IRS budget cuts cost $34.3B in lost revenue from big business

Millionaires have access to lawyers and tax accountants and are more difficult to pin down.

A poor person can easily be bullied to handing everything over to the IRS -- probably with just a few mean letters.

Since you can claim self-employment income without documentation, regular audits are necessary to prove actual income. It's also common for people to claim children who don't truly qualify; again, this would only be provable through actual audits.

In contrast, the average middle-class taxpayer tends to have both less built-in incentive to game the system and less flexibility (as most of their income will be documented to the IRS).

To defend the IRS a bit more: this program is in some ways an administrative model. Taxpayers don't need to prove any need to claim the credit. There aren't multiple rounds of paperwork, and, if you aren't audited, the only interfacing you have to do with the bureaucracy is in submitting your tax return, and you'll have money deposited in your bank account in a week. It may be the most effective welfare program, even accounting for audits (many of which are triggered by obvious red flags) in its ratio of benefits to "hoops needed to jump through."

Whereas rich people have complicated forms, requiring more man-hours and actual human eyeballs to get involved.

That's why it happens. Not sure why you disagree, these are facts.

If we stopped auditing those with AGIs less than $25,000, then all I’d have to do is take enough deductions (retirement contributions, unreimbursed business expenses, medical expenses, loss from property sales, tuition, etc) to get my AGI below $25,000 and I’d never have to worry about being audited.

Ever.

One way to significantly reduce your taxes is to lower your AGI. So if anything, the lower AGIs would be a good place to start looking for tax cheats.

Failure to pay taxes is illegal, not theft.

Theft is stealing the property of another. If income is the product of your physical labor, and the state owns your productive output (making tax avoidance theft, as you propose) then you are a slave.

I'm just trying to figure out if it's hypocrisy or selfishness.

Everyone wants to lower their own taxes by raising everyone else's taxes.

100 people in a room will have 100 different way to change the tax system, and every proposal will have 99 votes against it.

The consequence is that for anything moderately or more complex there is actually no correct answer on what your tax liability is. What is the value of an intangible asset? How do you define novelty for the R&D tax credit? There are thousands of intersecting rules that change your liability and many of those are up to interpretation.

You ascribe too much to malice, when it is typically just plain old politics. Representative will only vote to tax X if his/her constituent Y is excluded somehow. Add these types of items over many bills/years and you get what we have today.

I've noticed this is a frequent occurance--one faction will try to score political points by appearing to take an action, only to capitulate at the end when fewer people are looking.

I think a lot of people look at the gap between the mean and median, and think that something must be going wrong; but to me, the inequality of outcome this measures is more a sign that America is a welcome home of extremely productive people and the smarter of their direct offspring, who inevitably earn ridiculous sums of money when and where doing so is not itself reviled.

If you are earning a median wage a lot of other countries have comparable tax rates. If you are earning minimum wage a lot of other countries have lower tax rates.

So the IRS was profiling pro-profiling groups based on their extensive association with anti-tax and anti-government political currents, expecting that people who don't think they should pay taxes may well be trying to avoid paying taxes less than honestly?

According to KOS at the time, literally the only group which got their 501(c)(4) application reviewed and rejected during that "scandal" was a progressive one. Meanwhile a bunch of "tea party" associates got their 501(c)(4) (or worse 501(c)(4)) despite historical and ongoing partisan political work.

Sounds like "conservatives v twitter", where conservatives cry foul every time they get on a blocklist, and twitter replies that they can't autoban white supremacists the way they did ISIS because it'd throw out half the republican conference and a significant fraction of their followers.

All in all, just more and more examples of Wilhoit's hypothesis

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

[0] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2013/5/19/1210132/-The-Only...

Amazon reinvests revenue into the business which is discussed tons on this site. It also has the effect of eliminating certain types of taxes... and massively increasing taxes in other areas (like sales, use, B&O, payroll, etc...). Somehow I don't see discussion of how payroll tax at Amazon is exploding, though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

(Read the fourth paragraph of this page)

The IRS does this all the time.

And unlike criminal law, the burden of proof is on the accused, not the state.

IRS agents are no exception.

You are welcome to over-report them for your own satisfaction.

Most corporations pay the amount of tax they owe under the law, but the law is written to allow tax evasion. The IRS can’t do anything about this.

The fix is to close several well known loopholes.

Things like that is what I think about when I hear some of the hardline comments here.

We're not there, though.

Granted, both parties are terrible when it comes to corporate interest so... they both suck - but one really has a strong tendency to advocate for balancing the books.

The same is true for our tax laws. I can almost guarantee every adult over 30 has made an error in their tax return.

There are a million examples. Here's one: do you know someone that has stayed with a friend or family member rent free? The guest should have claimed the fair rent value of this non-monetary "gift" on their tax return. But literally nobody does.

Most AR departments will, in fact, be willing to write off some of what they're owed. There's a cost to pursuing the debts, both in employee time and in goodwill.

How do you factor in for the point where these agents having diminishing returns? Is it when the agency brings in as much as they cost? If so, why is that the reasonable place to employ to? The purpose of the IRS is to collect taxes to fund other agencies that don’t directly make revenue for the government.

Either way the plan can be adjusted, as my sibling says, to include the revenue from subsidiaries so let's not be defeatist :)

In other words, if you try to do multiple $9999.00 transfers in an attempt to "fly under the radar" - you will be caught out.

I believe that the argument here is that insurance companies are the unnecessary middleman gumming up American healthcare. Making $21b in 2018, insurance companies exist to make as much money as possible--by denying coverage when they can and paying out as little as possible. They complicate the process by requiring both the providers and consumers to get tangled up in paperwork, also slowing the process (and quality) down. Her argument there is that we could provide a better experience for all and invest that $21b of profit being leeched out back into actual coverage by going to Medicare for All.

> intended to make people falsely believe that you can have universal healthcare and a cleaner planet without decreasing your material quality of life

I don't think that's what she's intending. Her plan for cleaning up the planet involves scientific investment in clean/green industries and becoming a leader in providing those services commercially throughout the world. The US is only 20% of the problem, which is why we need an industry to really push this throughout the rest of the world--something that other countries are currently leading in.

In case your curious about Warren's approach here: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/my-green-manufacturing-plan-f...

No, I'm not assuming that. The quantity sold will decrease, of course, if the price increases. That is a hidden cost paid by prospective buyers who must now do without the good, complementing the more visible cost paid by those who continue to purchase the good at the higher price. A company's profitability (ROI), on the other hand, is relatively fixed—in the end all investments tend toward zero economic profit, or equivalently a level of accounting profit equal to the opportunity cost of the investment, assuming even a moderately competitive market. Higher-than-average profitability invites competition, while on the opposite side if profitability is low then investors put their money elsewhere and the business closes. There is some variation due to factors like brand recognition, other natural or artificial monopolies, and risk, but generally speaking a corporate tax won't be paid from the company's bottom line as most people imagine. There just isn't much flexibility in that area to begin with.

> Exxon not paying much/anything in taxes, and $B spent every year globally to keep the supply of oil flowing.

This is not a subsidy to Exxon, it's a subsidy to the people consuming oil-based products. If you want to stop subsidizing oil, fine; but that is a completely separate policy decision from where to levy the tax. Anyway it's not like you're proposing to tax Exxon specifically for the cost of keeping the oil flowing, which would defeat the point of the subsidy. A corporate income tax would spread that cost across all products, even ones that have nothing to do with oil, and be paid primarily by people who spend most of their earnings on corporate-produced goods (i.e. not the rich, who tend to spend a larger share on investments).