I'm very cynical of "but this time it will be different, we're going after the rich!". Anyone who has ever dealt with government bureacrats, knows that they generally end up following the path of least resistance which in this case will be the middle class.

I pay all of my taxes due, and I expect the same from other taxpayers, regardless of income bracket and total tax liability.

You have an idealistic assumption that people who are targeted for audits or fines are all guilty of tax fraud. This isn't true. Sometimes is just a matter of them losing supporting documentation.

The political narrative is that the IRS will be on the front lines of the battle for social equity and maybe that's the intention but I've personally experienced the realities of government bureaucracy and the overreach of federal law enforcement.

What are "taxes due"? And at what point does "Creative-but-legal accounting" turn into "Tax fraud"?

The tax code is complex and arcane enough that if you give a suitably complicated set of taxes to several different tax preparers, they will almost certainly all come back with different numbers - all of which are "correct," in the sense of being compliant with tax code.

But at some point, which honestly isn't that much annual income, it becomes worth having your own private accountant to wrangle your side businesses and such for the tax benefits. A friend of mine did this out of college (accounting/finance major) - on paper, he was responsible for doing some freight routing for trainloads of raw materials, but in reality he was about 25% that and 75% "keeping up with the details of the company owner's side businesses, all of which were legal and legitimate, but all of which served as tax breaks for the owner's hobbies." Hunting guide company? A reasonable amount of your firearms expenses are tax deductible for training, practice, equipment evaluation, etc. Fishing company? Same for a lot of your boat expenses and such.

I'm not sure if that really needs fixing or not, but a $50k/yr dedicated accountant is cheaper than taxes fairly quickly. Especially if they can do other work for you too.

So you go through your congress critter, and hope they can find the right person for you, which they generally manage to do, but it takes them 6 months. Or in my case, I have an issue from 2019 still pending. My congress critter has even changed, so I have to re-initiate and start the process all over again whenever that happens. Luckily it's a case where they owe me a little money and I don't really need it.

The IRS desperately needs the funding. But of course they could become over-funded and cause stupid ridiculous problems in the other direction.

If they're well-documented it's not here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_allegations_of_misuse_... or here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Service

I can't wait to be told why this is a bad thing.

- Kill People - Torture people - Lock people up

So I'd much rather have him keep his money than have to hand it over to people who will use it for these purposes. Yeah, I know, I know, they build roads and it's absolutely impossible to build roads without extorting the entire population.

More money in the hands of an efficient government isn't always a good thing.

> over taxed

They've only started reviewing these and there's a lot more for them to grind through.

The question however is how long it will take them to go through each loan.

One might think that people who claim their priority is reducing the budget deficit would strongly support spending tens of billions to increase revenues by hundreds of billions.

But when we observe that people's actions contradict their claims, we should stop believing their claims.

First, even if the recovered money exceeds the budget, the amount of recoverable money tends to be fixed to a first approximation. Audits already tend to follow the 80/20 rule. The marginal increase in recovered money quickly becomes less than the marginal increase in budget. You might find a new seam of recoverable money but those tend to dry up quickly while agency budget increases are forever.

Second, the indirect compliance costs to the government can exceed the directly recovered money, even ignoring the economy at large. The government may find $75M in new money for an audit cost of $25M if they start auditing something they have historically ignored and therefore tends to have sloppy compliance. This will create a lot of compliance activity in the private sector. On the surface, this looks like a free $50M to the government. However, these compliance costs can increase government procurement costs in excess of the direct recovery. The US government is aware of this and is therefore circumspect about over-auditing for diminishing returns as that can show up as a net cost elsewhere in the budget.

Most money recovered in audits is from sloppy record-keeping, ignorance, ambiguity, etc and not fraudulent intent at scale. There is always some fraud but that isn't the meat-and-potatoes of it. Increases in auditing incentivizes more rigorous processes in the private sector, which comes at a cost to the economy, but also reduces future audit recoveries. Increasing audits isn't an infinite money glitch.

There's a strong belief that somehow rich people are uniquely capable of "creating jobs", while jobs the government creates don't count. Surely if we let the rich get richer, that money will trickle down on the rest of us. It's not totally inconsistent, if you overlook the fact that it never actually works that way.

Still... this one does have a strong note of "laws for thee, but not for me". Or even more weirdly, "... but not for the person I imagine I'm going to be some day, even if it's worse for the person I actually am and almost certainly will remain."

Conservatives want the government cut down significantly, not to find creative ways to get more money.

Actually cutting spending is hard. It's easy to decry the overall number, but you have to cut actual programs. The vast majority of it goes to things like social security, medicare, and the military -- things people are reluctant to cut. Of what's left, it's a lot harder to find "waste" than people think. At most they zero in on programs that matter a lot to other people... and comprise a trivial fraction of the overall budget.

The budget is big because people want it to be big. Actually reducing the size of it is hard. Meantime, there is zero reason why we should allow people to break the law to avoid paying for the money that Congress appropriates.

“RESOLVED, That the Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention.”

https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/docs/Resolution_Platform_202...

Strictly, that meant that the 2016 platform remained in force, and they blamed the inability to derive a new one on COVID. But it doesn't speak particularly well of them not to be seriously considering the fundamental statement of what it is the party wants to do.

Yet another claim trivially refuted by actions.

We should stop repeating transparently bogus claims like this.

The fact is they have been very successful at stopping democratic policy over the years and just this year they have forced concessions on spending out of democrats, including the president after he stated that wouldn’t happen.

I've had major frustrations precisely because conservatives do not cut down on the government when they finally get elected. Spending always goes up.

What we have, at least in the US, are tax and spend big "liberals" on one side. And don't tax, but spend even bigger anyway "conservatives" on the other.

Please don't try to sell us on the myth of conservatives being good financial stewards because the recent historical data clearly bears all that out to be nonsense. There is currently no option in the US for you to vote for if you believe we need, for instance, a drawdown in spending.

A. A lot of them definitely are grifters

B. The ones that aren’t have to deal with political realities that make slashing income easier than slashing spending.

Why do we still need to tax the working poor?

SV techbros will happily sell your data to whichever tyrant is paying, including the federal government.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/surveillance-sale

https://epic.org/issues/consumer-privacy/data-brokers/

https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/how-your-online-data-...

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-relea...

It is always posts repeating left/center-left dogmas. Agree or disagree, fine. It is also fair to dismiss the entire exercise as meaningless bickering. However I find it hard to describe this as "intellectual curiosity", when the discussion is narrowly limited to specific brands of sloganeering.

Entire books have been written on some of the common disputes arising on this site. There's rarely anything new added in the usual short comments here. Most commonly I read a pop culture interpretation/regurgitation of the same concepts. Perhaps it was something a talking head repeated somewhere?

When I have made the mistake of engaging, I'll cite an author or perhaps link a short article by the same author summarizing some of the points. Inevitably, posters will smear the source for having, "an agenda". As if all of politics isn't framed from within "agendas".

It is bad enough on explicitly partisan posts like this one, but I'm also noticing politics creeping into other benign areas. A discussion about Google's practices will always lead down the rabbit hole of "more regulation and government can solve that!". Observations around the business cycle, state managed economy and how these factors fuel monopolies are less welcome. Perhaps John Oliver didn't give those talking points.