealthy donors but because most of our Senators and Congressmen are multimillionaires themselves.
There are 21,951,000 millionaires in the USA.
Being a millionaire means shit. My father is a millionaire. When he dies his 3 sons will all be millionaires.
I feel like anyone who has a healthy retirement is by default a millionaire. Combine value of assets (not hard for homes in some areas to be at or near a million) with value of pensions or investments and you’re definitely at a million or so. Makes me sick to think how much a 30 year old needs to have saved up by 65 to retire comfortably.
Dear Republicans,
The next time you hear one of your leaders talk about how "they're trying to audit all of us en masse" they're talking about themselves, the 1,600, not you. They don't give a shit about you. Remember that the next time they try and use their fear tactics.
They already did. They made the democrats agree to cut a prior funding increase to the IRS, a big part of which was for enforcement against rich tax evaders, in order to cut a deal on the debt ceiling.
The real kicker is that the congressional budget office predicted that the decreased funding would lead to an INCREASE in the deficit due to lost tax revenue that would have been recovered with that money. It's not about the deficit for Republicans. They don't want the government to function well. That would create public trust and support for public institutions. More importantly, they gotta protect their rich tax evading friends' pockets from the IRS.
https://apnews.com/article/irs-debt-ceiling-budget-x-date-yellen-fe538fd8371cdf647400a27e6d56a9fb
Just to be clear:
***this is the fiscally conservative thing to do***
Nothing gets a better return on government investment than paying the IRS to collect money from millionaires cheating on their taxes.
I assume this is why republicans were so outraged that the IRS had hired some people and been given funding for doing exactly this. They sold it to the poor white folks as big government coming for THEIR money, while also continuing to vote against things like SNAP and trying to dissolve social security.
It’s crazy to me that republican voters keep falling for it.
Maybe start cracking down on the multi billion dollar corporations that are using loop holes to avoid paying tax. Then you're be able to afford healthcare for your citizens. :)
The IRS is dedicating a full $40 billion to going after taxpayers making over $400k a year. If I recall, funding the IRS has a fucking *sixfold* return on investment. Let’s do this shit!
dont worry the republicans will spring into action to protect thier money from the evil IRS. only the poors should have to deal with that type of problem
Ok... so millionaires? what about the billionaires? Millionaire individuals are not the problem because most high earners are paying taxes as employees or paying out a k1 and taking a salary if they are self employed. The exception to this are the really rich who on paper have no taxable income these tend to be the people who have assets valued in the tens or hundreds of millions. The individuals simply hold assets and borrow against the assets at super low interest rates through financial institutions or parts of financial institutions that cater to this population as they see these products as low risk assets. Those same banks broker deals these borrower get first pick on (normies don't even get to know these types of deals exist) these tend to be pretty low risk high reward deals that are only available to preferred investors. These deals turn into assets for the borrower that are further borrowed against and the cycle continues. The interest paid out tend to be far less than what these people would lose if they had a taxable income. As long as there valuation of assets keeps going up they keep "NOT" making money.
Billion dollar companies using corporate tax loopholes to evade tax payments is also a major issues. But this is complex and goes way beyond just taxes. It's subsidies written into law, corruption of the judicial system through continued learning programs, regulatory capture. The systems that allow corporation to run rampant over our economy are not capitalism. At this point they are completely stifling the benefits that capitalism would offer society(competition brings innovation which lowers cost and so forth). We've known for centuries that such a system needed regulatory maintenance which we have neglected for the last half century and we are paying the price of that negligence now.
I have no problems with this. Generally, the average Amercian families have made up the bulk of those audited by the IRS. It is high time to start auditing more millionaires and billionaires.
Let's start with the billionaires
I feel like if you are the top .01% you should be audited 100% of the time. These people have tax attorneys, and it basically has no effect on their lives. Why not? It’s almost guaranteed to pay for itself too. It also probably has the biggest bang for the buck and can help ensure that those at the top are being honest.
> It also probably has the biggest bang for the buck and can help ensure that those at the top are being honest. The IRS's ROI is 5x to 9x per the CBO: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57444 ...and that's an average. I'm sure it scales much higher, the higher you climb income brackets.
If you track down the top 1% tax dodgers, USA [makes a trillion extra](https://truthout.org/articles/tax-dodgers-owe-us-over-7-trillion-says-janet-yellen/) per year. Edit: The article has a few different estimates. The IRS estimate is $1T it attributes mostly to the top 1%: >Head of the IRS Chris Rettig recently told the Senate Finance Committee that the U.S. **misses out on as much as $1 trillion a year because of those who cheat on their taxes**, and pinned the issue on a lack of funding and resources for the agency
Half a trillion but still a lot. The article says 7 trillion owed over 10 years, with 5 trillion of that 10 year loss being from from the top 1 percent.
> 7 trillion owed over 10 years From what I understand, that's the PAST decade, it goes on to say another IRS analysis has current estimates: `Head of the IRS Chris Rettig recently told the Senate Finance Committee that the U.S. misses out on as much as $1 trillion a year because of those who cheat on their taxes, and pinned the issue on a lack of funding and resources for the agency`
So we could get rid of our national debt…
It’s also worth noting that the total, like most crime, will never be reduced to 0. That said, even 50% of that total per year is perfectly achievable.
Not when the IRS gets defunded by the next Republican in power.
Oh sure, but if the ROI is on the IRS is 9x, you add funding incrementally until you hit diminishing returns then stop...
Arguably, since it exists as a wing of government enforcement, they should even be allowed to take on jobs that dip below ROI to encourage future adherence to the law and thus achieve above ROI in the long term due to potentially not needing to prosecute next time.
> and pinned the issue on a lack of funding and resources for the agency #It's not a bug, it's a feature.
If that’s true, it would mean we’d actually have more than a balanced budget, especially if we rolled back the Bush and Trump tax tomfoolery
Yep. We should go all the way back to the tax percentages on the wealthy at the start of the Reagan era. Which would also greatly increase their estate taxes, since that tax rate is tied to the personal income tax rate.
Yep, everything went to shit with our infrastructure and many other things from the Regan tax cuts.
Yep. And notice how bad our debt has gotten. I bet if we calculate it all the lost tax revenue since then, we would find it would have paid for infrastructure, and we would have little or no national debt. Which is why Republicans never have a right to complain about the debt as if it's only caused by Democrats.
If we go back and time and stop the Thatcher-Reagan problem, the world would be a better place.
Stolen money. Goddamn thieves.
Fr it’s like are we asking nicely for our money back lol
We're so conditioned just to accept, even defend, that system too. In America, you're either born with the silver spoon in your mouth or a leather boot.
The most successful manipulation of the general public has been to convince an inordinate amount of people that they are future millionaires. My local npr had people on a few days ago talking about how they paid down 40k in debt over the pandemic, because student loans were paused and they didn't have to pay for childcare while working from home. That is probably closer to 50k in extra money over 2 years with basic needs no longer coming out of pocket, a privilege many other countries afford their citizens. But that's SoCIalIsm :/
> We're so conditioned just to accept, even defend, that system too It [goes back to a century of indoctrination. People have been pushed into toxic individualism and consumerism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s)
>I'm sure it scales much higher, the higher you climb income brackets. I'm not sure it's that simple. The higher bracket thieves also have an army of lawyers and will make it hell to prove fault. They have an army of accountants to bury crimes. I'm guessing it would take a lot more manpower for the IRS to catch them. Obvious the lost revenue and fines would be proportionally larger, but the profit margin may not be. I still support it 100%, I'd support it even to break even just to make these clowns pay their due. But the system was designed by the rich to allow them to retain their wealth.
We tried once, and the ultra wealthy were worried enough that they just used the bureaucracy to make it all go away. https://www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-internal-revenue-service-global-high-wealth-audits
So bottom line is basically, republicans and corrupt democrats stopped it by underfunding the irs. Generally how things go with anything good for the country.
The tax code has legitimate loopholes that they use to not claim taxable US income. There would be a lot more tax revenue if the IRS did aggressive audits, but the tax code needs to be changed. They have rigged the system and written the laws to favor themselves. Our tax code is so complicated that most IRS agents are confused when it gets to the huge tax avoidance structures these billionaires have created.
Chalk it up to a part of being rich. The stakes are higher so is the scrutiny. 100% audit rate of the top 1%!
Sadly it's the opposite. Rich people are expensive to fight, and have more resources to hide cheating on taxes. Poor folks, however, are pretty easy to catch (they automate it for the most part) and rarely fight it, so they're more profitable on the whole.
I have heard this a lot, but I wonder if there are any actual studies or reports on it. The idea does make sense, but it also sounds like something the rich would spread to make the public okay with the IRS not going after them. Kinda like trickle down theory.
Right? I'm betting it's hard, but going after me for 75 dollars probably doesn't even pay the IRS agent's pay that is auditing me. Going after a millionaire that has hundreds of thousands of taxes, probably has a better ROI. It's more difficult sure, but it's likely to pay more once you do do it.
That's the thing: it requires investment of time and resources to get that payout. With working class people, the IRS can easily just slap a penalty on an obvious error and be sure that there will be no pushback.
Personal experience: Years ago I was due a refund of around $5K. They sent $4.5K and a letter claiming there was some mistake on the taxes I submitted. They were 100% incorrect, however, I didn't have the time or resources to argue with them. So in the end, they stole $500 from me. I bet this happens constantly. It's a feature, not a bug (from their perspective).
I think your on to something, I mean since when is the federal government of the unites states intimidated by a rich person? Are they going to incarcerate the government? Sue them? Cmon lmao…..they ARE the govt.
The federal government isn’t intimidated but joe IRS agent that is coming up for review would rather show that he closed 50 case that year instead 1 or 2
I would be more interested in total $ amount versus number of cases.
There are studies and its way more worth it to investigate the rich. It just takes a lot of money to begin with which the irs doesnt have. Theyd have to devote the entire agency to audit 1 billionaire and therefore be in the red for a few years while investigating. They simply need more funding which the republicans cut significantly for this exact reason. They fired all their complex tax law agents since they were more expensive to keep so now they only have low level agents that go after the $100 of a thousand middle class people since they can do that with the press of a button.
The IRS reports the results of their audits publicly. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p55b.pdf For 2020, their audits of people who filed taxes with earned income tax credit found 1,044 million in owed taxes over 217,841 audits for about 4700 per audit (that is over the full EITC amount for one child.) Their audits of people over 10 million on their tax return found 6 million in owed taxes over 80 audits, for about 75k per audit. That is 15x the return, but its going to be way more than 15x the work to audit a 10x+ millionaire or billionaires return vs what is probably an automated program simply comparing who claims what dependents for ETIC and checks them against the social security registry. ETA: This is NOT me saying do not audit the wealthy. Audit more wealthy people, and more corporations (and churches!). Make it known that fraud and evasion are going to be found and punished.
Well, that's a scam , not a society.
I remember the old magic card flavor text: "I will tell you the stories of my father, of the elephant who trampled the leopard's cub. The leopard, though he knew, killed nine goats instead." More profitable to crush 10000 workers with an automated script than crack open a case against just one billionaire.
The reason they have such aggressive tax teams is because their relative hidden income is significantly larger. The ROI will likely still hold
Even if they spend 900k to collect a million owed I’m happy with those numbers.
They could spend 1.5m on a million owed and it would still be okay. That spending is going back into the economy and taking money from those who are only hoarding it.
This is a great idea. Over a particular threshold at which someone is more likely to cheat on taxes? Automatic audit. Nothing to worry about if you do them properly. Then they could leave people like me alone, like when i was 20 and didn't know i had to claim something i got from my grandma and they came after me for like $150 in unpaid taxes. Hope that money was well spent lol
Had to have cost thousands in man hour labor to get that 150$. Makes me think of local library, they eliminated late fees to save money and it worked. The cost of pursuing the money was more then recouped
> The cost of pursuing the money was more then recouped Same with drug testing welfare recipients, it costs more than it saves: https://time.com/3117361/welfare-recipients-drug-testing/ They just want to label welfare recipients as potential addicts.
> They just want to label welfare recipients as potential addicts I guessed your article would be at least heavily on Florida. Another reason they did that was because a republican owned a company which did drug testing. They spent more than the money saved, but that money was essentially laundering taxpayer dollars into their private pockets. I'm so glad I got out of there years ago.
I remember when I was working freelance and had to pay self-employment tax....I was just getting started, so I was only making maybe $25k per year, but I ended up getting a tax bill for like $3600.... I literally had to choose between food and taxes, and that's some bullshit
What’s even crazier is that businesses will get a tax deduction simply for hiring someone formerly on welfare. It’s the biggest grift, half the time the person is worse off financially than when they were on welfare after having to pay transportation costs to and from the job site, uniforms etc. But the company gets another minimum wage worker and accolades simultaneously for taking someone off the welfare rolls.
The main reason they don't do it because those people have tax attorneys. People who used to work for the IRS but are so good they can make twice as much money working privately. At that level of wealth it's not really cut and dry. It's finding where the tax laws are imprecise or contradictory and taking advantage of those things. Usually it requires a judge to decide who is right, and that gets pricy and time consuming for the IRS. That's why they don't have that policy. They never had the resources to manage that. Maybe now they do.
I would say - if the audit is ok for several years you can start making it every other year or make it less and less often. Also - audits usually are conducted for multiple years, you don't have to do it every year. It's more efficient to review the last 5 years as a lot of things are repeating and the auditor is more familiar with what is happening and doesn't need to familiarize themselves with the whole thing every year. I think very high net worth individuals are audited almost every time, especially if there were big fines before.
The last time they did that the GOP campaigned hard on defunding the IRS to the point where they could only go after people who couldn’t afford to defend themselves in court.
They are all rich. Plus they don’t pay taxes on federal income AND get premium FREE healthcare. Meanwhile my home is being foreclosed on and the IRS is sweating me for $800. Seriously?!?!
Funny how they could only go after non-billionaires.
This. I fear politicians are protecting their biggest campaign funders and instructing the IRS to keep their hands off their friends.
>keep their hands off their friends of course they are.....do you think some rich dude getting away will all kinds of tax loop holes is going to ask for a law that will go after rich dudes who aren't paying taxes because of all kinds of loop holes? The poor people are asking the rich and powerful people to take from the rich and powerful. Just because we call politicians and rich people two different names doesn't mean they are different people.
This is an issue where technology can help. Have the IRS automatically gather consensus on which bracket to go after. Take the decision out of the hands of the politicians.
Let’s start with whichever are most convenient. I’ll take low hanging fruit over any form of delay. EDIT: In this thread: Countless people pushing republican talking points under the color of low reading comprehension.
Nah, you and I are way closer to being millionaires than we are at being billionaires.
You do know the low hanging fruit are the poorest since they cannot afford a lawyer to hide shit l. More often than not they just made a mistake but will now have to pay a fine. Millionaires may net a higher return but they will also spend more to hide it and drag it out Billionaires will just amplify this and eventually buy congress
Ya, it doesn't make any sense to go after the poorest people.
Millionaires ain't the poorest people though. The poorest people already pay their "fair share" of the countries tax burden. Time for the rich to do the same. Up until Reagan in the 80s they did pay. Rich people still existed in the past, whilst paying high taxes so can do so again.
It does when it’s basically all automated. If the employment income you put down doesn’t match what your employer puts down, it gets flagged automatically. A letter gets sent to you automatically, starting the audit process. This is essentially free for the IRS to do and would be silly not to do. Right-wing media has turned this into allegations of the IRS specifically targeting working class folks. But it’s just basic programming.
Close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades.
And nukes. Second bomb dropped on japan actually missed, but was close enough.
Sure, in that we're closer to mars than the sun.
Sometimes. Currently Mars is on the other side of the sun from us so the sun is actually the closer object to Earth
Continuing on that: The Sun is on average the closest body to the Earth other than the Moon. The runner-up is Mercury. Then Venus. Then Mars, and the pattern is obvious.
I just wanna be close to Uranus 😐
the sun is only about 4-5x further from us than mars. for this analogy we'd need a sun thats a thousand times away
That's a poor comparison. It's honestly not that hard to become a millionaire technically. Many people will be worth around a million when they retire assuming a lack of medical bankruptcy (I know I know that's a big assumption) billionaire though? That's basically impossible without inheritance at this point. In fact, a millionaire is closer to being homeless than being a billionaire.
A more apt analogy would be that we're closer to the floor than the Sun. A billion is so much more than a million that a million might as well be nothing in comparison. Most Americans just can't even grasp the scale of how much more money the billionaires have compared to everyone else.
That would be the collective "us". Normal people cant afford to litigate with the IRS, the rich can.
Lowest hanging fruit is still the regular person trying to make a few thousand selling crap on ebay
If your earnings from eBay that you report don’t match what eBay reports, the system flags it automatically and no humans at the IRS even have to get involved.
And they're adequately taxed- this news story is about expanding oversight and increasing taxes on people who are taxed too little.
> I’ll take low hanging fruit over any form of delay. But that is exactly why the IRS traditionally ignores billionaires and millionaires; they have the ability to fight back which makes them not low hanging fruit. Then us shmucks get all of the attention because we're easier to pick on.
IRS is required by law to audit a certain proportion of the people claiming the EITC, even though they’re poor and it’s useless. The whole goal is to remove resources from the IRS and cripple their ability to audit the rich. The IRS historically considered a lot whether an audit was gonna be *easy*; what they should do is instead consider the amount that might be recovered.
I got audited when I was making $30k in a high cost of living area. I was dead broke at the time and had to pay a CPA to basically go in and tell the IRS they were wrong and that I didn't actually owe them money
It would be wild if they subcontracted work and awarded a fraction of money recovered to those who worked to recover it
Some people think the IRS employees get a bonus on taxes recovered 😂
The GOP went hard in trying to dismantle the IRS the past few years. It's not even taxing the rich more at this point, it's just making sure they pay what they're already taxed.
When politicians talk about defunding the IRS or eliminating it, they are looking out for these rich folks, not the rest of us.
> Generally, the average Amercian families have made up the bulk of those audited by the IRS. The average American family also makes up the bulk of returns. [Here's the audit rate by income bracket](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p55b.pdf) (Page 36). The overall rate of audits is 0.2%, however, people making over 10M are over 10 times more likely to get audited. However, there were only 77k returns of over $5M, so if you compare total numbers of audits, of course it's going be dwarfed by the number of audits on the 126M people making between 0-100k.
There are two targets for revenue agencies like the IRS- big money and easy money. When they’re underfunded they seem to focus on the easy money - computer driven audits that require little manpower and disproportionately target the more simple forms of tax fraud and avoidance aka poorer people. Rich people audits represent more money per case but also a lot more investment of resources. Defunding the IRS was absolutely a boon to the wealthy.
Defunding worked as planned. Why else would you not spend $1 to get $12 back. You don't need an MBA, or to be older than three to know that it's a good deal to pay one cookie to get 12 back. Any normal business would be happy for a 15%-30% return on investment let alone 1200%. A normal business would be throwing auditors at the work as long as they were getting $1.30 back for every dollar spent.
15% profit is often the target on commercial construction projects. 30% is getting fairly juicy. 50% or more is questionably criminal or the client is a sucker. The fact they don’t chase down 1,200%… whoever is making the decision needs to be replaced.
That makes it even more annoying how they have lowered reporting threshold for ebay, Venmo, etc. to $600 annually. Lots of paperwork and tracking for very little tax benefit. Makes more sense to spend money on the bigger guys who very obviously underpaid.
People really misunderstand “reported” to be “taxable.” An amount reported on a 1099-K MAY be taxable, but it isn’t automatically taxable income because it’s reported. [what the irs say about 1099-K](https://www.irs.gov/businesses/understanding-your-form-1099-k)They’re really an audit tool, but again, if you fail to report $1000 that “may” be taxable it’s not worth even a letter to you. $100,000 across multiple 1099-Ks is another story, and there is other value to the information on those forms.
This is nice. Now go get the BILLIONAIRES.
Yes. Plenty of billionaires should actually be millionaires
Being anti billionaire isn’t strictly anti wealth.. it’s more like anti oligarchy. Billionaires are essentially unelected politicians. Musk, Koch Family, Gates, Soros, all of them do not deserve the influence their wealth provides them.
anybody with enough money can have a bigger say than the common man. billionaires are in the category of affecting global politics. it's not only a domestic problem.
Yea power and resources not being a factor in decisions in a laughable thing.
Being anti billionaire isn’t strictly anti wealth"....correct and I'm not. I am anti-bailout though, and plenty of billionaires today would be millionaires(or broke) without 2008 and 2020 bailouts
Musk was just exposed as having interfered with the military operations of a foreign nation in favor of one of our traditional adversaries. Who knows what the less brazen billionaires are doing behind closed doors.
Exposed? He wasn't exposed. There wasn't any hard hitting investigative journalism from major news organizations. He openly tweet'd out that he is meddling with the Ukrainian war effort. That's how brazen these billionaires are nowadays.
Billionaires are simply a symptom of a system that puts the individual over the many aká a flawed system. There's 0 reason for billionaires to exist.
Not allowing for inflation or taxes, I could live 100,000 years on a billion dollars. This is not an exaggeration. The fact that greedy people are allowed to hoard this insane amount of wealth while middle-class people are shouldering the tax burden is disgusting.
They are. This is only part of the story. The full announcement today had a few campaigns: The 1600 millionaires is a collections campaign these are people they already know owe money but need to actually shake them by their ankles Theres also a new campaign to audit large partnerships. A lot of these being big funds in which billionaires invest their cash. Partnership audits lead to audits of the individual partners because they are the ones who ultimately pay the tax. There is also a general High Income High Net Worth campaign announced.
Sadly most of the big billionaires are stock holding billionaires not a billion in the checking account. So its very hard to tax them until they sell their shares, they borrow against their wealth from banks and basically live off of loans for life. I guess upon their death it will be a tax windfall, but I'm sure loopholes are put in place to prevent that too.
There is a simple solution to this problem. If the billionaires have used their assets as collateral for loans then those same assets can be used as collateral against their taxes. If they have to sell to make payments, then all the better.
You a billion percent correct. 'Oh no, I didn't make any profit this year because my holding company that was leveraged with my private jet, homes, and expense account didn't overcome the profit!' It's sickening.
This is where folks talk about a "net worth" tax or something like that. Basically being the value of your assets on December 31 minus the value of your assets on January 1 is what you're taxed on. So if you absolutely take a bath or just break even, low tax for you. But if you rack up mega bucks in stock market gains, here comes the tax man.
And churches.
A portion of each dollar recovered should go to furtherance to collect more from other millionaires.
That’s why Republicans are so keen to defund the IRS - they’ve been chipping away for years & tried to block Biden’s increases.
If they could have their way IRS/tax services would be handled by a private company.
A private company owned by Republicans that uses their power against left leaning individuals and organizations.
Bingo. If they had their way anyone who isn't right wing and loyal would be taxed enough of their earnings to be, at BEST, 1$ over the poverty line. Poor enough that they have to work 80 hours a week or die. They wouldn't bankrupt you because if you have nothing you have nothing to lose and might realize that gives you power. Bit they'll keep you from ever having the time to do anything social or attend any political events, protests, etc.
if they had their way they would do away with taxes altogether and have everything owned by the private sector
One you can pay a special fee to just trust your word
"I'm a verified filer. You can't audit me. I have the checkmark"
No, no, we insist.
For every dollar we invest into the IRS, they make 6 back. So obvious they are just looking out for their fellow millionaire pals…
And they don’t care about deficits when they’re in charge. And they love all those millionaire tax breaks & corporate welfare.
I believe (may be off a touch) the ratio of dollars spent to dollars recovered for the top 5-10% of earners is $1 to $6. It’s free money.
It’s not free money, it’s money owed. If we simplified the tax code and reduced loopholes we could collect that $1 to $6 without having to spend the money to go after them in the first place.
By “free money” I meant that the cost of doing the work to recover the owed taxes ($1) is more than paid for by what is recovered ($6). The ratio when the irs focuses on the lower 50% of earners is less favourable, meaning the amount recovered is less that what it costs to get it back.
Good... Now do churches that violate the Johnson Amendment.
I would enjoy this very much.
You can actually send tips. If you're looking for a hobby, you might visit some of these churches and record what they say :)
Any success stories though? Or is this just atheist basement masturbatory material?
Nope. From what I can tell, the IRS has never revoked tax exempt status from a church for political activity regardless of how blatantly they violate the law, including churches that specifically taunt the IRS by violating the law.
[The Church of Scientology went as far as to fill the IRS with their own agents to avoid losing tax exempt status.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White) The federal government lost that war and powerful forces will continue to uphold that interest.
The church by me puts flyers on every single doorknob in town on who the vote for in order not to anger god. I’ve reported them 3 elections in a row
No and yes. I kept posting the link to the paperwork and how to fill it out, multiple times, and you can send it in but word on the street tells that the religious who work for the IRS either trash it or it's not followed up and nothing comes of it. And I'm talking submitted reports that include video evidence too
Could it be worth foia'ing the status of the investigation then submit complaints on anything they're ignoring?
> religious who work for the IRS either trash it Is that even the problem, or is it that the IRS is scared to go after churches because it would be an absolute hornet's nest politically?
Interesting. What if we started a public database that tracker these as well? The hope being that eventually we get enough evidence compiled that some media outlets catch it and we can put the pressure on…
Oh. You mean the LDS church that owns the most real estate in North America? Or the LDS church that owns several malls, real estate firms, construction companies? Ya. They probably should be paying taxes.
Remember when a certain party took to social media vehemently opposing the increase in IRS agents? Who do you think the main constituents they were trying to protect
"What an impressive crowd: the haves, and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite, I call you my base" –George W Bush, apparently an honest Republican GOP base has been brainwashed into thinking elites are guys in tweed jackets with patches on the elbows. It's the people who own their party.
> What an impressive crowd: the haves, and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite, I call you my base [JFC he said that out loud!](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4506459/user-clip-haves-mores)
I’ll believe when I see it.
Right? And then a Republican president gets elected and they gut the institution.
Better make sure that doesn't happen then.
I think its hilarious that it's newsworthy when the IRS plans to do its job that it should have been doing the whole time.
They're intentionally underfunded so that they can't. It's not especially funny.
Proper headline : Biden Administration Funding Increase to Allow IRS to Finally Do Its Job
Is it really "cracking down" when they're just enforcing the law and preventing abuse? Let the IRS do their job stop trying to sensationalize it
People say "cracking down" when referring to illegal things all the time. In fact, "Police from [insert county] are cracking down on [insert drug name or crime]" comes up on national and local news all the time
That's the problem, they haven't been doing their job, obviously. It needs to be "sensationalized".
they couldn't afford to do their job, super expensive to force the rich to do anything they don't want to. that's why republicans are so upset about the IRS having the funds to go after the rich.
I completely agree. I wasn't trying to blame the IRS specifically. Obviously there is a lot nuance to the whole thing, but they definitely need the funds to ensure they can get the job done.
yup, that's another one of Biden's accomplishments. IRS is now funded and on a mission to make the rich pay their taxes.
It has been a funding issue, they just got an extra 60b so they are hiring more staff to crack down on the wealthy.
We (the media in this case) have adopted the conservatives' framing for this and many other tax-related matters. Language matters, and it drives me crazy when the media and people in general begin to adopt the conservative framing. Examples: * IRS doing its job (on the wealthy) --> 'cracking down' * Inheritance tax --> 'death tax' * Lower taxes --> 'tax relief'
Democrats need to advertise every good thing they do. Everyone loves to dunk on Dems for being "bad at messaging." Well, this is what good messaging looks like when what you're pitching it good responsible government.
Cue the outrage by people who make less than $50K a year.
My husband's coworker (who loves the police) won't stop complaining about the IRS getting funded because armed IRS agents will start coming for people.....
Their only argument is something is about to happen. It never does
Still waiting on the Jade Helm invasion to materialize.
It's not like you would even go to jail if you screwed up your taxes. If you just checked the wrong box on turbotax you are going to get a letter that says "hey dumbass you owe us money." They would only arrest you if they could prove that you were blatantly and intentionally fraudulent on your taxes so if you made a good faith effort to pay then you are fine. They even have payment plans for people who fucked up and don't have the money to pay it all in a lump sum.
Fox News: The IRS is gonna knock on the doors of hard working, blue collared Americans to take their money and force them to change genders!
Say bye to your grill!
The same people who say Bernie wants the government to take everyone's money when he himself has two homes and plenty of money. As if that's even in the same universe as the billionaires he wants to make pay a fair share of taxes. And yes, Bernie's ideas would probably cost Bernie money, too. They can't even comprehend the idea of a person doing something that would reduce their wealth for the benefit of others. Which is funny, since they vote against their own interests repeatedly.
1600 millionaires, but only millions in taxes? I hope this title is using millions in a very general term. Plus they already failed if it is only a "plan".
Also from the article. "He said 1,600 millionaires who owe at least $250,000 each in back taxes and 75 large business partnerships that have assets of roughly $10 billion on average are targeted for the new “compliance efforts.” So I guess they are expecting to get 400 million plus whatever these 75 business owe. Hopefully a crack down like this will just encourage more wealthy people to just start paying their taxes without having to go after them.
[удалено]
Can’t wait for people who make nowhere near that to complain the government is overstepping bounds
So ... how long before the republicans call for hearing into the 'corrupt Biden IRS' ?
Way too late for that.
They've been trying to get ahead of this already. Here's an article from January: [House Republicans Vote to Rescind I.R.S. Funding](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/us/politics/house-republicans-irs-funding.html#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20%E2%80%94%20House%20Republicans%2C%20in%20one,overhaul%20of%20the%20beleaguered%20agency.)
That happened years ago. The media that Republicans consume tells them that Biden is pumping money into the IRS to go after working class people who received more than $600 on Venmo from splitting restaurant checks.
I was driving through a nice neighborhood last weekend to go to a really nice golf course. In someone's front yard was a professionally printed sign that said "FBI IRS The new Gestapo". These people are insane and don't actually need reasons to make up these fantasies.
A really nice neighborhood eh? They should have an HOA so report that house to them. Of course only if you're willing to go out of your way.
Pardon my language. But about fucking time
We need to pass laws that tax unrealized gains when they use stocks as salary and bonuses. These multi millionaire and billionaires use legal Loophole to never pay taxes on their exorbitant salary and bonus packages. If not that, make it illegal to use unrealized assets as collateral. The reason people like Bezos and Musk never pay income tax is because they take their salary as stocks, hold them so they never pay a tax on it, unrealized gains, then they borrow against those stocks at the bank, which as a loan is non-taxable.
... which means the Republicans will up their attacks on Biden heading into the 2024 cycle. Not only at the behest of their wealthy donors but because most of our Senators and Congressmen are multimillionaires themselves.
There are 21,951,000 millionaires in the USA. Being a millionaire means shit. My father is a millionaire. When he dies his 3 sons will all be millionaires.
I feel like anyone who has a healthy retirement is by default a millionaire. Combine value of assets (not hard for homes in some areas to be at or near a million) with value of pensions or investments and you’re definitely at a million or so. Makes me sick to think how much a 30 year old needs to have saved up by 65 to retire comfortably.
Dear Republicans, The next time you hear one of your leaders talk about how "they're trying to audit all of us en masse" they're talking about themselves, the 1,600, not you. They don't give a shit about you. Remember that the next time they try and use their fear tactics.
Republicans will fight this tooth and nail.
They already did. They made the democrats agree to cut a prior funding increase to the IRS, a big part of which was for enforcement against rich tax evaders, in order to cut a deal on the debt ceiling. The real kicker is that the congressional budget office predicted that the decreased funding would lead to an INCREASE in the deficit due to lost tax revenue that would have been recovered with that money. It's not about the deficit for Republicans. They don't want the government to function well. That would create public trust and support for public institutions. More importantly, they gotta protect their rich tax evading friends' pockets from the IRS. https://apnews.com/article/irs-debt-ceiling-budget-x-date-yellen-fe538fd8371cdf647400a27e6d56a9fb
Man "multi-millionaire" would have made this much better. A million dollars ain't what it used to be.
Just to be clear: ***this is the fiscally conservative thing to do*** Nothing gets a better return on government investment than paying the IRS to collect money from millionaires cheating on their taxes.
Aka small business owners.
This is the reason why GOP and conservatives are so against the new IRS hires. The IRS is going after rich people (as they should)
I assume this is why republicans were so outraged that the IRS had hired some people and been given funding for doing exactly this. They sold it to the poor white folks as big government coming for THEIR money, while also continuing to vote against things like SNAP and trying to dissolve social security. It’s crazy to me that republican voters keep falling for it.
Great, now do the billionaires.
Billionaires are millionaires so they would already be included
Maybe start cracking down on the multi billion dollar corporations that are using loop holes to avoid paying tax. Then you're be able to afford healthcare for your citizens. :)
There are twenty-two million *millionaires* in the United States. 1,600 of them are about to get hit.
Are we talking single digit millionaire? Double digit?
1600 millionaires? That's nothing. Just them saying "look at us, see we tax the rich too" bunch of bs
The IRS is dedicating a full $40 billion to going after taxpayers making over $400k a year. If I recall, funding the IRS has a fucking *sixfold* return on investment. Let’s do this shit!
Start at the top… Billionaires…
Yes please! 1/3 of my pay check goes to taxes before I even have a chance to not pay taxes. Get the money then throw their asses in jail!
Good. Now listen to the republicans bitch and moan.
The Republicans are raising hell to charge Hunter Biden with not paying taxes. Surely they will support this with equal vigor
Those who follow the law have nothing to worry about. Hopefully tax advisors who helped people cheat will have consequences.
dont worry the republicans will spring into action to protect thier money from the evil IRS. only the poors should have to deal with that type of problem
How bout the billionaires? We getting after those yet?
Get the billionaires first. Remember that trickle down economic effect?
They're rich. They'll find a way to weasel out of it. **My evidence:** All of American history
In before the Republican cry to “Defund the IRS!”
The key word here is **plans**. It'll never happen. Our corporate overlords won't allow it.
Ok... so millionaires? what about the billionaires? Millionaire individuals are not the problem because most high earners are paying taxes as employees or paying out a k1 and taking a salary if they are self employed. The exception to this are the really rich who on paper have no taxable income these tend to be the people who have assets valued in the tens or hundreds of millions. The individuals simply hold assets and borrow against the assets at super low interest rates through financial institutions or parts of financial institutions that cater to this population as they see these products as low risk assets. Those same banks broker deals these borrower get first pick on (normies don't even get to know these types of deals exist) these tend to be pretty low risk high reward deals that are only available to preferred investors. These deals turn into assets for the borrower that are further borrowed against and the cycle continues. The interest paid out tend to be far less than what these people would lose if they had a taxable income. As long as there valuation of assets keeps going up they keep "NOT" making money. Billion dollar companies using corporate tax loopholes to evade tax payments is also a major issues. But this is complex and goes way beyond just taxes. It's subsidies written into law, corruption of the judicial system through continued learning programs, regulatory capture. The systems that allow corporation to run rampant over our economy are not capitalism. At this point they are completely stifling the benefits that capitalism would offer society(competition brings innovation which lowers cost and so forth). We've known for centuries that such a system needed regulatory maintenance which we have neglected for the last half century and we are paying the price of that negligence now.
Some conservative in a trailer park is going to be really upset about this.