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The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online

money.msn.com

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Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online

#15

Post by maxerickson »

D9u wrote: post #11

Meanwhile the fat cats pay little, or no taxes... GE paid 7% in 2010, partly due to the poor economy. How many of us wish we could get away with only paying 7% tax? http://money.msn.com/taxes/latest.aspx?post=26d490bd-7317-4f...

Do you think it makes sense to compare personal and corporate taxes? Corporations are generally far better equipped to spend money avoiding taxes, so it probably makes more sense to try to keep loopholes to a minimum and evaluate whether the effective rates are appropriate for the parties they apply to.

The article you link discusses the very wealthy having taxation dominated by the lower taxes on investment income. I think such taxes could be higher without having significant impact on investment (lots of rhetoric suggests that even tiny changes would cause investment to collapse, that's silly), but there is plenty of room to discuss whether government spending is a better use of the wealth than private investment (and such taxes do more or less have the effect of directly moving private investment dollars to government spending).

Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online

#17

Post by bthomas »

maxerickson wrote: post #10
1morepassword wrote: post #7

I love it. An IRS audit based on trawling public data is more likely to wake up the moronic "I've got nothing to hide" clowns than any total surveillance by the NSA or the massive cyberstalking by Facebook, Google e.a.

It probably won't bother the ones that diligently and conservatively determine their tax liability. I would guess there is quite some intersection between those groups.

There's a large subset of that intersection that puts a bizarre halo effect around the NSA (everything they do is good) and the opposite for the IRS. So I do think this will wake them up.

Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online

#18

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Holy lucre ! 300 billion in lost revenue. That has to be wrong. Even at a tax rate of 30% (way higher than the US effective rate) that implies one trillion dollars each year gets hidden from the IRS.

That will solve every budgetary crisis going.

Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online

#19

Post by maxerickson »

rplacd wrote: post #16

"publicly" seems to be a prominent omission from the title.

Credit card transactions are mentioned several times in the article.

That isn't closely private information, but it isn't something I would call public activity.

Re: The IRS has upgraded its technology to track virtually everything you do online

#20

Post by gregd »

maxerickson wrote: post #15
D9u wrote: post #11

Meanwhile the fat cats pay little, or no taxes... GE paid 7% in 2010, partly due to the poor economy. How many of us wish we could get away with only paying 7% tax? http://money.msn.com/taxes/latest.aspx?post=26d490bd-7317-4f...

Do you think it makes sense to compare personal and corporate taxes? Corporations are generally far better equipped to spend money avoiding taxes, so it probably makes more sense to try to keep loopholes to a minimum and evaluate whether the effective rates are appropriate for the parties they apply to. The article you link discusses the very wealthy having taxation dominated by the lower taxes on investment income.…

Do you think it makes sense to compare personal and corporate taxes?

Yes. Corporations themselves want to apply the Constitution to the corporation as if they're a "person", therefore, it makes sense to compare the corporate tax rate to the personal tax rate.

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