What makes you think that the enforcement mechanism to collect the wealth tax will be loosed upon people without wealth?
Because thatâs exactly how it is now and unless the legislation is explicitly and strictly written to prevent it I see no reason to expect otherwise.
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I trust Warren to craft her bill in a narrowly tailored way. Whatâs the incentive for anyone to gum it up with overboard IRS enforcement authority?
If the enforcement mechanism is just more auditors theyâre going to be inclined to stick to the easy audits of relatively poor people as opposed to assigning teams of auditors to comb through thousands of pages of some billionaireâs tax documents.
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I agree. I wouldnât trust, say, Cory Booker, to draft this bill appropriately, but I assume Warren will.
She may draft it well, but I have absolutely no faith the right things will be done by the time it gets out of committee and into the bureaucracy.
For starters, can we all acknowledge that the IRS had itâs budget and headcount cut in the 2010s? The game has been rigged against tax collection already, even bumping IRS headcounts back to 2010 levels will require increasing the staff by something like 20%. And they really should be talking about something more like 100%.
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Additional auditors pay for themselves many times over. Auditing middle class and below doesnât work and is a complete waste of time because they donât pay much income tax to begin with.
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Dems should raise taxes on Jeff Bezos personally Like, the bill should name him specifically and tax him a kajillion dollars. See how many voters wonât like that.
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They should do it GOP style, too.
A one time tax on all stock holdings in excess of $100 billion.
âYour honor this is not targeted at any individual and it is absurd to suggest that. Congress simply intended a generally applicable statute as required by the 14th amendment.â
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thereâs something in case law where this isnât allowed, according to planet money, or lawfare, or smoething else i heard.
Nah you gotta get a different billionaire every month, keep it in the news.
So make new laws.
It is basically impossible to comprehend how rich these assholes are.
Jeff Bezos has like $200 billion. A single billion dollars is an absurd amount of money, well beyond what any one person should ever have. Your garden variety private equity asshole with a couple billion dollars has like a full time family office, jets, staff galore, and lives a truly unimaginable lifestyle. It really isnât possible to spend more than a few billion dollars in a lifetime. He has A HUNDRED FUCKING TIMES THAT MUCH.
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First they came for Bezos, and I said nothing.
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The Building Equity for Zoomers by Opulence Sequestration Act.
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This may be true, but EITC is a huge target of IRS enforcement and the IRS is literally on record as saying they dont audit the well off much because it is too hard.
The decrease in audits as resources declined was heavily tilted towards fewer audits of the wealthy. Supposedly this is being ramped back up, but not sure how many resources are being poured into it and the agency is so swamped right now that Im not sure how much it can ramp up today. Typically the IRS starts audits no more than 12-18 months after filing given the three year statutory deadline for most tax changes. They arent even processing some returns for 8-12 months now.
Also, IIRC from the last time I dug into this, audit rate in the link you posted doesnt mean full fledged audit, it includes things like mail correspondence audits. So if a taxpayer got a question about a specific number via mail and responded back, that would be included in this audit rate.
Im sure these have been posted here at various points but just for reference.
FYP.
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The numbers support a bold increase in IRS resources. The budget of the entire IRS is $12B. The annual loss of government revenue from unpaid taxes is about $400B. There is a win-win solution there.
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I think the vast majority of people have literally zero comprehension of how much money Bezos has. Even if they know itâs $196 billion, that just means heâs rich to them.
If you ask them how much money someone would have had to make every single day from the birth of jesus until now in order to have the amount of money Bezos has, theyâd guess like $5. The answer is $266,000 every day for 2,020 years. Itâs obscene.
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Perhaps giving them a massive funding infusion will change their approach?