[HN Gopher] IRS Collects $1B in Back Taxes from Millionaires
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IRS Collects $1B in Back Taxes from Millionaires
Author : tldrthelaw
Score : 43 points
Date : 2024-07-11 18:40 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbes.com)
| ddoolin wrote:
| This is why Republicans are trying to defund the IRS.
| exabrial wrote:
| The problem isn't tax revenue.
|
| The problem is the federal government spends $1billion dollars
| every 1.46 hours.
|
| We collect an _absurd_ amount of taxes. Far Far Far Far too much.
| The vast majority of it is wasted.
|
| Collecting more isn't going to solve the problem and it never
| has.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I personally don't feel like my tax dollars are wasted, by and
| large. I also live in a large metro where I see my tax dollars
| being spent all over the place on worthwhile projects. Is every
| dollar spent as efficient as possible? No, but humans don't
| operate at peak efficiently and never will.
| mythrwy wrote:
| The projects you see in the metro would probably be mostly
| from local (county/ city) taxes as opposed to federal taxes
| no? (I do realize the feds sometimes contribute partially).
|
| Someone could probably make the same arguments for/against
| local taxes, but OP appeared to be referring to federal taxes
| as wasteful.
| apothegm wrote:
| For some things yes, for some no. Fwiw, urban areas
| contribute FAR more in federal taxes than they get back in
| services. Those taxes then are used to support suburban and
| rural areas that receive much more in services than they
| pay in taxes.
|
| Either way, it's very evident in many urban areas that
| taxes paid result in both economic and quality of life
| benefits.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| My guess is that you haven't worked for the government. I've
| spent 20 years working for multiple government agencies and
| the one commonality is that they are all very wasteful. I've
| spent countless hours working on pet projects for some middle
| manager or executive who leaves three months later and the
| project gets scrapped. I've seen plenty of passionate
| developers, both employees and contractors, come in and leave
| after a year once they've understood that no one cares and
| that they will always be wading through bureaucratic sludge
| in order to get anything done.
| rhelz wrote:
| _chuckle_ My guess is you haven 't worked much in the
| private sector :-) You wouldn't even believe the private
| jets, yachts, huge bonuses, and other things they spend on
| which have nothing to do with making money. Why, Elon Musk
| just got Tesla to pay him $50 billion. For what, exactly?
| yunohn wrote:
| The unspoken point being made here is about corruption, not
| efficiency per se. I want all my tax money going towards the
| public good, not just fractions/percentages of it.
| Qiu_Zhanxuan wrote:
| European talking but do you feel the proportion of tax being
| wasted has increased or decreased since the last 2 decades ?
| Did public service got better or worse ? Social program ?
| Education ? Foreign Policy ?
|
| I always felt that America had low taxes and most of it was
| used to deliver the bare minimum services (police, defense,
| public servant, social program) or even below (public schools,
| teacher, justice, IRS...) what is necessary for a society to
| sustain itself.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I see tax wasting increasing. For example my local and state
| government spend lots of taxes on funding activist / social
| justice programs that are simply not wanted by most citizens
| but are still pushed through by dedicated extremist
| activists. These programs always have generic names and goals
| like "community building" and they achieve nothing, except
| handing out our hard earned money to politician's friends
| (who they can count on for election support) and their
| political causes. Meanwhile basic government functions like
| policing and prosecution and education are failing.
|
| Here's one example among a LONG list of grifts that
| illustrates how reckless politically biased elected officials
| can be with everyone else's money - spending millions so some
| activist group can run a minor survey:
| https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-
| news/politics/seattle-s...
|
| Another example: here, funding for public schools has
| increased a huge amount - it is more than double what it was
| a decade ago. Our schools spend something like 20-25K USD per
| student per year now. But the schools are in poor physical
| condition, the quality of education is low, programs like
| music are on the chopping block, many schools are being
| closed to save money, the teachers and their unions are
| unaccountable for performance, and the school/district
| leaders are focused on political battles like injecting
| ethnic studies into math
| (https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/new-course-
| outlin...).
|
| The thing is government programs are generally not held to
| any standard of performance and accountability, and citizens
| don't have much time to watch over them. Spending and budgets
| always go up not down, because there is always some dedicated
| group fighting to extract something for themselves. The
| leaders who are enabling all this act in ways that ensure
| election and re election, not good results for their
| citizens. And they act in favor of their personal political
| and ideological goals instead of being neutral. This type of
| "corruption" then causes many people to want to just reduce
| taxes because they're not even getting the basics they
| thought they already pay for. I don't have a solution, I just
| think it is some kind of spiral that leads to people
| believing taxes are wasted more as time goes on.
| neilyio wrote:
| What a place we live in where someone can see "policing and
| prosecuting" as "basic government functions" rather than
| "community building".
| Larrikin wrote:
| What is it wasted on specifically and what do you think taxes
| should be spent on specifically?
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| In my 20 years govt experience, it is wasted on pet projects
| and failed projects created by contractors.
| mpalmer wrote:
| There is no "the" problem. You identify one problem to
| exclusion of the very real, salient problem that the average
| taxpayer sees the wealthy as not paying their fair share.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I wonder how that perception problem can be tackled?
|
| The top 1% of people pay 45% of federal income taxes. The top
| 10% of people pay 75%.
|
| Rates are already highly progressive.
|
| https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-
| in....
| rhelz wrote:
| // The top 10% of people pay 75% //
|
| 75% of what? Income tax? Very misleading--there is more
| than one way to make money, and those in the top 10% are
| probably not making most of their money via income. Warren
| Buffet famously said his secretary has a higher tax rate
| than he does.
|
| // I wonder how that perception problem can be tackled? //
|
| The best way would be an even distribution of wealth. The
| top 1% own half.
|
| The other 99% share the other half. You can quote any
| statistic you'd like, but when 1% own half, the other 99%
| are not going to think they have a perception problem.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Here is the problem.
|
| Even if you taxed "rich people" harder, say tax all
| billionaires at 90%, there isn't enough to cover what is
| being spent and it's not even close.
|
| For instance, there is approximately 5 trillion currently
| held by billionaires in the US. That, coincidentally, is
| approximately 1 year of current federal spending.
|
| Then the following year you have no more billionaires to
| harvest as it took them many decades to get the money.
|
| On the other hand you have people who say "well, the federal
| government needs to stop spending so much" (and this does
| make sense at the same level "tax the rich more does "). But
| the problem with removing, or even substantially reducing,
| federal deficit spending is the resulting giant black hole
| would economically collapse many things in the short term at
| least.
|
| I don't know that there are easy answers for the problems the
| US finds itself in at the moment. Probably some sort of
| financial reset at some point, which is unlikely to be either
| clean or painless.
| rhelz wrote:
| During the Clinton administration, they (1) raised taxes,
| and (2) eliminated the budget deficit. In fact, we had
| budget surpluses.
|
| Personally, I was shocked. I thought for sure the increase
| in taxes would push an already wobbly economy into deep
| depression. What happened instead is that---after the
| Government stopped hovering up all the money available to
| lend--interest rates decreased, and people both had to and
| could lend their money to actually productive businesses.
| It was boom city after that.
|
| There is no unsolvable debt problem. If we couldn't repay
| our debt, people would stop buying our bonds. And the
| solution is so simple. Raise the taxes until interest rates
| are low enough to trigger an investment boom.
| mythrwy wrote:
| They eliminated the budget deficit during the Clinton
| years on the backs of the Reagan 80s boom and the end of
| the cold war. It was a unique time. Also, we did not
| spend nearly as much back then and it was easier to do.
|
| It didn't last very long and soon we were to Bush 2
| spending and massive deficits again. Every subsequent
| administration has dug the hole deeper to the point we
| spent 140 billion in June alone on federal debt interest
| payments.
|
| Who will you raise taxes on? The "Rich"? (see my other
| comment, it's not enough money), the "middle class" who
| are being squeezed silly by inflation at the moment? I
| don't know that they can shoulder much increase without
| big upheaval.
|
| I agree no problem is unsolvable, but that doesn't mean
| the problem will be solved gracefully. I suspect a new
| order of things economically is how it works out in the
| end, and what that looks like and when it occurs I do not
| know.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| You don't actually believe revenue doesn't matter.
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| One interesting thing is that the us government can.leverage its
| national debt....or so it claims.....as this is why we are
| apparently not freaking out over the debt crisis. The government
| has learned to use debt as a measure of "progress" like sure
| technically every us citizen is responsible for that debt but
| when every vote gets to decide on a handful of people....
| Millions could disagree with the representative and yet they
| still are responsible.
|
| Like imagine if the average person could just decide they arnt
| going to be able to cover interest on the debt they have, yet
| they still could print tons of money. Money that's only backed by
| their word, and the debt gets used in your local town
| negotiations as a weapon.
| mythrwy wrote:
| The federal treasury also spent 140 billion paying just interest
| on the national debt in June alone (nearly 900 billion year to
| date).
|
| So, this isn't even a drop in the bucket.
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