Treasury recovers $1.3B in unpaid taxes from high-wealth tax dodgers

Reddit conversation implies this is the lowest, easiest, least contestable fruit imaginable. Strongly implying a lot more is within reach if the government tried a little harder.

As noted elsewhere in this thread, this is peanuts compared to the deficit let alone the debt. Deficit hawks need to look into Land Value taxes in my opinion.<p>There is an estimated 1.4 billion acres of private property. At an *average* of $10,000 per acre, that would raise 14 Trillion Dollars in revenue. Split 50&#x2F;50 with the States, 7 Trillion to the Federal Government and 7 Trillion divided between the States proportionally, that would cover nearly all government spending.<p>The Federal budget for 2023 was 6.1 Trillion Dollars, including a 1.4 Trillion Deficit. 7 Trillion covers that with hundreds of billions left over to start making debt payments.<p>Now the vast plurality of this land is farm land so at 10,000 an acre would be an onerous burden. So we would probably not get to that average and still need additional revenue or otherwise not be able to abolish all other taxes.

I&#x27;m kinda dubious of the crowing when it doesn&#x27;t come with a baseline figure of what they would have expected to collect in the same timeframe without the program.<p>A common way high net worth people end up delinquent is that they had a windfall like selling a business or appreciated property which they managed poorly or which was genuinely complicated (e.g. due to international issues), resulting in a temporary liquidity problem or just uncertainty over what they needed to pay.<p>Particularly with the low interest rates historically it was just no big deal to be a bit delinquent while you work things out or solve your liquidity... but still be on track to eventually pay it.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t be too surprised if a careful analysis showed most of this recovery was already expected based on historical behavior and that if there was any excess higher interest rates were the main driver.

If I am understanding this article, this is from a drive to chase down tax debts or delinquent tax payments that were already identified previously. In other words, this is just performing collections, which is straightforward. Personally I doubt there will be some breakthrough finding of significant tax underreporting, because most high wealth people are sophisticated enough to carefully follow the law and maintain evidence for it all.

cool, this will run the government for.. (checks watch) almost 2 hours!<p>news flash, folks, <i>every</i> billionaire in the USA, combined, has a combined net worth of about 5 trillion dollars. making billionaires not exist by confiscating all of their wealth (and crashing the stock market in the process) would fund the government for around nine months.<p>not saying that the ultra-wealthy shouldn&#x27;t pay their fair share, but we only have 2 real choices: dramatically cut spending and&#x2F;or dramatically increase productivity&#x2F;gdp. raising taxes is just window dressing and mostly just hurts people who have a w2 income.

In the last 3 years yearly IRS budget grew by more than 2 billion. So another way to read this news is, US taxpayers lost $700M.

An entire 0.1% of the yearly interest payment on our government debt, this should solve a lot of problems.

And this will fund all two minutes of the government.

Two questions to ask yourself:<p>1. Why am I hearing this?<p>2. Why am I hearing this NOW?<p>Try to drop your pre-existing beliefs about the topic for a moment (rich people bad, FedBots evil, etc) and ask why this attempt at persuasion has been brought to your attention.<p>Who benefits from the agitation that occur in your mind when you read this?