No, the IRS wouldn't know my income. Just that Apple paid $x in salaries. I could be paid in cash, and it wouldn't matter. Apple might need to pass an audit to assure the salaries add up, but the IRS would not need to see the details or retain the information. Note I suggested 25%, which is more than the 20%+ of GDP they collect now. Self employed would pay like a business. They're going to write off like one, too.
So are you suggesting keeping the capital gains tax? If so, that is part of my reluctance. I also worry about how people will react when the funds going to the govt are decoupled from their pocketbooks. I could see the public voting over and over for increases in spending as it wouldn't directly affect their bottom line. What's to stop that 25% from inching upward, higher and higher till it breaks the economy? There is something nice about when I vote for an increase in some spending program like a bridge knowing that it will directly affect my take home to the tune of 8$ a month for 5 years, or whatever. Same applies on a grander scale. Although I like the graduated system, I hate the bureaucracy and your proposal would lessen that. It's interesting, but I'm not on board yet.
As Romney pointed out, 47% of the people don't pay tax, so they're voting to spend money just as you say as it is. If you don't want the government to spend more money, don't vote for a democrat or republican. That's easy. Or figure out if one or the other really will spend less. They fiddle with the tax rates all the time. Bush cut them. Clinton raised them. Bush cut them. Obama raised them (and broke the economy). I'm not seeing any additional cause for concern. The real danger is the 25% sticks and some next FDR type implements a new income tax on top of it.
What's to keep Apple (do you really work for Apple?) from cheating by telling the IRS you make half as much as you make? barfo
Do they now? You can spend all your money in cash and the IRS has no way to track that so far as I know. barfo
3rd party, like a public accounting firm. They don't pass any data to the IRS but the final total salaries figure.
I want to use a bank. I don't want the government spying on my finances. Get it? If you think NSA is not ok but IRS isn't, you don't really care about your civil liberties and privacy.
Not nearly as much as you, that's for sure. I don't give a rat's ass whether the government knows what I spend my money on. I don't see how that compromises my quality of life at all. Of course, I'm not sending money to ISIL like you... barfo
I don't own guns, but if I bought one, I wouldn't want the government tracking that. I don't want them to know if I buy a pack of cigarettes or eat a burger at Wendy's. Your kind might start fining me for eating unhealthy foods, after all. I don't want them to know if I use a lot or little bit of electricity. If I do take out cash, I don't want to be spied on to see if I'm buying drugs. But you don't care, those sorts of things don't compromise your quality of life. YET.
Better yet. I don't want them to know you and I talked on the phone 15 minutes before I withdrew a couple $hundred. They'll be wiretapping you, too. Suspicious!
YET. I like that. Yeah, for several decades now it hasn't been a problem for me. But who knows, maybe one day the government will turn on me! Seems like it would be a lot more realistic to be paranoid about the effects on your body of those cigarettes and burgers than about the government knowing about them. barfo
Question.... And forget the concept of our constitution for now. If, and I know this is purely hypothetical, our government needs to tap everything and anything. That this process would guarantee that not a single person is mugged, killed, raped or whatever. Would you agree with it?
No. But barfo wouldn't have to worry they might arrest him to preempt some crime hey expect him to commit.
Someone just watched Minority Report. Did you like it? What was your favorite part? It sounds like it gave you a lot to think about.
Ya Denny, you and I have totally different worlds of privacy. I just can't spend my life paranoid about the govt knowing my banking habits, even if you are correct and it could one day lead to a negative outcome. It seems to me, there was a day when one could live in total secrecy, but with ever passing year, due to technology, that type of life becomes more of an impossibility. I don't want them reading my emails, or recording my calls, but at some point we live in a nation of 300,000,000 people, and we spend a lot of our lives in a digital world. For many reasons this world is going go be known. Oh well. It might not be perfect, but I'm not giving up the benefits of the digital world.
