Received my annual S.S. statement & it has my entire SS#.
Received a form from the IRS - also has my entire SS#
U’d think in this day and age they would only use the last 3 or 4 digits.
The Government is hiring people fired from McDonalds !!!
Remember that the IRS has been deliberately underfunded and understaffed. For years and years, no $$ has been allocated to update their systems and staffing. This was deliberate.
Back in 2014, I had to go to a local IRS office to deal with my dad’s tax issue. The office still used the old MS-DOS type system from decades ago. Still, my issues/questions were answered correctly and promptly.
Nowadays it’s popular to be rude to service workers and complain. But here, you are wrong to insult the workers.
Don’t blame the IRS workers–blame those who have deliberately underfunded and hobbled the department from properly doing their job.
2 Likes
Nothing to do with the original topic…but since we are going off on political tangents then I would like to see defunding of the Federal Government across the board. You will not find a more bloated, inefficient, and wasteful organization.
1 Like
I disagree that it’s a political tangent. The reason the IRS has staffing and technology system problems (original post complaint) is due to deliberate defunding by people who claim that government is bad – people who want the wealthy and corporations to pay nothing towards the common good.
1 Like
“Across the board” means NOAA can’t fly hurricane hunters as often into storms, or replace aging weather satellites to supply weather reports to farmers. The GPS satellite constellation is Federally funded. I don’t think the people who live in Tri-Cities (Richland Kennewick Pasco) Washington would like the DOE to stop managing the radioactive wastes that are leftover from the Mathattan Project, which will radioactive for thousands of years. Be careful what you wish for. Services cost money. You can’t get blood out of a stone. I don’t think we want across the board, we want prioritization and good decisions.
I think the #1 area we have to cut is the military (but not GPS services!). We spend far and away more than any other country on military. Why are we the world’s police force? President Eisenhower (R) warned us wisely to beware the “military industrial complex”.
Medicare / Medicaid have no ability to negotiate drug prices. Jeez, why don’t they use their status as the hugest buyers to force prices concessions on Big Pharma? Why does 1 tablet of my wife’s Revlimid cost $1000 retail, when it’s only a refinement of the old Thalidomide drug? It’s not magic pink fairy unicorn poops from Mars.
Manned space flight is a 100% waste of money. We should do 100% robotic missions at a fraction of the cost. The present and future of aeronautics is not a human face… it’s an AI.
1 Like
Yes…across the board. If you don’t think there is wasteful spending in EVERY department then you are kidding yourself. Cherry picking a few programs doesn’t change the answer. Think of the amount of money it costs the taxpayer for each Federal employee…and how many of them are completely unnecessary. Also, watch what happens every September when departments race to frivolously spend lots of money so their funding does not get reduced. Craziness!
BTW, while I agree on military spending, if we cut it to ZERO we would still run a deficit. That’s how out of control Federal spending has gotten.
So, defund the federal government. Then what?
1 Like
Agree that spending is too massive.
At the same time, wealthy people and large corporations are paying very little or nothing in taxes, while benefitting from government spending (infrastructure for starters).
I’ve come to believe that the wealthy and corporations are the most unpatriotic people (or “people” for corporations) in the country.
If the tax code was simpler, and if taxes owed were actually paid, we’d have less of a problem – still a problem, but less so. And, if everyone paid their taxes, the rates could be lower for everyone.
2 Likes
I would love to see a simplified tax code (consumption, flat, etc…) but politicians are never going to let that happen. We have an entire industry built around the complexity of our tax code. When you think about the amount of personal and financial resources that government and private industry require to enforce and comply with our tax code its staggering.
1 Like
You like only regressive taxes?!?
Graduated tax rates aren’t unfair – 15% on a low-income worker is much more of a hit than 15% on a multimillion/billionaire. A flat tax “sounds” fair, but isn’t really. Consumption taxes are regressive too.
There are other options to simplify tax codes – why are capital gains/investment income treated differently than wage income? Why so many loopholes? Why is it so easy for the wealthy to transfer their wealth tax-free to their children? and more…
2 Likes
OK, now I see…its about soaking wealthy individuals and corporations. After all, they are evil.
At least we can agree that simplification of the tax code is needed.
1 Like
No one is talking about soaking anybody. It’s just outrageous that there are so many ways for wealthy people to avoid taxes. If they want to get investor passports to Georgia (Tblisi, not Atlanta) or Turkey or wherever and renounce their US Citizenship rather than pay taxes, then they better get cracking.
Soaking them? No. Just get them to pay something, as opposed to NOTHING.
1 Like
After all these years, something you say that I can find agreement with. And who said that miracles never happen anymore. 
I really felt that when I was laid-off in 2015 and got a large severance check and I was thrown into a very, very poor job market in my industry at the time (the oil E&P industry was crashing). I also had a stock award (which vested ironically days before I got the boot) and my salary of course. I paid $150,000 in Federal taxes that year. I know, I know… first world problems… but I had no visibility into my next gig at the time. It was the worst time in my life, because my Father was dying during those days, and the effing tax code was no help.
A popular narrative…but not backed up by the facts:
So the top income earners continue to pay a disproportionate percentage of the federal income taxes based on their income.
I think what you might be hoping for is a wealth tax…
Misleading as usual. The Tax Foundation story cited talks about % of tax paid by the wealthy cohort… of course they pay more, they make more money, and there are (thankfully) relatively a lot of weathy people in America. What is of concern is their low individual MARGINAL or AVERAGE tax rate which is a totally different thing than % of tax paid by their total cohort.
People like me and the others here are concerned about “banana banana!” and you come back and try to mollify us with, “wait, no, apple, apple”. We’re not swallowing that re-direction and distraction. We’re not that simple.
It’s fundamentally unfair for a C-Suite Executive who gets most if not all of their comp from long term capital gains taxed at 15% to pay the same % of their income as a regular wage earner who earns 10x less.
2023 tax brackets:
- 24% for incomes over $95,375 ($190,750 for married couples filing jointly)
- 22% for incomes over $44,725 ($89,450 for married couples filing jointly)
- 12% for incomes over $11,000 ($22,000 for married couples filing jointly)
- 10% for incomes of $11,000 or less ($22,000 for married couples filing jointly)
The average 15% tax rate will be experienced when an individual goes north of $11,000 I don’t feel like spreadsheeting this right now, but if they get to average schoolteacher starting wages they’d be close to 15% and the Executive will be making much more.
Did you miss the section that literally talks about average tax rates??
The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI below $44,269) faced an average income tax rate of 3.5 percent. As household income increases, average income tax rates rise. For example, taxpayers with AGI between the top 10th and 5th percentiles ($154,589 and $221,572) paid an average income tax rate of 13.3 percent—3.8 times the rate paid by taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent.
The top 1 percent of taxpayers (AGI of $546,434 and above) paid the highest effective income tax rate of 25.6 percent—more than seven times the rate faced by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers.
Not all high income taxpayers are the same. Doctors and dentists earn cash… they do get soaked. Executives who get non-cash compensation get off not paying as much as the cash earners.
"Common tactics rich people use to avoid paying taxes:
One key method rich people use to avoid taxes in the U.S. is asset-based lending, or borrowing from your own portfolio. Wealthy individuals will literally take a loan out against themself to eliminate capital gains taxes. This is a portfolio loan, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) does not tax them.
Generational wealth is even more ingrained. Wealthy people can hold assets without realizing gains until they die and pass those assets on to their kin. When this happens with large amounts of property, rich families can avoid major capital gains taxes.
Equity compensation is a major driver in keeping taxable income low. Rich people balance out any capital gains taxes with capital losses from other investments that lost value at the time of sale. The practice of tax-loss harvesting is key here."
10 Millionaires Who Avoided Paying Taxes — and How They Did It | GOBankingRates
And now the first move of GOP lead House is to cut the additional funding for IRS provided by the previous congress and administration. Thankfully they won’t succeed, but just proposing a cut at this time is nonsense. CBO says the cuts would cause over $100 billion a year in lost revenue for starters.
2 Likes