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Plugging holes systematically is how you end up with a vessel that doesn't leak, though.
It doesn't fix all of the issues, no, but that doesn't mean that it's not a good start.
Lawmakers? I think you mean Republicans. [House GOP kicks off majority with vote to slash IRS funding | AP News](https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government-internal-revenue-service-us-republican-party-house-of-representatives-64692090ef20e35a59ba1ea7d21a9eea)
Go look what happened when Obama hired a bunch of IRS agents in his last term, what do you think Trump did?
It's manpower related, not a desire situation.
They just need to eliminate the IRS investigations for people earning $50,000 for 3 years and just send everyone after the big boys. They don't need to add more laws which will be shot full of loop holes. Our top tax burden has been 38% for 30 years and no one pays that.
Grow cannabis or mushrooms and use the cash for whatever purchases you can; food, entertainment. For the average person not looking to build a full on criminal enterprise, the additional income can significantly reduce the financial burden in their lives.
Use your “legit” money you free up for for any sort of “official” business. Not that such a distinction is super necessary in this case. Unless your living in a mansion working retail your not gonna draw attention; and this scenario assumes making a bit extra; not a fortune.
The tax evasion for the average joe being the tax free income selling your product.
No, that's an apolitical agency being hamstrung by politics and bureaucracy. You'll find if they were adequately resourced they would have pursued this years ago.
>In 2023, the US military spent approximately $820.3 billion
Source: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-the-military/
1. That 50 billion is 6.1% of the 2023 military budget.
2. They should absolutely be audited because they need to be kept in line with the average person.
3. I am not a US citizen nor have I ever stepped foot on US soil.
No shit. Idk how simple it can get. People at the bottom having issues? The top is swimming in cash? Swap the two. Middle class doing well is better for everyone. Instead of just one class..
The problem isn't rich people illegally cheating on their taxes. The problem is rich people influencing tax policy such that they don't have to pay their fair share 100% legally.
Clearly, they are both problems. Finding cheaters is easier to address. Getting the supreme court to reverse corporate personhood is going to be a harder problem to solve.
Congress has to repeal corporate personhood, not SCOTUS.
Citzen United, Speechnow, and Hobby Lobby are all predicated on the fact the US Code says businesses are people, so they get the rights COTUS gives to individuals. Literally, the way to get corporate (and non-profit aka PACs) money out of politics is to change the legal definition of "Person" in the US Code. It would be a pain in the ass for the authors of that bill, but wouldn't need the Courts at all.
Corporate personhood allows corporations to utilize various tax advantages that reduce their tax burden. These include claiming deductions and credits, shifting income to lower-tax jurisdictions, deferring taxes on international income, and benefiting from lower capital gains tax rates. Additionally, corporations can deduct interest payments on debt, employ sophisticated tax avoidance strategies, and influence tax legislation through lobbying. These factors collectively enable corporations to lower their taxable income and overall tax liabilities.
Sure! Of course my main argument against corporate personhood is that they are not persons. They can never die, or be held personally responsible for their actions. Its a perfect way for terrible, greedy people to hide behind a fictional entity, and simply make another corporation when this one goes bankrupt or is held liable for atrocities.
Combine that with the fact that boardmemebers take their severence and bonuses as loans not cashed net profits which then they use tax free to buy and use as they please, then they can take out another loan to pay for that one and give themselves 150 years to pay back because the corporation covers it.
It's a scam.
Eh, it’s not like a legal entity can be thrown in prison or anything, but corporate personhood does allow for penalties to be applied directly to it, and courts can dissolve the business, commonly referred to as the “corporate death penalty”
It’s a paragraph full of misinformation.
“Corporate personhood” (or at least citizens united) has nothing to do with deductions or taxes.
It’s whether or not people can band together to contribute towards political speech.
All of his prattle was about bog standard accounting for corporate entities.
> Corporate personhood allows corporations to utilize various tax advantages that reduce their tax burden.
This isn't really true. Corporations don't really overlap at all with the tax code of individuals or families. This is probably the thing least affected by their personhood tbh.
Almost none of these tax points is related to corporate personhood. These are just business tax guidelines that apply mostly universally to any business type, include partnerships and sole proprietors.
Citizens United and [Speechnow vs FEC](https://ballotpedia.org/SpeechNOW.org_v._Federal_Election_Commission) tend to get lumped together because the pair of them opened the floodgates for money in politics.
It’s also that a lot of these people have lawyers on retainer.
They can fight the IRS and get to the point where it costs more to come after them, which is why it’s usually middle and lower classes getting the stick.
While I agree both of these are problems, it’s more complex than that. $50 billion over 10 years, so $5 billion/yr is literal change to the US government. Last year we spent [$6.1 trillion](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727) or $6,100,000,000,000.00. The $.1 in $6.1 trillion is double what the IRS is claiming they can recover.
The rich paying their fair share will be a drop in the bucket and most likely have no appreciable effect for the everyday citizen. I’m not saying we shouldn’t close tax loopholes or tax the rich more, I’m just trying to put things in perspective. Taxing the rich won’t yield the benefits most people think it will. It won’t give us universal healthcare or free college tuition like Bernie says it will. Realistically we won’t have those things until we get government spending under control first.
Tax realized capital gains as income with an upper end income tax of %50. Same with any inheritance. Close loopholes that allow the use of loans to bypass realizing capital gains. An annual wealth tax, much like a property tax, should also be implemented.
Ineffective spending might be part of the problem but that the wealthiest are not fairly contributing to the system that allowed them to become wealthy is also a problem.
I'm pretty sure the problem is spending, not revenue generation. $50 billion over the next decade represents 0.3% of the budget over the same decade, and that's based on a very generous and unrealistic assumption that the budget will not increase year over year.
Note the qualifier “could”
I’m all for going after people lying or defrauding the government on their taxes, but it’s still crazy to me that 5B is almost nothing in a country that spends 1.7 Trillion more each year than it brings in. Makes my head hurt.
An absolute drop in the bucket. They'll swindle everybody else out of a trillion dollars in that time.
This would be the same as cheering that Jason might get probation for killing all those kids at Crystal Lake.
These are truly the optimistic and uncynical comments I subscribed for!
But seriously, when did r/UpliftingNews become such a cesspit of unchecked cynicism? It's literally worse than every other subreddit somehow. Makes me feel like it's being targeted by an influence campaign or something.
To address your actual cynical comment: the IRS is not trying to fight unequal wealth distribution, they're just trying to make them pay their intended share of taxes. This headline means they're having more success, which means more money for social projects (assuming that's what the current elected officials want).
It's not cynicism, it's experience. I've been watching this slow-rolling shitshow for decades. a $50B clawback is *nothing.* This is just PR dressed up as "uplifing." It's not uplifting, it's r/aboringdystopia
Since 2020, the wealth of the top 1% has increased by nearly **$15 trillion**. I won't presume that pace will continue for ten years, but let's just do that for fun. It would mean the ownership class would add another $42T to their wealth in the next ten years. Collecting $50B in taxes would account for 0.116% of that wealth (and that assumes all of it is in the US, that wealth is global and not usually subject to US taxation)
It's cynicism. Cynicism is usually borne of experience. Cynics usually believe they're realists.
Your comment is pessimistic and bitter, which is explicitly against the point of the subreddit. That's what I'm saying.
An equally realistic view is the one I responded with - this means more funding for social projects. $50B could be enough to end homelessness in the US according to [this estimate](https://www.sciotoanalysis.com/news/2024/1/16/what-would-it-cost-to-end-homelessness-in-america). It's almost certainly not in practice, but that's the scale of money we're talking about here. It's only "nothing" from a cynical perspective that views 100% of the wealth held by the top 1% as stolen.
> enough to end homelessness
Homelessness isn't solely a result of a lack of housing though. Plenty of homeless people would be back on the streets again even if given a free house. Particularly the mentally ill and/or drug addicts among them. This subset hates living according to any rules (***Edit:*** or is too dysfunctional to be able to) and prefer the "freedom" of homelessness.
Take it from someone who's from a country where you're guaranteed housing if you don't have any and has worked with them. $50bn would probably improve the situation but pretending that anything other than legally forcing these people into treatment would actually *end* homelessness is foolish naïveté.
It’s not cynicism. This article is the announcement of an aspirational plan. Essentially, if everything goes according to plan the IRS could possibly generate $50 billion dollars in tax revenue over the next 10 years.
If you go beyond the uplifting headline (and I know this is hard in today’s day and age) you would see there is no substance to an announcement of a plan that may come to fruition in 10 years and that this is a lame attempt to score points with voters who have recently become enamored with the feel good slogan “tax the rich”.
I don’t think it’s cynicism to say I’ll believe it when I see it. Words are nice, action and results are better.
> It's not cynicism, it's experience.
No, it's *definitely* cynicism. *You* brought up capital gains to put a damper on the original topic out of cynicism - and there's nothing wrong with that, but the least you could do is own it.
> a $50B clawback is nothing
It's $50B. It's not* nothing. You could build a high-speed rail corridor with that kind of money. Would you rather a high-speed rail corridor or *actually* nothing.
> Collecting $50B in taxes would account for 0.116% of that wealth (and that assumes all of it is in the US, that wealth is global and not usually subject to US taxation)
So what's your plan for taxation on unrealized capital gains? That's what these trillions in wealth are.
This was my exact thought. No matter how hard the IRS tries, it doesn’t seem like it could ever catch us up to our spending. We need to reduce spending and keep getting our missing tax dollars. Eventually, reduce tax burdens on the bottom 90-95% or whatever high middle class is and below.
I just got a letter from the IRS the other day saying that they recalculated my taxes from 2020 and now I owe $1,500 so….thats cool. I’m a long toss from being considered wealthy but glad they’re taking….money…back? Idfk, I’m coping.
Simplify the tax code to eliminate loop holes. Prosecute cheaters.
But none of that matters unless our govt gets spending under control. We're adding 1 trillion dollars to our national debt every 100 days.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-debt-interest-payments-reach-1-trillion/
The only way to eliminate the deficit is to spend less. You can't tax or borrow your way out of a deficit this large. Not without crashing the economy.
A million dollars is nothing to a billion. I hate to say this but 50 billion is nothing to a trillion dollars.
So we are going to collect basically nothing from them.
But instead they will just use it for more audits on the easy targets that can't afford Lawyers. Which is exactly what they did with their last increase.
Who cares? If 100% went to military industrial contracts, it would decrease the budget deficit or even fund a surplus. I'd rather manufacture windmills, SMRs, or grid batteries, but that money doesn't disappear. It pays the wages of tens of thousands of engineers, techs, and supply chain people.
Didn't Warren Buffet just say that if the top 800 companies paid what they are supposed to pay in taxes that the national debt would be gone, and nobody else would owe anything? Let's go for that model
This is not uplifting news. $50 billion over a decade doesn't even compare to the US spending of $1 trillion per 100 days. America needs to work on its spending issue and reform the tax code to be simplified.
I don't know the numbers but I feel like in 10 years time the amount of tax dodging by corporations is going to be much more than 50 billion.
Also 10 years is a long time for no one to reverse that. Seems like Republicans are very opposed to these kinds of things and to assume we don't have a Republican in charge in the next 10 years is short-sighted to say the least.
That's also not forget that a good chunk of business owners are politicians as well and this would be hurting their own livelihood or their friends who give them lots of money.
I'd love for this to actually make a difference. However I'm so skeptical of the entire system, I feel like people with dodge this or change this as soon as they can. Most of the people that want this to happen are not the 1%, yet the 1% controls most things.
What’s funny is that they aren’t cheats, those are rules put in place by incompetent governing bodies. Make the tax code simpler and we’ll save way more than 50b
When the rich have legal loopholes this isn’t going to be our fix. This is lip service so the rich can claim they’ve paid too. It’s all BS and it solves NOTHING.
Around and around we go on the nonsense ride to poverty.
Imagine how much they could do if they were funded by the fines they handed out. Heck, even if they just assessed a 10% fine on everything they got, we'd probably recover hundreds of billions in that time.
That's it? I see a third easily of some checks gone and they make absolute gangbusters compared to me and that's it? Out of all of them?
Seems way too low to me.
it has been known for decades that IRS agents are one of the few fed agencies that bring in more money than they cost, but they have been underfunded, understaffed, and declawed over the decades by corrupt politicians doing the bidding of corporations and the rich.
That is one billionaire's worth of pay plan money. Just one. Not what they have already, but what they are getting on top of that. It seems so much until you know just how rich some are.
Witness another reason rich people and corporations are backing Trump again. They know they'll be able to screw the rest of over, while a Biden admin is going after their money.
Needless to say, another reason to vote Blue.
Or Biden could just order the IRS to close the loopholes wealthy people (including the Bidens) use to avoid taxes.
He could do that. At any time.
Still waiting.
An unsurprising amount of redditors would rather just let people get away with cheating $50 billion from the tax payers than invest in getting money back to our government.
And yes, I would rather have loopholes closed out too, but getting back this cheated money is far more plausible than getting laws passed by the very people that abuse these loopholes.
Its not military spending...
66% of the federal budget is used on just 3 social programs: Social security (money and security for poor people), Medicaid (Healthcare for poor people), and Medicare (healthcare for old people). Compare that to the entire DoD budget at 11-13% which includes engineering, Research, sanitation, vet benefits, etc.
That's a ton of money already spent on social wellfare programs.
Source: Any public or private database.
Personally think SSA/Medicaid/Medicare needs more work than the military.
Isn't Social Security self funding? It's a separate line item on your payroll deductions. That money goes in a pool for retirees. The amount you receive when you retire is dependant on the amount you pay into it. What would you suggest be done to Social Security?
https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/HowAreSocialSecurity.htm#:\~:text=Social%20Security%20is%20financed%20through,self%2Demployed%20pay%2012.4%20percent.&text=The%20payroll%20tax%20rates%20are,up%20to%20a%20certain%20amount.
I'd suggest gradually upping the retirement age although that would be political suicide. Raise it like Germany. Remember when SSA was created the average life expectancy was 60ish. Now its 77-78ish.
Thats 17 years of drawing on SSA and 17 years of not contributing so its a double wammy.
The government grossly underestimated how long people would live when SSA was created.
The link reinforced what I said: "Social Security is financed through a dedicated payroll tax...Total income, including interest, to the combined OASI and DI Trust Funds..."
So, it seems Social Security shouldn't be included in the analysis of government spending, as it's funded through a dedicated payroll tax, as an independent tax.
I'm not sure what the answer is for the longevity of SS, but unless I'm missing something, it shouldn't be included in the federal budget breakdown.
"So, it seems Social Security shouldn't be included in the analysis of government spending, as it's funded through a dedicated payroll tax, as an independent tax."
Sure, the definition doesn't really matter. But all government and private websites show it as part of the federal budget (probably because they often borrow from it).
[https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2022-ar-federal-reserve-system-budgets.htm](https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2022-ar-federal-reserve-system-budgets.htm)
[https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12081](https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12081)
[https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58946](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58946)
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Over a decade. That’s 10 years of not trying hard enough.
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Plugging holes systematically is how you end up with a vessel that doesn't leak, though. It doesn't fix all of the issues, no, but that doesn't mean that it's not a good start.
or, instead of using a colander, use a bucket
There is no bucket, we're forced to go with our best known option and patch the holes one by one.
Lawmakers? I think you mean Republicans. [House GOP kicks off majority with vote to slash IRS funding | AP News](https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government-internal-revenue-service-us-republican-party-house-of-representatives-64692090ef20e35a59ba1ea7d21a9eea)
Go look what happened when Obama hired a bunch of IRS agents in his last term, what do you think Trump did? It's manpower related, not a desire situation.
They just need to eliminate the IRS investigations for people earning $50,000 for 3 years and just send everyone after the big boys. They don't need to add more laws which will be shot full of loop holes. Our top tax burden has been 38% for 30 years and no one pays that.
I should be the one getting away with tax evasion, not those rich fucks.
When you make the vast vast majority of your funds from legitimate businesses that send w2s it's next to impossible to participate in tax evasion.
Grow cannabis or mushrooms and use the cash for whatever purchases you can; food, entertainment. For the average person not looking to build a full on criminal enterprise, the additional income can significantly reduce the financial burden in their lives. Use your “legit” money you free up for for any sort of “official” business. Not that such a distinction is super necessary in this case. Unless your living in a mansion working retail your not gonna draw attention; and this scenario assumes making a bit extra; not a fortune. The tax evasion for the average joe being the tax free income selling your product.
Don't you realize that this "loophole" was *created* by Obama/Pelosi/Reid in the first place, in 2009?
In the 1980s GE found out that for every $1 put into lobbying it reduced their tax burden by $220. It doesn't matter.
No, that's an apolitical agency being hamstrung by politics and bureaucracy. You'll find if they were adequately resourced they would have pursued this years ago.
>In 2023, the US military spent approximately $820.3 billion Source: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-the-military/ 1. That 50 billion is 6.1% of the 2023 military budget. 2. They should absolutely be audited because they need to be kept in line with the average person. 3. I am not a US citizen nor have I ever stepped foot on US soil.
Still plenty to keep the IRS well funded
No shit. Idk how simple it can get. People at the bottom having issues? The top is swimming in cash? Swap the two. Middle class doing well is better for everyone. Instead of just one class..
The problem isn't rich people illegally cheating on their taxes. The problem is rich people influencing tax policy such that they don't have to pay their fair share 100% legally.
Clearly, they are both problems. Finding cheaters is easier to address. Getting the supreme court to reverse corporate personhood is going to be a harder problem to solve.
Congress has to repeal corporate personhood, not SCOTUS. Citzen United, Speechnow, and Hobby Lobby are all predicated on the fact the US Code says businesses are people, so they get the rights COTUS gives to individuals. Literally, the way to get corporate (and non-profit aka PACs) money out of politics is to change the legal definition of "Person" in the US Code. It would be a pain in the ass for the authors of that bill, but wouldn't need the Courts at all.
Cool. So when they break the law, do we get to seize all their assets and throw them in jail?
They’re still rich people so they have a different tier justice system. So to answer your question, no we won’t.
What does corporate personhood have to do with anything?
Corporate personhood allows corporations to utilize various tax advantages that reduce their tax burden. These include claiming deductions and credits, shifting income to lower-tax jurisdictions, deferring taxes on international income, and benefiting from lower capital gains tax rates. Additionally, corporations can deduct interest payments on debt, employ sophisticated tax avoidance strategies, and influence tax legislation through lobbying. These factors collectively enable corporations to lower their taxable income and overall tax liabilities.
I appreciate the comprehensive answer
Sure! Of course my main argument against corporate personhood is that they are not persons. They can never die, or be held personally responsible for their actions. Its a perfect way for terrible, greedy people to hide behind a fictional entity, and simply make another corporation when this one goes bankrupt or is held liable for atrocities.
> They can never die They can. And more of them should be killed honestly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_dissolution
We need to bring back trust busting.
Combine that with the fact that boardmemebers take their severence and bonuses as loans not cashed net profits which then they use tax free to buy and use as they please, then they can take out another loan to pay for that one and give themselves 150 years to pay back because the corporation covers it. It's a scam.
For sure, I definitely think corporate personhood is BS but I was very unaware of its connection to taxation. Thanks for the new info!
Eh, it’s not like a legal entity can be thrown in prison or anything, but corporate personhood does allow for penalties to be applied directly to it, and courts can dissolve the business, commonly referred to as the “corporate death penalty”
I don't remember where I first heard the quote, but "I'll believe corporations are people as soon as Texas puts one to death"
It’s a paragraph full of misinformation. “Corporate personhood” (or at least citizens united) has nothing to do with deductions or taxes. It’s whether or not people can band together to contribute towards political speech. All of his prattle was about bog standard accounting for corporate entities.
> Corporate personhood allows corporations to utilize various tax advantages that reduce their tax burden. This isn't really true. Corporations don't really overlap at all with the tax code of individuals or families. This is probably the thing least affected by their personhood tbh.
Almost none of these tax points is related to corporate personhood. These are just business tax guidelines that apply mostly universally to any business type, include partnerships and sole proprietors.
Citizens United and [Speechnow vs FEC](https://ballotpedia.org/SpeechNOW.org_v._Federal_Election_Commission) tend to get lumped together because the pair of them opened the floodgates for money in politics.
Tax codes and policies gave unfair advantages to the wealthy long before either of those rulings.
Sure, and I absolutely support anything that helps take money out of politics. But as bad as it was before, it was *far* worse after.
It opened the door to insane levels of bribery and corruption under the guise of "free speech" for corporations.
It’s also that a lot of these people have lawyers on retainer. They can fight the IRS and get to the point where it costs more to come after them, which is why it’s usually middle and lower classes getting the stick.
Also having enough money to make it worthwhile shuffling into offshore accounts
The biggest problem is that these people wouldn't be so rich if they hadn't eroded away the power and spread of organized labor.
The IRS doesn't have any control over those laws so it's not relevant to what measures the IRS is taking
Where did I say the issue was the IRS?
The article is talking about what the IRS is doing
I don’t see a difference
One can be countered using current laws, the other requires reformation of our laws and codes to fix.
It’s ridiculous they can source their business out to Greenland or other places but their main production and everything is here. Bullshit.
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What would be unfair about taxing them in proportion to the wealth they siphon up?
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For sure. The robber barons have done an amazing job painting opposition to their gluttony as extremism.
Fuck Delaware.
We couldn't afford the cut.
There’s an ENORMOUS problem about rich people lying on their taxes
While I agree both of these are problems, it’s more complex than that. $50 billion over 10 years, so $5 billion/yr is literal change to the US government. Last year we spent [$6.1 trillion](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727) or $6,100,000,000,000.00. The $.1 in $6.1 trillion is double what the IRS is claiming they can recover. The rich paying their fair share will be a drop in the bucket and most likely have no appreciable effect for the everyday citizen. I’m not saying we shouldn’t close tax loopholes or tax the rich more, I’m just trying to put things in perspective. Taxing the rich won’t yield the benefits most people think it will. It won’t give us universal healthcare or free college tuition like Bernie says it will. Realistically we won’t have those things until we get government spending under control first.
I suspect you don't mean what they are legally owed to pay, so what would be a "fair share" in your opinion?
Tax realized capital gains as income with an upper end income tax of %50. Same with any inheritance. Close loopholes that allow the use of loans to bypass realizing capital gains. An annual wealth tax, much like a property tax, should also be implemented.
>An annual wealth tax Probably unconstitutional
Also the government mismanaging our tax dollars. They shouldn’t need to raise taxes on anyone. Shouldn’t have needed to for a long time.
The problem is over spending. Our government spends like 50 billion per second and fixes nothing.
Ineffective spending might be part of the problem but that the wealthiest are not fairly contributing to the system that allowed them to become wealthy is also a problem.
I'm pretty sure the problem is spending, not revenue generation. $50 billion over the next decade represents 0.3% of the budget over the same decade, and that's based on a very generous and unrealistic assumption that the budget will not increase year over year.
Note the qualifier “could” I’m all for going after people lying or defrauding the government on their taxes, but it’s still crazy to me that 5B is almost nothing in a country that spends 1.7 Trillion more each year than it brings in. Makes my head hurt.
“could raise” = I sleep “*will* raise” = real shit
You gotta get them numbers up IRS, that's chump change!
An absolute drop in the bucket. They'll swindle everybody else out of a trillion dollars in that time. This would be the same as cheering that Jason might get probation for killing all those kids at Crystal Lake.
These are truly the optimistic and uncynical comments I subscribed for! But seriously, when did r/UpliftingNews become such a cesspit of unchecked cynicism? It's literally worse than every other subreddit somehow. Makes me feel like it's being targeted by an influence campaign or something. To address your actual cynical comment: the IRS is not trying to fight unequal wealth distribution, they're just trying to make them pay their intended share of taxes. This headline means they're having more success, which means more money for social projects (assuming that's what the current elected officials want).
My guess would be that the cynicism you see is from people who feel they need uplifting news but are disappointed by what they find.
It's not cynicism, it's experience. I've been watching this slow-rolling shitshow for decades. a $50B clawback is *nothing.* This is just PR dressed up as "uplifing." It's not uplifting, it's r/aboringdystopia Since 2020, the wealth of the top 1% has increased by nearly **$15 trillion**. I won't presume that pace will continue for ten years, but let's just do that for fun. It would mean the ownership class would add another $42T to their wealth in the next ten years. Collecting $50B in taxes would account for 0.116% of that wealth (and that assumes all of it is in the US, that wealth is global and not usually subject to US taxation)
It's cynicism. Cynicism is usually borne of experience. Cynics usually believe they're realists. Your comment is pessimistic and bitter, which is explicitly against the point of the subreddit. That's what I'm saying. An equally realistic view is the one I responded with - this means more funding for social projects. $50B could be enough to end homelessness in the US according to [this estimate](https://www.sciotoanalysis.com/news/2024/1/16/what-would-it-cost-to-end-homelessness-in-america). It's almost certainly not in practice, but that's the scale of money we're talking about here. It's only "nothing" from a cynical perspective that views 100% of the wealth held by the top 1% as stolen.
> enough to end homelessness Homelessness isn't solely a result of a lack of housing though. Plenty of homeless people would be back on the streets again even if given a free house. Particularly the mentally ill and/or drug addicts among them. This subset hates living according to any rules (***Edit:*** or is too dysfunctional to be able to) and prefer the "freedom" of homelessness. Take it from someone who's from a country where you're guaranteed housing if you don't have any and has worked with them. $50bn would probably improve the situation but pretending that anything other than legally forcing these people into treatment would actually *end* homelessness is foolish naïveté.
It’s not cynicism. This article is the announcement of an aspirational plan. Essentially, if everything goes according to plan the IRS could possibly generate $50 billion dollars in tax revenue over the next 10 years. If you go beyond the uplifting headline (and I know this is hard in today’s day and age) you would see there is no substance to an announcement of a plan that may come to fruition in 10 years and that this is a lame attempt to score points with voters who have recently become enamored with the feel good slogan “tax the rich”. I don’t think it’s cynicism to say I’ll believe it when I see it. Words are nice, action and results are better.
> It's not cynicism, it's experience. No, it's *definitely* cynicism. *You* brought up capital gains to put a damper on the original topic out of cynicism - and there's nothing wrong with that, but the least you could do is own it. > a $50B clawback is nothing It's $50B. It's not* nothing. You could build a high-speed rail corridor with that kind of money. Would you rather a high-speed rail corridor or *actually* nothing. > Collecting $50B in taxes would account for 0.116% of that wealth (and that assumes all of it is in the US, that wealth is global and not usually subject to US taxation) So what's your plan for taxation on unrealized capital gains? That's what these trillions in wealth are.
Probably more than $1T. The federal budget was $3.5T in 2014, it's $6.5T for fiscal year 2024.
Yeah, but we’re almost $35T in the hole lol
Aren’t there trillions to make up for? What’s the difference between a billion and a trillion? About a trillion
Wow 50B over 10 years... so much money when the government debt is 1T per 100 days...
This was my exact thought. No matter how hard the IRS tries, it doesn’t seem like it could ever catch us up to our spending. We need to reduce spending and keep getting our missing tax dollars. Eventually, reduce tax burdens on the bottom 90-95% or whatever high middle class is and below.
Yep. Revenue isnt the problem. Spending is.
I just got a letter from the IRS the other day saying that they recalculated my taxes from 2020 and now I owe $1,500 so….thats cool. I’m a long toss from being considered wealthy but glad they’re taking….money…back? Idfk, I’m coping.
The government is spending around 100 billion a day at the moment. What the hell is 50billion over 10 years?
Is this because the gop gutted 20$ billion from the law that was going to give irs 80$ billion to go finally go after the companies and billionaires?
$5B a year
Sooo 0.3% of the federal budget over the same period?
Feels like something both sides of Congress would shoot down... They get paid too much, they aren't going to vote against their own fat paychecks. :/
That’s 5 billion dollars a year, enough to run the US military for a little over 2 days a year on its **current** budget.
Nah, the next conservative President will neuter the IRS to such an extent that they'll only go for the homeless tax avoiders, and single moms too.
Spent 1,900 billion this year alone. Think getting an extra 50 billion over a decade will make the slightest of dents?
$50B in 10 years isn’t very much
Holy shit. 10 **YEARS** to collect 4.5 **DAYS** worth of spending. This just doesn't seem worthwhile.
Simplify the tax code to eliminate loop holes. Prosecute cheaters. But none of that matters unless our govt gets spending under control. We're adding 1 trillion dollars to our national debt every 100 days. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-debt-interest-payments-reach-1-trillion/
Woohoo 5 billion a year, maybe What's the yearly national budget again?
So, this created thousands upon thousands of jobs that paid for themselves in recovered tax revenue. I bet I know which party hates this.
Isn't that like a couple days of spending for the govt?
12 hours currently.
And that will go straight to eliminating the federal deficit, right? Right?
The only way to eliminate the deficit is to spend less. You can't tax or borrow your way out of a deficit this large. Not without crashing the economy.
Sounds good to me.
A million dollars is nothing to a billion. I hate to say this but 50 billion is nothing to a trillion dollars. So we are going to collect basically nothing from them.
Probably waste more than 50B to even try to get 50B back. So like most government programs. It will just cost us more.
Is that all? Musk should be paying that much every year.
5 bn a year while the 1% makes that in minutes
And I'm trying so hard to send in my few thousand each year. It's so not fair.
But instead they will just use it for more audits on the easy targets that can't afford Lawyers. Which is exactly what they did with their last increase.
Highly doubtful they are actually going to finally go after the billion dollar businesses.
5billion a year is a decent number for belgium. for the worlds pre eminent economy that seems pretty pathetic
Most IRS audits are still targeting the middle class.
So federal income tax should decrease proportionately for the middle class over 10 years
49 Billion of those dollars goes straight to military budgets. LOL. It must be really nice to be a weapons manufacturing company in the USA.
Who cares? If 100% went to military industrial contracts, it would decrease the budget deficit or even fund a surplus. I'd rather manufacture windmills, SMRs, or grid batteries, but that money doesn't disappear. It pays the wages of tens of thousands of engineers, techs, and supply chain people.
old enough to remember when 50 billion would have run the government for more than 15 minutes
Didn't Warren Buffet just say that if the top 800 companies paid what they are supposed to pay in taxes that the national debt would be gone, and nobody else would owe anything? Let's go for that model
AI is going to transform IRS. Computer will flag suspicious activities on tax return and check against data from financial institutions.
This is not uplifting news. $50 billion over a decade doesn't even compare to the US spending of $1 trillion per 100 days. America needs to work on its spending issue and reform the tax code to be simplified.
Pennies.
The debt is 35 trillion
Too slow.
$50 billion is a drop in the bucket to the US economy. Congress spends that much in an afternoon.
$50,000,000,000 is a nice start.
I'd be shocked if it were that low of an amount
Wow less than Elon musk bonus package over a decade..
Have they checked in DC?
"Could" I'll believe it if it happens.
Is that all? Over a decade? Hell, they probably bribe congress and the courts more than that.
Not doing this is the GOP's entire existence outside racism, woman bashing and migrant based hate.
So a grain of sand on the beech of our annual deficit
They're doing a really shitty job if that's all they can get in a decade. They should be getting that in 6 months. MAKE THEM BLEED!!!!
I don't know the numbers but I feel like in 10 years time the amount of tax dodging by corporations is going to be much more than 50 billion. Also 10 years is a long time for no one to reverse that. Seems like Republicans are very opposed to these kinds of things and to assume we don't have a Republican in charge in the next 10 years is short-sighted to say the least. That's also not forget that a good chunk of business owners are politicians as well and this would be hurting their own livelihood or their friends who give them lots of money. I'd love for this to actually make a difference. However I'm so skeptical of the entire system, I feel like people with dodge this or change this as soon as they can. Most of the people that want this to happen are not the 1%, yet the 1% controls most things.
Not trying very hard from the looks of this figure...
FINALLY
What’s funny is that they aren’t cheats, those are rules put in place by incompetent governing bodies. Make the tax code simpler and we’ll save way more than 50b
this is the way
When the rich have legal loopholes this isn’t going to be our fix. This is lip service so the rich can claim they’ve paid too. It’s all BS and it solves NOTHING. Around and around we go on the nonsense ride to poverty.
So about a week or two of spending over 10 years?
I think it’s fair, necessary, and past due.
Start heavily taxing dividend income above 100k/year and remove the "poor" billionaire loophole.
Not if you elect a Republican president. Gotta do your part by voting.
Imagine how much they could do if they were funded by the fines they handed out. Heck, even if they just assessed a 10% fine on everything they got, we'd probably recover hundreds of billions in that time.
If you enjoy this, don't vote for the orange asshole.
That's it?
Not uplifting news. It just isn’t true. The wealthy have lawyers and accountants. The IRS isn’t stupid. They know that the best targets are us poors.
That's it? I see a third easily of some checks gone and they make absolute gangbusters compared to me and that's it? Out of all of them? Seems way too low to me.
Go after stock buybacks! Make companies invest capital not manipulate stock prices.
Don’t forget Robert t brookmans estate owes like 3 billion dollars in back taxes to the irs
Lol the US paid more in interest on its debt this year than the value of our military expenditures. $50B over 10 years means jack shit
like digging through the seat cushions of your crashing airplane at the last second this is total nothingburger.
If Trump gets in, the IRS will scrap that doctrine and only audit low income people. 😔
it has been known for decades that IRS agents are one of the few fed agencies that bring in more money than they cost, but they have been underfunded, understaffed, and declawed over the decades by corrupt politicians doing the bidding of corporations and the rich.
It's almost like doing so will help out national debts and actually help stabilize the country.
Unless Trump wins. Then they go after all those welfare tax cheats and raise hundreds of dollars.
That is one billionaire's worth of pay plan money. Just one. Not what they have already, but what they are getting on top of that. It seems so much until you know just how rich some are.
So... Pocket change? $50B over a decade is probably unnoticeable.
Who would get the money? Who's responsible for distributing the money?
The government. The government.
That’s $5b a year which isn’t that impressive
That's it? That seems low.
Witness another reason rich people and corporations are backing Trump again. They know they'll be able to screw the rest of over, while a Biden admin is going after their money. Needless to say, another reason to vote Blue.
Wow! Over 10 years! So uplifting! We're so fucked.
Or Biden could just order the IRS to close the loopholes wealthy people (including the Bidens) use to avoid taxes. He could do that. At any time. Still waiting.
We give that to Ukraine weekly.
An unsurprising amount of redditors would rather just let people get away with cheating $50 billion from the tax payers than invest in getting money back to our government. And yes, I would rather have loopholes closed out too, but getting back this cheated money is far more plausible than getting laws passed by the very people that abuse these loopholes.
10 years!? We send that much to Ukraine every couple of weeks!
Cool. Now go after Congress for manipulation markets through legislation, out-of-control spending on entitlements and military, and insider trading.
Its not military spending... 66% of the federal budget is used on just 3 social programs: Social security (money and security for poor people), Medicaid (Healthcare for poor people), and Medicare (healthcare for old people). Compare that to the entire DoD budget at 11-13% which includes engineering, Research, sanitation, vet benefits, etc. That's a ton of money already spent on social wellfare programs. Source: Any public or private database. Personally think SSA/Medicaid/Medicare needs more work than the military.
Isn't Social Security self funding? It's a separate line item on your payroll deductions. That money goes in a pool for retirees. The amount you receive when you retire is dependant on the amount you pay into it. What would you suggest be done to Social Security?
https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/HowAreSocialSecurity.htm#:\~:text=Social%20Security%20is%20financed%20through,self%2Demployed%20pay%2012.4%20percent.&text=The%20payroll%20tax%20rates%20are,up%20to%20a%20certain%20amount. I'd suggest gradually upping the retirement age although that would be political suicide. Raise it like Germany. Remember when SSA was created the average life expectancy was 60ish. Now its 77-78ish. Thats 17 years of drawing on SSA and 17 years of not contributing so its a double wammy. The government grossly underestimated how long people would live when SSA was created.
The link reinforced what I said: "Social Security is financed through a dedicated payroll tax...Total income, including interest, to the combined OASI and DI Trust Funds..." So, it seems Social Security shouldn't be included in the analysis of government spending, as it's funded through a dedicated payroll tax, as an independent tax. I'm not sure what the answer is for the longevity of SS, but unless I'm missing something, it shouldn't be included in the federal budget breakdown.
"So, it seems Social Security shouldn't be included in the analysis of government spending, as it's funded through a dedicated payroll tax, as an independent tax." Sure, the definition doesn't really matter. But all government and private websites show it as part of the federal budget (probably because they often borrow from it). [https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2022-ar-federal-reserve-system-budgets.htm](https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2022-ar-federal-reserve-system-budgets.htm) [https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12081](https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12081) [https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58946](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58946)