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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

If you think the Democrats have no rich people “gaming the tax system” and donating “mega” amounts of dollars to politicians and their related groups, you have absolutely no idea how the system works. This is a team sport.

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Thats not what this article is suggesting. It is possible the article is targeting the GOP considering their recent bill to gut the IRS and remove income tax.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/no-irs-no-income-tax-h...

> Thats not what this article is suggesting. It is possible the article is targeting the GOP considering their recent bill to gut the IRS and remove income tax.

That's a mischaracterization. That's a messaging bill that's been was first introduced and must have failed in 1999, and I presume many other times since.

So in other words, they're considering doing no such thing. It's DOA and everyone knows it. If it wasn't DOA, it wouldn't be on the table.

The Democrats are funding the IRS and the Republicans are defunding it. It was literally the first thing they did when they won the house.

They're all dishonest, but obviously not to the same degree.

There is no pot of gold by going after rich tax cheats. You get some headlines, but even if you seized all the wealth of Bill Gates and Elon Musk you’d fund the government (at best) for a few months.

You need to increase taxes broadly on the vast middle and lower classes to truly make a difference. It’s usually done in backhanded ways at this scale, like increasing the retirement age or the payroll tax. Direct income taxes are extremely unpopular for the people they impact, so broadly doing this is a non starter, it only works as a class warfare move (“no one under 400k income is impacted!”).

So the republicans are posturing that they will decrease funding but it won’t happen. If the IRS starts mass auditing it will be the lower and middle classes. The EITC is rife with fraud as is small business and eBay / Etsy hustlers. You audit someone and garnish their wages and they will be a lifelong hater of the IRS and all associated with them. It’s a long game.

When 1% (~4M) of the country owns 32% of the wealth, you can either target them for taxes. OR you can go after the 160M people in the Middle/Upper 40% to get the 26% of the wealth... Last option, as a compromise you can go over the top 10% (40M) for 72% of the wealth.

Now, I'm a simple IRS person, but I want to maximize taxes garnered for time spent. This is such a stupidly easy equation.

Pretending that taxing the rich for all they've got is less effective than taxing the upper/middle class, is just absolute BS, and is easily proved false.

The rich own assets, they aren’t making massive amounts of income. Wealth taxes don’t work well. The game at the highest level is very complex.

In Europe, the middle class pays far more in tax. The left in America advocate for a European-style welfare state but pretend the middle class doesn’t have to pay a nickel in extra tax for it because they can get it all from the rich. The math doesn’t add up.

"wealth taxes don't work" - citation needed

Also, I'm explicitly suggesting the top 10% of folks as a target for taxation.

The only major country to attempt a wealth tax was France, which repealed it.

et voila "one wealth tax didn't work", becomes "all wealth taxes don't work". But also what does "didn't work" even mean here? There's nothing about the French law that suggests it didn't get money.

But also, this was like, a lot easier to verify you're wrong about this (quick Google Search reveals): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax#Current_examples

That reads as 9 countries that are doing it. So I'm going to need a lot more citations from you to believe anything you post from here on out.

Republicans fund the military because it's a handout to the people who vote for them. Democrats fund the Federal bureaucracy because it's a handout to the people who vote for them. Neither of the actions are about accomplishing things--just attempts to entrench their own power.

It's attempts to entrech their own power, but IRS also collects money.

Just become something benefits the democrats doesn't mean it can't collect revenue for the state. So, my point still stands.

You have not shown that hiring more IRS agents increases net revenue whatsoever. Let alone that it helps them collect from billionaires evading taxes.

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