Five Former Treasury Secretaries: Fund the IRS

link w&#x2F;o paywall: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;vDBOh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;vDBOh</a>

I find it extremely annoying that the USA treasury wants to punish a lot of other countries for being easy to do business in just because the USA themselves doesn’t dare touching their billionaires.

The linked IRS inspector general report the article’s premise is based on is pretty interesting. Basically the IG is saying that the IRS is leaving a lot of money on the table because of gaps between different functions&#x2F;departments (examination and collection). The report does acknowledge that workforce scale is a problem but it looks like that is stated without considering worker productivity.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.treasury.gov&#x2F;tigta&#x2F;auditreports&#x2F;2020reports&#x2F;202030015fr.pdf#page7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.treasury.gov&#x2F;tigta&#x2F;auditreports&#x2F;2020reports&#x2F;2020...</a>

It is hilarious that Timoty Geithner, of all people, would write this editorial -- given his own problems with failing to report income to the IRS.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Business&#x2F;story?id=6704526&amp;page=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Business&#x2F;story?id=6704526&amp;page=1</a>

&gt; could total $7 trillion over the next decade<p>The treasury created $8T in bond sales just last year, and accelerating. Bond sales fund every level of the government. Tax revenue will never pay the debt. Buyers know this. It doesn&#x27;t matter. It&#x27;s irrelevant.

&gt; But misreporting exceeds 50 percent for certain types of business income, like rental and proprietorship income. The current tax system thus benefits certain high earners who accrue most of their income from sources where misreporting is common.<p>This would be trivially solved by simple and flat taxes, but the main problem with fair and flat taxes is they lack the flexibility to be used as a political social engineering tool.<p>However, I seem to remember something about this very issue in history before, and for some reason this period is a theme this morning - something to do with wealthy peasants being an ongoing problematic resitance to policies that promise justice to everyone if they just give up everything. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dekulakization" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dekulakization</a><p>The window has not shifted and the crimes of the 20th century are still very much in the minds of people. These guys and the rest of the out of touch Davos crowd basically want to engineer a version of China for the rest of the world. You&#x27;re never going to guess who won&#x27;t be giving up their stuff.<p>It is important to express contempt at these people. They show up in every generation, and the results are always the same.

I don&#x27;t think anyone trusts the IRS enough to give them money.

In a surprising turn of events, bureaucrats believe that bolstering their own bureaucracy is the panacea they’ve been looking for!<p>More seriously, based on the level of digitization that has happened in the financial sector over the last 20 years, I think it would be truly shocking if we <i>didn’t</i> have a tremendous reduction in manpower associated with auditing records.<p>Firstly, most American file their taxes using software that all but makes it impossible for them to be wrong in any significant way.<p>Secondly, that is aided by the fact that all major financial institutions pipe their customers data straight into the government and into each other. There is very little space for lying or hiding assets. The whole system is computerized.<p>And to be frank, I doubt that the pursuit of major tax evaders is really a function of lack of resources. I’d strongly wager that it’s a lack of political will. If the authors are being truthful about the existence of a small number of large, known entities simply not filing returns, then we can assume that somebody in the chain of authority has made the explicit decision to not pursue. Adding more bodies without changing that fundamental decision won’t help.

Giving more power to the IRS is not the answer. The Fair Tax is a far better solution.

TLDR: modernizing outdated technological systems is the key to fixing this problem.

Just abolish the income tax. All it does, and will do, is justify the further growth of the surveillance state.

&gt; Six hundred billion dollars per year, and growing in &quot;unpaid taxes&quot;.<p>I foolishly tried to file my own taxes in 2018. Used the IRS&#x27;s free online calculator. According to the letter I got recently, when I put $11k into some tax-advantaged retirement account, it resulted in me not counting that $11k as income, but I actually put it in the wrong account, so that $11k should have counted as income on which I owed taxes.<p>To put it lightly, I am _extremely unsympathetic_ to the IRS complaining about &quot;unpaid taxes&quot; when... i mean, literally everything about the system is broken.<p>There are 1000 things I&#x27;d rather spend the $80k&#x2F;yr my wife and I have taken from me, under threats of violence, by the many agencies who think they have a right to our income.<p>I&#x27;m struggling to understand the arrogance that&#x27;s just dripping through this entire piece.<p>People in America are struggling right now, it&#x27;s been a difficult two years. The heads of the &quot;revenue collection agencies&quot;, complaining about how their job is difficult?<p>Cry me a river.