How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor • Hacker News Board

Re: How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor

#21

Post by dantheman » Tue, Sep 06, 2011, 5:50 AM UTC

wisty wrote: post #11

tzs wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax laws generally start out simple, then get complex patching holes. My favorite example. Once upon a time a long time ago, a company wanted to pay a dividend to shareholders. That would be taxed as ordinary income to the shareholders. The company's accountants had a brilliant idea. 1. Do a stock split. Say, 105 for 100. 2. Do a stock buyback, where the company buys back 1/21 of the outstanding shares. Net result to…

Why should income and capital gains be taxed differently anyway? If it's to stop Grandma getting hit with a huge marginal tax when she sells her house (despite it being a once-off kind of thing), just introduce some kind of smoothing. If your income is uneven, the tax man can give concessions (if you get a lot of money after a period of low income), and rebates (if you have a low income period after making a lot of m…

Because income and capital gains are two different things. Capital gains should be lower because there is a risk that you may lose money, if you add a high tax on top of that lots of investments become not worth it.

Re: How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor

#22

Post by Canada » Tue, Sep 06, 2011, 5:51 AM UTC

shawnee_ wrote: post #13

waffle_ss wrote: post #6

Tax laws need to be much, much simpler. The more complicated they are, the easier it will be for people to sneak by without paying and for loopholes to exist. It's the same thing that happens when a program drifts away from triviality - the probability of bugs increases greatly. Make tax laws trivial, and most of these problems - and most of the need for the IRS - would go away.

Good analogy. Although I've mentioned this before here, it's relevant; the way the tax law was originally put into effect was very smart and not complicated at all. ($4000 in 1893 ~ $100K today) (1) Zero tax on any person making under $4,000 per annum (2) Begin graduated tax rates on person making $4,000 or more per annum (with special attention paid to trustees and other persons whose income source is derived from e…

Zombie processes aren't scheduled for execution and therefore don't consume CPU resources.

Re: How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor

#23

Post by SamReidHughes » Tue, Sep 06, 2011, 5:53 AM UTC

wisty wrote: post #11

tzs wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax laws generally start out simple, then get complex patching holes. My favorite example. Once upon a time a long time ago, a company wanted to pay a dividend to shareholders. That would be taxed as ordinary income to the shareholders. The company's accountants had a brilliant idea. 1. Do a stock split. Say, 105 for 100. 2. Do a stock buyback, where the company buys back 1/21 of the outstanding shares. Net result to…

Why should income and capital gains be taxed differently anyway? If it's to stop Grandma getting hit with a huge marginal tax when she sells her house (despite it being a once-off kind of thing), just introduce some kind of smoothing. If your income is uneven, the tax man can give concessions (if you get a lot of money after a period of low income), and rebates (if you have a low income period after making a lot of m…

> Why should income and capital gains be taxed differently anyway?

Because of inflation, because there's already a corporate income tax.

Re: How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor

#24

Post by sliverstorm » Tue, Sep 06, 2011, 6:47 AM UTC

robryan wrote: post #15

Astrohacker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I find it disturbing that other commenters in this thread would evidently use this program if they had a chance. I can sense the downvotes already... but let me explain why this program is terrible. If I charged everyone a tax, and threatened people with violence if they didn't pay up, then everyone would recognize it was wrong. When government does it, the brainwashed masses think it's a good thing. But it i…

How do you propose public services are paid for and law and order is maintained?

Your parent probably hasn't thought it out that far; your parent probably started at "gee, I don't like paying taxes" and stopped at "therefore, taxes are bad! Down with taxes!"

Alternatively, your parent could belong to the set of people who basically figure the money will just come from somewhere. They don't really care where, so long as it's someone else's money.

Re: How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor

#25

Post by sliverstorm » Tue, Sep 06, 2011, 6:51 AM UTC

abduhl wrote: post #19

aschoen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps public services (including the legal system) could be funded by donations instead of tax money.

Should everyone be allowed to use these public services when not everyone is donating? Should you be allowed to use the police even if you haven't been donating to their budget? What if the police have two calls: one from someone who has donated and one from someone who hasn't? Who has priority? The tax system exists to fund services that are generally not used by someone until they are needed (FEMA, Medicare, unempl…

Yup. People love to skip out on paying for services, and then scream bloody murder when they don't get those services later when they need them.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/t/no-pa...

Re: How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor

#26

Post by georgieporgie » Tue, Sep 06, 2011, 6:59 AM UTC

Astrohacker wrote: post #12

mchusma wrote: post #2

This might be the most terrifying program I have ever heard of. I am struggling to think of anything other than the potential consequences of this.

Agreed. I find it disturbing that other commenters in this thread would evidently use this program if they had a chance. I can sense the downvotes already... but let me explain why this program is terrible. If I charged everyone a tax, and threatened people with violence if they didn't pay up, then everyone would recognize it was wrong. When government does it, the brainwashed masses think it's a good thing. But it i…

government is immoral. Government is therefore a criminal organization

Well, the simplest of the logic errors there is that one. Immoral does not equal illegal. I'm not even going to get into the fact that it's not always wrong to force people to do things.

Re: How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor

#27

Post by smutticus » Tue, Sep 06, 2011, 7:02 AM UTC

SamReidHughes wrote: post #23

wisty wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should income and capital gains be taxed differently anyway? If it's to stop Grandma getting hit with a huge marginal tax when she sells her house (despite it being a once-off kind of thing), just introduce some kind of smoothing. If your income is uneven, the tax man can give concessions (if you get a lot of money after a period of low income), and rebates (if you have a low income period after making a lot of m…

> Why should income and capital gains be taxed differently anyway? Because of inflation, because there's already a corporate income tax.

1) Inflation effects salaries just as much as capital gains. Inflation does not discriminate between income types.

2) I pay capital gains tax rates on some of my income but I'm not a corporation so I pay no corporate income tax. The 2 are only tangentially related.

Re: How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor

#28

Post by yummyfajitas » Tue, Sep 06, 2011, 7:11 AM UTC

robryan wrote: post #15

Astrohacker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I find it disturbing that other commenters in this thread would evidently use this program if they had a chance. I can sense the downvotes already... but let me explain why this program is terrible. If I charged everyone a tax, and threatened people with violence if they didn't pay up, then everyone would recognize it was wrong. When government does it, the brainwashed masses think it's a good thing. But it i…

How do you propose public services are paid for and law and order is maintained?

This is a minor problem, since public services make up a very small portion of government spending in the US. Most government spending is merely redistribution.

http://usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2009_US_total

Re: How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor

#29

Post by SamReidHughes » Tue, Sep 06, 2011, 7:13 AM UTC

smutticus wrote: post #27

SamReidHughes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should income and capital gains be taxed differently anyway? Because of inflation, because there's already a corporate income tax.

1) Inflation effects salaries just as much as capital gains. Inflation does not discriminate between income types. 2) I pay capital gains tax rates on some of my income but I'm not a corporation so I pay no corporate income tax. The 2 are only tangentially related.

1) Inflation does discriminate between income types, in the following manner. If there's 5% annual inflation and somebody pays you a dollar for some work today, you're getting one dollar in whatever today's dollar is worth, and you're paying income taxes in whatever today's dollar is worth. If there's 5% annual inflation, and you invested $20 a year ago and today you sold your investment for $22, you've made $1 in whatever today's dollar is worth. But you're paying income taxes on $2.

2) Corporate income taxes decrease the amount of capital gains you have.

Re: How to turn in your tax-cheating neighbor

#30

Post by sqrt17 » Tue, Sep 06, 2011, 7:18 AM UTC

dantheman wrote: post #21

wisty wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should income and capital gains be taxed differently anyway? If it's to stop Grandma getting hit with a huge marginal tax when she sells her house (despite it being a once-off kind of thing), just introduce some kind of smoothing. If your income is uneven, the tax man can give concessions (if you get a lot of money after a period of low income), and rebates (if you have a low income period after making a lot of m…

Because income and capital gains are two different things. Capital gains should be lower because there is a risk that you may lose money, if you add a high tax on top of that lots of investments become not worth it.

The problem with this way of thinking is that, this is not necessarily true: Regular ways of getting income also make you take part in the risk of whatever or whoever you get your income from, and as a result, more and more things that would be income get wrapped into capital gains.

The fair thing to do would be something where losing money (or unvoluntarily suffering relocation expenses or losses as a result of your source of income) gives you a tax credit, valid for the next 10 years.