IRS gives wrong information about taxes
- Thread starter shanek
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Shanek, how does it feel to be without a single supporter, with everyone jeering at you? Not nice?
Well, if you start listening as much as you talk, start showing manners, stop accusing people who shred your points of being a "liar" and of "spreading filth", and start showing some genuine respect for those who have more experience and knowledge, you might find that you develop an ally or two.
Or isn't that what you want? Do you want to be a martyr to your religion? Do you think that money cares about you?
Well, if you start listening as much as you talk, start showing manners, stop accusing people who shred your points of being a "liar" and of "spreading filth", and start showing some genuine respect for those who have more experience and knowledge, you might find that you develop an ally or two.
Or isn't that what you want? Do you want to be a martyr to your religion? Do you think that money cares about you?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: IRS gives wrong information about taxes
Shanek, you're always going on about how the government collects taxes "at the barrel of a gun." That seems a rather silly comment, as the threat of force is behind ANY governmental law or regulation. If someone breaks the law, they can be punished. If someone doesn't pay taxes, they can be punished. You may not agree that the government should have the power to levy an income tax, but it does, and threatening punishment for nonpayment is hardly "tyrannical."
Mike
shanek said:
Shanek, you're always going on about how the government collects taxes "at the barrel of a gun." That seems a rather silly comment, as the threat of force is behind ANY governmental law or regulation. If someone breaks the law, they can be punished. If someone doesn't pay taxes, they can be punished. You may not agree that the government should have the power to levy an income tax, but it does, and threatening punishment for nonpayment is hardly "tyrannical."
Mike
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: IRS gives wrong information about taxes
The funny thing about Libertarians is, they really have a problem with Gummint collecting taxes, but they don't have a problem with taking advantage of the things they pay for.
Shanek himself is a big fan of the Internet, yet I never hear rant about the Gummint funding the development of it.
Or roads, never hear them complaining about the roads...
The funny thing about Libertarians is, they really have a problem with Gummint collecting taxes, but they don't have a problem with taking advantage of the things they pay for.
Shanek himself is a big fan of the Internet, yet I never hear rant about the Gummint funding the development of it.
Or roads, never hear them complaining about the roads...
Earthborn
Terrestrial Intelligence
Income: "Anything of value transferred to or used for your benefit as compensation for you employment."
The problem with this definition lies in the definition of 'used for your benefit'. Transferring money can simple be avoided by a company by keeping the money officially to itself, buying things for itself.
Suppose we live in this future and a large corporation decides to pay its CEO no more than minimum wage. After all, it reasons, he doesn't actually work any harder than a minimum wage worker does. The corporation also buys a mansion, as houses are a good investment. It fills the walls with expensive art, decorates it with expensive antiques. All these are good investments, and thus good business policy. A few race horses in the stables, a sports car in the garage, it all makes perfect sense businesswise.
The CEO is allowed to sleep over in it as long as he can't find a place for himself. Surely that's just a nice gesture to help someone out, and keeping it uninhabited isn't a good plan either. And while he's there you can't force him not to enjoy the wonderfull art. And you can ask him to take the sports car for a spin once in a while, not for his own pleasure of course, but to make sure the engine doesn't deteriorate. He usually eats on business dinners, which is just part of his job.
It would mean that he can live on minimum wage much more luxurious than any factory worker getting the same salary. They both pay the same amount of taxes, while the factory worker needs to pay it from the money he needs to feed his family.
So should we consider the CEO to be 'using all these things of value for his own benefit' ? If so, then I bet you don't mind also paying taxes for the pens, paperclips and computer you use to do your job. In fact you would need to make an extensive list of all the things you use on your job, and all the food you eat in the kantine in order to know how much 'income' you got and how much tax you need to pay. I don't think that makes filling out your tax forms any simpler.
The simpler you make a taxsystem, the easiest it will be to avoid it: just make sure you don't use anything that is being taxed. Jeff Goldblum voice: "The rich will find a way..."
The problem with this definition lies in the definition of 'used for your benefit'. Transferring money can simple be avoided by a company by keeping the money officially to itself, buying things for itself.
Suppose we live in this future and a large corporation decides to pay its CEO no more than minimum wage. After all, it reasons, he doesn't actually work any harder than a minimum wage worker does. The corporation also buys a mansion, as houses are a good investment. It fills the walls with expensive art, decorates it with expensive antiques. All these are good investments, and thus good business policy. A few race horses in the stables, a sports car in the garage, it all makes perfect sense businesswise.
The CEO is allowed to sleep over in it as long as he can't find a place for himself. Surely that's just a nice gesture to help someone out, and keeping it uninhabited isn't a good plan either. And while he's there you can't force him not to enjoy the wonderfull art. And you can ask him to take the sports car for a spin once in a while, not for his own pleasure of course, but to make sure the engine doesn't deteriorate. He usually eats on business dinners, which is just part of his job.
It would mean that he can live on minimum wage much more luxurious than any factory worker getting the same salary. They both pay the same amount of taxes, while the factory worker needs to pay it from the money he needs to feed his family.
So should we consider the CEO to be 'using all these things of value for his own benefit' ? If so, then I bet you don't mind also paying taxes for the pens, paperclips and computer you use to do your job. In fact you would need to make an extensive list of all the things you use on your job, and all the food you eat in the kantine in order to know how much 'income' you got and how much tax you need to pay. I don't think that makes filling out your tax forms any simpler.
The simpler you make a taxsystem, the easiest it will be to avoid it: just make sure you don't use anything that is being taxed. Jeff Goldblum voice: "The rich will find a way..."
Earthborn said:
How about a 50% sales tax, no exceptions?
Oh wait, the rich people just won't buy anything, my bad.
I think the idea that the wealthy will just avoid any simple taxes is a bit silly. The CEO example, well I actually feel sorry for him. I would rather have my salary and the freedom to live my life the way I want it then be a slave like that.
In my sales tax example, I don't see how it could be avoided. Just take care to tax all imports as well, and seize the assets of the cheaters.
Maybe we should just put a million dollar tax on monacles, tophats and coattails. That would teach those fatcats!
Earthborn
Terrestrial Intelligence
Except he isn't a slave. He's practically the boss of the company. He has a big say in what the company buys as an investment and who is allowed to take care of it. He's only a slave of a company he controls himself!
I would trade with him any day.
Well, you gave the answer yourself on how it could be avoided:
See, it really isn't that hard.Oh wait, the rich people just won't buy anything, my bad.
Rich people will just start giving eachother gifts. They will probably have administrations to make sure the gifts they give to eachother are of the same value on the free market. A steel manufacturer gives 400 thousand dollars worth of steel to a sports car manufacturer and the sports car manufacturer just gives him a 400 thousand dollar sports car in return. No sales tax is paid, since no selling took place, just 'mutual acts of friendship'. From the perspective of the government, there is no trade, just people helping eachother out.
Earthborn said:
I would trade with him any day.
I could arrange that!
Rich people will just start giving eachother gifts. They will probably have administrations to make sure the gifts they give to eachother are of the same value on the free market. A steel manufacturer gives 400 thousand dollars worth of steel to a sports car manufacturer and the sports car manufacturer just gives him a 400 thousand dollar sports car in return. No sales tax is paid, since no selling took place, just 'mutual acts of friendship'. From the perspective of the government, there is no trade, just people helping eachother out.
Ok, here you go coming down on my brilliant ideas, again.
I've already figured this out, any "funny business" and you get hit with a stick. Hard. You hit enough people with enough sticks somebodys gonna learn something. Or at least its fun hitting people with sticks.
Kevin_Lowe
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EvilYeti said:
So who decides who gets the stick?
If you're proposing the pornography standard for tax evasion ("I can't define it but I know what it is"), who is going to judge these cases?
It's a heck of a lot of power to give a person, or a group of people.
Your system is a bad one for a fairly simple reason. The tax system should be concrete enough that an honest person can calculate exactly how much tax they owe and know they have paid what is due.
A system where you don't know how much the government is going to demand until they eyeball your house and pull a figure out of thin air is a bad, bad system.
That's not to say that the current system isn't corrupt, abuseable and thoroughly abused. Just that a simplistic "solution" is no solution at all.
Earthborn
Terrestrial Intelligence
You could? Cool!I could arrange that!
In that case I will relegate all the business decisions that need to be made to you, and my job will purely consist of the very important task of deciding in what assets the company invests in and who is going to take care of them. That's a very important job after all, and I will probably have no time for anything else.
Well, it wasn't that brilliant because 'wealth' is not something that can be easily measured in one way or another. If you tax only one way to define wealth, all the rest will be just one gaping hole in the taxsystem. If you define wealth as the number of dollars someone has, they will trade in their dollars for something else. If you define it by the number of cows, people will instead buy donkeys. People already put their homes on the name of their firms or on the name of members of the family to avoid taxes.
That's the real reason taxes are complicated. Some people try to avoid them and others try to get as much of it as they can. They end up in an evolutionary arms race, with one making things more complicated for the other. It's a bit like a snake needing to become more venomous to be able to kill a rodent, that becomes increasingly more resistent to the venom of the snake. You can decide for yourself who is snake and who rodent.
Of course in such an arms race, only individual battles are won. On both sides more and more energy is needed to just maintain the status quo. None of the sides can just decide it doesn't want to play anymore. In the government versus tax-evader battle, it means that the complexity of the system is only going to grow. It's 9000 pages now. Don't bet on that it will be fewer in the future.
Another reason I suspect why taxsystems are so incredibly complex is because of the politicians constantly promising to make it simpler. Trying to simplify something that is inherently complex, is not easy. Whatever plans they have, those will have to be changed. There will have to be exceptions to the rules, and rules ruling the exceptions. Everytime anyone wants to simplify things, they will be adding another layer of complexity. It is easy to shout some simple idea you think it should be based on, getting it implimented in a way that is actually going to work and doesn't hurt so many people that they will protest, or make it too easy to avoid it is a very different matter.
The people who are constantly demanding that taxes should be simplified, should also ask themselves whether they want things to be simplified for the taxpayers or making it run on a smaller bureaucracy. The two things don't always go hand in hand: the assembler programming language is very simple and runs on simple computers, but on the user side it is not easy getting anything done. Windows is very bloated and complex, but for the user it is much easier. Similarly, making it easier for the average taxpayer to calculate their taxes does not necessarily mean the bureaucracy to make it simpler for him will be smaller. I suspect quite the opposite.
mjv said:
For a CEO perks like that are nickles. Don't forget that the corporation is paying tax on the income that it uses for those expenditures. If the CEO is doing his job, so what?
Incidentially, those things that you mention might add up to an equivilant salary of $400k or so. It is not that much.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: IRS gives wrong information about taxes
But that is exactly the point! Any time you call upon the government to do something, they're going to do so with the threat of force. So goverment should only act in areas where the use of force is justified.
When they can fine you or put you in jail just for doing exactly what they told you to do? THAT is tyrannical! Being able to jump into your bank account at any time is tyrannical. Insisting you turn over all the details of your income year after year is tyrannical.
The government does not have to resort to such measures to collect taxes. They only do so because it gives them a virtually unlimited revenue stream so they can finance their favorite boondoggles.
mfeldman said:
But that is exactly the point! Any time you call upon the government to do something, they're going to do so with the threat of force. So goverment should only act in areas where the use of force is justified.
When they can fine you or put you in jail just for doing exactly what they told you to do? THAT is tyrannical! Being able to jump into your bank account at any time is tyrannical. Insisting you turn over all the details of your income year after year is tyrannical.
The government does not have to resort to such measures to collect taxes. They only do so because it gives them a virtually unlimited revenue stream so they can finance their favorite boondoggles.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: IRS gives wrong information about taxes
This is more of your trolling. It just isn't true. For example, when Harry Browne ran for President, he turned down Federal matching funds for his campaign even though he was the first third-party candidate in America's history to qualify for them.
Because they DIDN'T. They did fund and develop ARPAnet, but that isn't the internet. The internet is a collection of independent networks which was looking for a good way to connect themselves together. The TCP/IP standard developed with ARPAnet is what they ended up using, but it could just as easily have been any other protocol. They only used TCP/IP because the government got themselves out of it! That's right, the government opened up the protocol and then completely left it to the private sector! And most of the things you actually use the internet for were not in place at that time. TCP/IP itself was very different, and it was only through the collective cooperation that the numerous problems with TCP/IP began to be fixed. Many of them are still there. So we're still having to work to fix all of the problems with ARPAnet, problems which weren't there in any of the other protocols they could have used.
Another lie. We've discussed roads many times on this forum.
EvilYeti said:
This is more of your trolling. It just isn't true. For example, when Harry Browne ran for President, he turned down Federal matching funds for his campaign even though he was the first third-party candidate in America's history to qualify for them.
Because they DIDN'T. They did fund and develop ARPAnet, but that isn't the internet. The internet is a collection of independent networks which was looking for a good way to connect themselves together. The TCP/IP standard developed with ARPAnet is what they ended up using, but it could just as easily have been any other protocol. They only used TCP/IP because the government got themselves out of it! That's right, the government opened up the protocol and then completely left it to the private sector! And most of the things you actually use the internet for were not in place at that time. TCP/IP itself was very different, and it was only through the collective cooperation that the numerous problems with TCP/IP began to be fixed. Many of them are still there. So we're still having to work to fix all of the problems with ARPAnet, problems which weren't there in any of the other protocols they could have used.
Another lie. We've discussed roads many times on this forum.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: IRS gives wrong information about taxes
They use of force isn't justified when people don't pay their taxes?
I'm not sure what you're referring to, could you please elaborate?
The government can come into my bank account an ANY time? Really?! They can just come and take my money for no reason at all?! You're RIGHT, that IS tyrannical. Good thing they can't. Sheesh...
It does if they want to collect an income tax. You may not agree with the income tax, but calling it "tyrannical" is certainly hyperbole (hint, I've looked up the definition of tyranny..have you?).
I'll let this one go, so much to discuss already...
Mike
shanek said:
They use of force isn't justified when people don't pay their taxes?
I'm not sure what you're referring to, could you please elaborate?
The government can come into my bank account an ANY time? Really?! They can just come and take my money for no reason at all?! You're RIGHT, that IS tyrannical. Good thing they can't. Sheesh...
It does if they want to collect an income tax. You may not agree with the income tax, but calling it "tyrannical" is certainly hyperbole (hint, I've looked up the definition of tyranny..have you?).
I'll let this one go, so much to discuss already...
Mike
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: IRS gives wrong information about taxes
No.
I'm referring to the very subject of this thread! The IRS is giving out bad information, and that could easily result in people being fined or imprisoned if it causes them to make major mistakes on their tax returns! NO ONE should be subjected to that kind of tyranny.
Yes.
No, but they can see what you have.
And that's why we shouldn't have one.
Mine says it's "Extreme harshness or severity." I'd say this definitely qualifies!
mfeldman said:
No.
I'm referring to the very subject of this thread! The IRS is giving out bad information, and that could easily result in people being fined or imprisoned if it causes them to make major mistakes on their tax returns! NO ONE should be subjected to that kind of tyranny.
Yes.
No, but they can see what you have.
And that's why we shouldn't have one.
Mine says it's "Extreme harshness or severity." I'd say this definitely qualifies!