this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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I know they’ve said they don’t have the capacity to take on the really big tax cheats (ie the same people that pay lobbyists and gift politicians with trips and gifts), but recovering one or two of their dodged taxes alone would probably cover every gig worker who’s ever underpaid taxes.
Of course, that would only make sense if you thought the IRS’ primary function was to fairly enforce taxation and mutual support of our shared govt—whereas the older I get, the more it seems to me that it serves as a social disciplining function and a lever to adjust social mobility. If your have enough money, you never have to worry about them.
This is why Biden gave them a big funding boost, to staff up so they could go after those people.
Well, maybe so, but so far they’re going after… gig workers
This is not true
That’s certainly a start but only 1.7 billion of that is listed as explicitly “high-income” unpaid debt. Even if you were to assume the 4.7 billion was entirely from high income, which I doubt, it’s still dwarfed by estimates of the missing taxes from the 1%. Per this fast co article an estimate of 168 billion per year is evaded by the top 1%. That’s 28% of the total evaded tax revenue estimate of 600billion. I’d speculate that if you included grey area practices for sheltering and hiding money, that liability would grow substantially.
I fully understand the IRS is understaffed and has been choked for funding, my general point is that this is deliberate, and meant to force them to focus on recoverable things like gig workers as opposed to the very wealthy who can hold them off with lawyers and clever accountants. If it were possible for them to go after these people, that would be the most rational use of their time—when I need to free up space on a hard drive or email acct, I target the largest files and attachments first.
Exactly. The IRS can only work within the law, and if the law makes it easy for the wealthy to evade taxes. That needs to be fixed in Congress. So good luck to us all, I guess!
It's a start, but it needs to go much, much further.
Total extra collected: $4.7 Billion
Total from "high-income taxpayers": $1.3 Billion
Your source does not actually say what you are implying it does.....