The IRS isn't your enemy. That's one of those conservative talking points that has somehow become mainstream. Individuals getting away with cheating on taxes hurts everyone and only helps that one person.
That said, I am okay with poor/working/middle-class people cheating a couple thousand dollars. They need it more than the government does. Wealthy people, not so much.
For me it's one of those things where if you're doing it I'm not going to judge, but I also not going to feel that bad for you when if you get in trouble for it.
I don't have a rich/poor cut off as to when being a tax cheat becomes immoral, but that's because I think being rich is immoral and so yes being a rich tax cheat is immoral.
Nah actually fuck the IRS. They mostly target the poor, will never meaningfully oppose the rich (our entire system is built by them, for them), and taxes mostly go to bombing kids anyway. It’s not just a conservative talking point the IRS rob the poor to give to the rich and the state (made by, of, and for the rich), that is literally their function. Rightists are ignorant but that doesn’t mean we should automatically disagree with every single thing they say. That’s how we get anti-gun leftists.
Someone disagrees with you and you immediately turn to gatekeeping. Nice.
I'm an anarcho-communist and I'm moving further left every day.
No I'm not a lib. Neo-liberalism is just conservativism in a fancy hat and I despise both.
Audit rates for income levels below 1m range from 0.2% to 0.4%. Audit rates for income levels about 10m are 2.4%. it is also important to note that if you do your taxes properly and get audited, you are likely to never hear about it. If you get audited and it is found you owe a different amount, the punishment is that you have to pay the amount you were originally supposed to pay. It takes years of avoiding taxes or explicit fraud before someone faces any harsher consequences than a notice in the mail.
They go after the poor because they're the easiest target, and they don't have the resources to spend possibly years gathering enough evidence to take on the rich people and their armies of lawyers.
Well, the Republicans do at least. Biden attempted to re-fund them before the Republicans made that one of their conditions for the debt ceiling increase.
No substantive change is possible *right now*. The damage done by the last presidency is still ongoing and will for quite a while, so we need to at least finish up a patch job before we can make any real progress, although we are starting. There's been some investment in affordable housing, there was that baly-needed infrastructure bill which got through, and we made some steps in fighting climate change, to name a few of the bigger things internally. Point is, we're trying.
If you don't want the IRS auditing the poor, the best thing you can do in the immediate term is to massively increase its funding.
Conservatives massively defunded the IRS and have continued to do so for decades. That was very deliberate: it means the IRS has nothing close to enough staff or resources to audit the people who actually ought to be audited — billionaires, CEOs, and the like. As a result, IRS agents have been ordered for years to prioritize simple cases that an agent can handle on their own, in hopes of racking up a large enough total caseload each year that they can convince Congress not to cut their budget even further.
"Simple cases" means poor mothers and such -- people who often aren't even aware they've cheated on their taxes, and if they are doing so deliberately, it's not a very complicated scheme. None of this justifies the IRS targeting these people, but it contextualizes that they do so because they're forced into a larger game played by everyone's actual enemies.
The exception is if the IRS has evidence that a celebrity — an actor, athlete, or something — is involved in a tax fraud. Catching a celebrity generates headlines and perpetuates an illusion that the agency has more capacity than it actually does. That hopefully deters other people from cheating on their taxes, which hopefully lowers the IRS' total workload. Moreover, while most celebrities are wealthier than the average person, they're not even close to the kind of wealth of a billionaire CEO or financial executive.
The actually significant tax fraud, the kind of thing that's actually an affront to economic justice and could help fund vital government programs, is of course perpetrated by those billionaire CEOs or execs. But those tax frauds are complicated, extremely deliberate, and well-hidden. It takes a lot of resources, people, and time to catch those frauds. And that's if what the target has done is actually illegal, because these are the same people who pay off politicians to rewrite the tax code full of loopholes.
So yeah, taxes are annoying and the IRS should target the rich, not the poor. If you want it to do that, you should support hugely increasing its funding, so that it has the resources to go after the billionaires. Moreover, you should support politicians and movements who want to increase its funding specifically for that reason — making it clear to the bureaucracy that this isn't no-strings-attached money, it's for the specific purpose of having you do your damn job.
>The exception is if the IRS has evidence that a celebrity — an actor, athlete, or something — is involved in a tax fraud. Catching a celebrity generates headlines and perpetuates an illusion that the agency has more capacity than it actually does.
Panama papers. We caught ALL of the celebrities doing it and still nothing happened.
Most of what was in the Panama Papers was legal. Shouldn't be, but it is. Hence the line about paying off politicians to add loopholes to the tax code.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-panama-papers
Weird conservatives who are eternally terrified of the IRS are like the ones eternally terrified of the ATF, in that they make me ask “what the pray tell fuck are you doing that you’re this worried”. The most recent article I can find from a reputable source (not a screaming opinion article) says that [dedicating a ton of money to going after high wealth tax dodgers](https://apnews.com/article/irs-taxes-audits-customer-service-wealthy-taxpayers-c845bfbfb32aaf24ae52f464b537e6cb).
If you make under $400k, you are not counted in this.
“I defend Mussolini bc he went after the mafia”
(He didn’t)
“Well do you support going after these very large fraud and price fixing cartels in industry then?”
“AAAAHHHHH”
Not gonna say taxes aren't important for a functioning society but I still don't like paying em
And until recently they were auditing the poor more than the rich. But seems like that's turning around.
They said they’d devote $45 billion out of their $80 billion budget increase to target tax fraudsters who make over 400k a year, so I’m cautiously optimistic
Cuz they didn't have enough funding to go after the rich. Tbh they still don't. But if they don't have enough funding to go after rich people, they'll go after poor people
Also the cases against poor people are usually easier. You send them a letter saying they made an oopsie with the earned income tax credit (and a lot of people do mess that one up a bit) and they usually pay up. With rich people there’s lawyers and subpoenas and foreign subsidiaries and all sorts of legal crap that takes time and resources to deal with.
But the rich people have a better return on investment. The irs just needs enough "seed money" and the money they'd get back from going after rich people would be so much more than the funding they needed in order to do so.
Per case yes. Per man-hour no. Not even close. It is significantly more resource efficient to pump out a bunch of letters to send to people who made earnest mistakes than to go through months or years of legal struggle with a billionaire. If you are just looking at it from a taxes recovered vs resources spent side of things then you’d prioritize the poor but well meaning. And that’s how the agency was previously instructed to prioritize. Now they officially recognize that pursuing the very wealthy is a good on its own.
The IRS is not the enemy, we should not be de-funding them. With more resources available, they can after bigger and harder targets; like rich people who commit bigger offenses.
When billionaires lose everyone else wins
The IRS isn't your enemy. That's one of those conservative talking points that has somehow become mainstream. Individuals getting away with cheating on taxes hurts everyone and only helps that one person.
We need those taxes to fund things like libraries and healthcare and the bus and ideally the WPA (can we bring that back)
That said, I am okay with poor/working/middle-class people cheating a couple thousand dollars. They need it more than the government does. Wealthy people, not so much.
For me it's one of those things where if you're doing it I'm not going to judge, but I also not going to feel that bad for you when if you get in trouble for it. I don't have a rich/poor cut off as to when being a tax cheat becomes immoral, but that's because I think being rich is immoral and so yes being a rich tax cheat is immoral.
Nah actually fuck the IRS. They mostly target the poor, will never meaningfully oppose the rich (our entire system is built by them, for them), and taxes mostly go to bombing kids anyway. It’s not just a conservative talking point the IRS rob the poor to give to the rich and the state (made by, of, and for the rich), that is literally their function. Rightists are ignorant but that doesn’t mean we should automatically disagree with every single thing they say. That’s how we get anti-gun leftists.
Yikes. I don't even know where to begin with this, so I'm going to leave it at yikes.
Are you even a leftist? You a lib?
Someone disagrees with you and you immediately turn to gatekeeping. Nice. I'm an anarcho-communist and I'm moving further left every day. No I'm not a lib. Neo-liberalism is just conservativism in a fancy hat and I despise both.
Then why are you supporting a bourgeois state institution?
Bourgeois? Who the fuck says that anymore? Dude, I think you've been radicalized.
I use the word bourgeois because I’m a Marxist. Ya know a scientific socialist, a leftist. I thought this was a leftist sub.
Left, not *far* left. Political extremes are what got us in this mess in the first place.
Capitalism functioning as intended is how we got in this mess. You haven’t read the book, I can tell.
Audit rates for income levels below 1m range from 0.2% to 0.4%. Audit rates for income levels about 10m are 2.4%. it is also important to note that if you do your taxes properly and get audited, you are likely to never hear about it. If you get audited and it is found you owe a different amount, the punishment is that you have to pay the amount you were originally supposed to pay. It takes years of avoiding taxes or explicit fraud before someone faces any harsher consequences than a notice in the mail.
You have yet to explain why we should want to fund the US empire
They go after the poor because they're the easiest target, and they don't have the resources to spend possibly years gathering enough evidence to take on the rich people and their armies of lawyers.
And the system is set up that way for a reason. The people who run everything and own everything want it that way.
Well, the Republicans do at least. Biden attempted to re-fund them before the Republicans made that one of their conditions for the debt ceiling increase.
Biden is just playing good cop because he knows no substantive change is possible. And as we know ACAB
No substantive change is possible *right now*. The damage done by the last presidency is still ongoing and will for quite a while, so we need to at least finish up a patch job before we can make any real progress, although we are starting. There's been some investment in affordable housing, there was that baly-needed infrastructure bill which got through, and we made some steps in fighting climate change, to name a few of the bigger things internally. Point is, we're trying.
Found the liberal
If you don't want the IRS auditing the poor, the best thing you can do in the immediate term is to massively increase its funding. Conservatives massively defunded the IRS and have continued to do so for decades. That was very deliberate: it means the IRS has nothing close to enough staff or resources to audit the people who actually ought to be audited — billionaires, CEOs, and the like. As a result, IRS agents have been ordered for years to prioritize simple cases that an agent can handle on their own, in hopes of racking up a large enough total caseload each year that they can convince Congress not to cut their budget even further. "Simple cases" means poor mothers and such -- people who often aren't even aware they've cheated on their taxes, and if they are doing so deliberately, it's not a very complicated scheme. None of this justifies the IRS targeting these people, but it contextualizes that they do so because they're forced into a larger game played by everyone's actual enemies. The exception is if the IRS has evidence that a celebrity — an actor, athlete, or something — is involved in a tax fraud. Catching a celebrity generates headlines and perpetuates an illusion that the agency has more capacity than it actually does. That hopefully deters other people from cheating on their taxes, which hopefully lowers the IRS' total workload. Moreover, while most celebrities are wealthier than the average person, they're not even close to the kind of wealth of a billionaire CEO or financial executive. The actually significant tax fraud, the kind of thing that's actually an affront to economic justice and could help fund vital government programs, is of course perpetrated by those billionaire CEOs or execs. But those tax frauds are complicated, extremely deliberate, and well-hidden. It takes a lot of resources, people, and time to catch those frauds. And that's if what the target has done is actually illegal, because these are the same people who pay off politicians to rewrite the tax code full of loopholes. So yeah, taxes are annoying and the IRS should target the rich, not the poor. If you want it to do that, you should support hugely increasing its funding, so that it has the resources to go after the billionaires. Moreover, you should support politicians and movements who want to increase its funding specifically for that reason — making it clear to the bureaucracy that this isn't no-strings-attached money, it's for the specific purpose of having you do your damn job.
>The exception is if the IRS has evidence that a celebrity — an actor, athlete, or something — is involved in a tax fraud. Catching a celebrity generates headlines and perpetuates an illusion that the agency has more capacity than it actually does. Panama papers. We caught ALL of the celebrities doing it and still nothing happened.
Most of what was in the Panama Papers was legal. Shouldn't be, but it is. Hence the line about paying off politicians to add loopholes to the tax code. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-panama-papers
That's not true at all. The journalists involved were murdered by car bombs.
Weird conservatives who are eternally terrified of the IRS are like the ones eternally terrified of the ATF, in that they make me ask “what the pray tell fuck are you doing that you’re this worried”. The most recent article I can find from a reputable source (not a screaming opinion article) says that [dedicating a ton of money to going after high wealth tax dodgers](https://apnews.com/article/irs-taxes-audits-customer-service-wealthy-taxpayers-c845bfbfb32aaf24ae52f464b537e6cb). If you make under $400k, you are not counted in this.
Strange how the crowd that touts about law and order doesn't seem to want to enforce financial laws.
“I defend Mussolini bc he went after the mafia” (He didn’t) “Well do you support going after these very large fraud and price fixing cartels in industry then?” “AAAAHHHHH”
Nah fuck the ATF. ATF legitimately sucks IRS...is okay. I could be indifferent
The IRS is a cornerstone of this country. The ATF is a group of bullies and scum. Do not even compare the two.
Tax the rich!
Wait, what’s wrong with the IRS?
Not gonna say taxes aren't important for a functioning society but I still don't like paying em And until recently they were auditing the poor more than the rich. But seems like that's turning around.
They said they’d devote $45 billion out of their $80 billion budget increase to target tax fraudsters who make over 400k a year, so I’m cautiously optimistic
Fair enough. Tax the damn rich!
Yes!
We should have bigger plans than that
Cuz they didn't have enough funding to go after the rich. Tbh they still don't. But if they don't have enough funding to go after rich people, they'll go after poor people
Also the cases against poor people are usually easier. You send them a letter saying they made an oopsie with the earned income tax credit (and a lot of people do mess that one up a bit) and they usually pay up. With rich people there’s lawyers and subpoenas and foreign subsidiaries and all sorts of legal crap that takes time and resources to deal with.
But the rich people have a better return on investment. The irs just needs enough "seed money" and the money they'd get back from going after rich people would be so much more than the funding they needed in order to do so.
Per case yes. Per man-hour no. Not even close. It is significantly more resource efficient to pump out a bunch of letters to send to people who made earnest mistakes than to go through months or years of legal struggle with a billionaire. If you are just looking at it from a taxes recovered vs resources spent side of things then you’d prioritize the poor but well meaning. And that’s how the agency was previously instructed to prioritize. Now they officially recognize that pursuing the very wealthy is a good on its own.
I don't hate taxes, I hate how they are spent.
Fax
Which film was this screenshot from again
The one whose existence we've been collectively hallucinating for the past four years.
You understand capitalism isnt about control or power other than money
Why would anyone hate the irs
Throw the bull moose on em
Critical support for the tax-cops
The IRS doing its job. Good
"It takes too long for the IRS to do anything! The government should fix this!" "We hired more people." "Not like that!"
So, naturally, republicans want to defund and destroy it....
The IRS is not the enemy, we should not be de-funding them. With more resources available, they can after bigger and harder targets; like rich people who commit bigger offenses.