Reddit conversation implies this is the lowest, easiest, least contestable fruit imaginable. Strongly implying a lot more is within reach if the government tried a little harder.
As noted elsewhere in this thread, this is peanuts compared to the deficit let alone the debt. Deficit hawks need to look into Land Value taxes in my opinion.
There is an estimated 1.4 billion acres of private property. At an *average* of $10,000 per acre, that would raise 14 Trillion Dollars in revenue. Split 50/50 with the States, 7 Trillion to the Federal Government and 7 Trillion divided between the States proportionally, that would cover nearly all government spending.
The Federal budget for 2023 was 6.1 Trillion Dollars, including a 1.4 Trillion Deficit. 7 Trillion covers that with hundreds of billions left over to start making debt payments.
Now the vast plurality of this land is farm land so at 10,000 an acre would be an onerous burden. So we would probably not get to that average and still need additional revenue or otherwise not be able to abolish all other taxes.
A federal land value tax would just flip the tables so much in California... I hate to say it but people would literally lose their shit. As long CA has 52 representatives and 54 electoral college votes, any federal property tax will be a major party re-alignment event.
I'm a left-wing debt hawk, and I really have no answer to the current unsustainable freight train of debt. I suspect inflation is the current plan, but we really, really have slowly building problem that will eventually cascade. When I does, I only hope that I'm invested in an anti-fragile position.
Ideally the Land value tax would be the only tax. Payroll taxes might be necessary for social security and Medicare but otherwise the idea would be that it replaces income taxes, corporate taxes, and so on.
But this would be a direct tax and require a constitutional amendment like the 16th to implement. It really isn’t happening.
But without something radical like the single tax, we will need to increase taxes and implement austerity to deal with the deficit and debt.
>Ideally the Land value tax would be the only tax.
The problem is that land value has become completely disassociated with value. You could get rid of all income taxes, and by adding a land value tax, effectively half the homeowners in CA wouldn't be able to afford the taxes on their own property. Is that bad policy in CA? Sure, it definitely is, but it is the policy, and it would unleash a major short-term crisis.
I'm kinda dubious of the crowing when it doesn't come with a baseline figure of what they would have expected to collect in the same timeframe without the program.
A common way high net worth people end up delinquent is that they had a windfall like selling a business or appreciated property which they managed poorly or which was genuinely complicated (e.g. due to international issues), resulting in a temporary liquidity problem or just uncertainty over what they needed to pay.
Particularly with the low interest rates historically it was just no big deal to be a bit delinquent while you work things out or solve your liquidity... but still be on track to eventually pay it.
I wouldn't be too surprised if a careful analysis showed most of this recovery was already expected based on historical behavior and that if there was any excess higher interest rates were the main driver.
If I am understanding this article, this is from a drive to chase down tax debts or delinquent tax payments that were already identified previously. In other words, this is just performing collections, which is straightforward. Personally I doubt there will be some breakthrough finding of significant tax underreporting, because most high wealth people are sophisticated enough to carefully follow the law and maintain evidence for it all.
cool, this will run the government for.. (checks watch) almost 2 hours!
news flash, folks, every billionaire in the USA, combined, has a combined net worth of about 5 trillion dollars. making billionaires not exist by confiscating all of their wealth (and crashing the stock market in the process) would fund the government for around nine months.
not saying that the ultra-wealthy shouldn't pay their fair share, but we only have 2 real choices: dramatically cut spending and/or dramatically increase productivity/gdp. raising taxes is just window dressing and mostly just hurts people who have a w2 income.
If I stopped paying my taxes my goverment will not even notice. It cannot run on my money alone for even seconds.
Is that an argument for me to not pay my taxes?
> (and crashing the stock market in the process)
Some scaremongering there for a straw man's argument that you made up.
Put thieves, tax avoidance is theft, into prison. Getting the money back is not enough. Society needs justice, and people stealing from everybody should not only pay their fair share but also be punished when they steal from society.
I think it's indisputable that tax policy has an impact on a government's health.
Yes, that's not exactly the same thing as prosecutable tax avoidance. But my sense is the real problem here is quasi-legal tax avoidance, and that this small $1.3 billion figure is just hinting at how easily more taxes could be recovered with less lenient tax policies. (As well as better-funded enforcement officers...) But that gets dangerously close to also saying, "let's raise the tax rates on millionaires (not just billionaires) back to where it was a few years ago..."
And let's be honest: that's why we're having this discussion. Government spending is bad and part of the problem, according to one side - with taxes just a way of enabling it. There's been a lot of words devoted to extolling the values of lower taxes in creating jobs and innovation.
So I think at some point, people just start rooting for tax avoidance.
legal tax avoidance has nothing to do with the $1.3b discussed in this article. I'm all for collecting legal taxes - but I'm against pretending like we can fund the budget with any reasonable tax policy. i'm trying to make the point that if we try to fund the bloated budget at the current gdp, it won't (just) be the super-wealthy who suffer, it will be the people who can't retire, the people whose kids still need scholarships and loans for colleges, the workhorses of the economy, the middle class.
Business needs to profit to exist in the long run. If costs are above revenue it has to close eventually. The bigger components of costs are usually payroll and tax. And a part of payroll also goes to government systems.
This is why high tax countries have terrible GDP. Unless a good part of the tax goes to subsidize companies in some way. And subsidies are very hard to do right and most likely bring corruption into government.
But billionaires do not pay their fair share; you don't need to raise anything and just get from them the same % as from others. The fact that they can legally avoid paying them is a problem. And sure, maybe it's a drip in the bucket, still doesn't mean it shouldn't happen.
Yes, I agree. A lot of things are needed to fix the actual budget/debt issues. Not sure if anyone has solutions for that; must be a popular research topic.
Many goverment expenses come from corruption, from expensive payments for health care (that exists because billionaires put money into politicians pockets, to overspending in the military that also come from kickbacks, etc.). So, reducing the numbers of billionaires reduces corruption and overspending. (And even what is spend can be done so more efficiently, money going to teachers and nurses instead of profits for big corporations).
Cutting on corruption has a big impact into goverment spending. Billionaires and inequality increase corruption, as there is easy money used to bribe politicians. End one and the other follows.
In summary, income inequality is likely to be a significant and no less important
determinant of corruption than economic development (and thus many other variables
for that matter). ... Inequality increases corruption, which in turn deters investment and growth.
“Correlation is not causation”
The paper shows that wealth inequality and corruption are correlated, and pontificates that maybe reducing inequality with wealth redistribution might reduce corruption, but offers no evidence that this is the case. Your chain of reasoning is not really supported by the paper.
> I kind of was expecting a lot more ROI, by like an order of magnitude
Have you looked at any other data besides this article? I haven't which is why I'm not jumping to wild conclusions.
Also their budget has been declining continuously since ~2010. It think it might recover it's (inflation adjusted) 2009 level this year.
OTH it's significantly more effective at collecting taxes than it was back in the 90s or 00s (cost per $ collected is 20-30% lower than it used to be) so extra funding might not necessarily make a huge difference. Then again regardless it's not like the government can done anything better with the extra money.
Their total budget in 2023 was $16 billion and it's generally not increased (or it's even cut) yearly.
So it's not keeping up with inflation and GDP growth without additional funding like the "Inflation Reduction"(since everyone knows that you can reduce inflation by spending even more money..) Act.
The chart on the right. Year is the bottom axis and the vertical axis shows the budget. When the curve goes down it means that the budget has decreased from a higher amount to a lower one (before you say it.. I never claimed it happened every year).
I would also suggest you that you look up figures from before 2014 because that's when most of the cuts happened.
So the government collected 1.3 B from 100k taxpayers who haven't filed taxes for six years.
If we do the math this is 13000 per tax payer or about 2.5 k per year.
So these high net worth individuals attempting to evade taxes owed... 2500 dollars each year.
To me that signals that they're likely not residents or making their money in America and had tax liability for some marginal reason. That's the only way you owe 2.5 k per year on a high income.
But yes, when you do the math, it does seem a little ridiculous. I pay a lot more in federal taxes.
Either IRS failed to collect the full amount owed, of these were people caught in some bizarre technicality where they owed chump change to the government and didn't know.
The tax obligation for these wealthy individuals was 2.5 k per year on average. That's nothing. Either they actually are not high income earners, IRS did not do a good job collecting, or they're non residents caught in some bizarre American tax technicality.
Try to drop your pre-existing beliefs about the topic for a moment (rich people bad, FedBots evil, etc) and ask why this attempt at persuasion has been brought to your attention.
Who benefits from the agitation that occur in your mind when you read this?
Beacuse the US IRS has been underfunded to a greater and greater degree over the past decades and only recently has seen the benefit of increased funding allowing the resources to investigate and pursue the tax dodgers that have always been there.
You're hearing current reporting on the current results of recent funding increases.
You didn't hear this a year, two years, or five years ago .. because it hadn't happened yet.
I’m satisfied very wealthy people who owed taxes paid them. I pay all my taxes, I expect the same from the other top 40% of Americans who have a federal income tax liability. Why would I not be happy to hear this news? This is what I voted for. “Promises made, promises kept.”
For the biblically inclined like yourself, start at Romans 13:6-7, Matthew 17:24-27, and Matthew 22:15-22. Matthew was a tax collector before being called to become one of Jesus' disciples.
My own secular belief system is in shared contribution to the cost and support of civilization. If I alone pay, that is insufficient. We must all pay what is due for the system to effectively function.
This is a very QAnon way of responding to news. Just add in "who's pulling the strings?" and you are pretty much there. You make no assertions, don't engage with the news itself at all, but just "ask questions".
Ahh yes, internet-connected mass schizophrenia thanks to abusive leaders, anonymous/artificial internet commenters breaking humans. They team up on bad ideas trying to get their justice. Buckle up for more of this.
You missed the initial step where they engaged with the news enough to process it and realise that rich people paying taxes they owed was in some way bad for their political team and needed to be undermined.
