> But that doesn't work for small businesses. If you sell hamburgers, the majority of your customers won't have informed the IRS of the transaction.
Hamburger joints getting extra scrutiny at the government’s expense doesn’t seem like a problem to me, especially since they often already do.
The people who aren’t getting audited often enough are not Mom&Pop hamburger joints, no one is arguing that. The premise of the parent poster is that the IRS is underfunded to deal with real large scale white collar crime, and as I understand you argue that’s not possible without splash damage to small buisinesses. But they're unrelated: you can specifically target large buisinesses, and you can make the government pay for audit services for small buisinesses.
> Some part of their constituency wants it this way -- and it's probably the small business owners who keep getting audited even though they're not evading taxes.
That’s utter nonsense. The large Republican doners not only have large tax bills at stake but believe they should not.
And it’s harder to tell the exact numbers, but probably thousands of times more more than all small buisinesses in donations.
How ideologically bankrupt democrats are is irrelevant and doesn’t change what is happening here.
> The idea that we should be outraged at companies for not paying what the law we passed says they don't owe instead of replacing the tax laws with ones that cause them to actually owe taxes is some kind of nonsense populist rhetoric.
The idea is we should be outraged at the tax law and fix it, instead of celebrating the loopholes for billionaires.
> Hamburger joints getting extra scrutiny at the government’s expense doesn’t seem like a problem to me, especially since they often already do.
The problem with "at government expense" is that it annihilates the premise that this is going to increase government income. If you audit someone, they not only have to hire a tax professional, they have to spend their own time on it because they're the only one who knows their own business. But because they're the only one who knows their own business, they also need to spend their time running the business. So the amount you would have to properly compensate them would be at something like the overtime rate, but worse because it's involuntary, and for someone whose time may already be valued at six or seven figures.
The government would never actually pay that full cost, so the idea that everything's fine because the government is paying for it is silly, and if they did it would immediately put the program deep underwater.
> The premise of the parent poster is that the IRS is underfunded to deal with real large scale white collar crime, and as I understand you argue that’s not possible without splash damage to small buisinesses. But they're unrelated: you can specifically target large buisinesses, and you can make the government pay for audit services for small buisinesses.
The problem is large businesses largely aren't the ones committing tax fraud -- hardly anybody is. Large businesses pay very low taxes because they hire very good accountants, not because they have fraudulent returns. The problem isn't that we need more audits, it's that we need better tax laws.
> The large Republican doners not only have large tax bills at stake but believe they should not.
Is it surprising that the people with the most money are the largest donors? It's basically a prerequisite.
> Each one of these doners individually spends hundreds of times more than the national small buisiness association on lobbying
Because small businesses don't have huge margins to be spending on lobbying. They're not a constituency because they donate, they're a constituency because they vote.
> The idea is we should be outraged at the tax law and fix it, instead of celebrating the loopholes for billionaires.
But that isn't where the outrage is directed. Nobody is actually fixing the laws -- either party. Even the Republican proposals (tax simplification, flat tax etc.) would fix it, but they never get enough votes to pass it because it's impossible to pass anything like that with the current level of polarization. If you can't get a single vote from the other party then it only takes a small handful in your own party to be corrupted by special interests and it's impossible to fix the problem.
It sounds like we are in violent agreement about better tax laws, and where we differ it’s only on the cost of auditing small businesses. Someone should do a study :)
Hamburger joints getting extra scrutiny at the government’s expense doesn’t seem like a problem to me, especially since they often already do. The people who aren’t getting audited often enough are not Mom&Pop hamburger joints, no one is arguing that. The premise of the parent poster is that the IRS is underfunded to deal with real large scale white collar crime, and as I understand you argue that’s not possible without splash damage to small buisinesses. But they're unrelated: you can specifically target large buisinesses, and you can make the government pay for audit services for small buisinesses.
> Some part of their constituency wants it this way -- and it's probably the small business owners who keep getting audited even though they're not evading taxes.
That’s utter nonsense. The large Republican doners not only have large tax bills at stake but believe they should not.
http://time.com/5075076/koch-brothers-tax-bill-campaign/
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/05/sheldon-adels...
Each one of these doners individually spends hundreds of times more than the national small buisiness association on lobbying https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00005433...
And it’s harder to tell the exact numbers, but probably thousands of times more more than all small buisinesses in donations.
How ideologically bankrupt democrats are is irrelevant and doesn’t change what is happening here.
> The idea that we should be outraged at companies for not paying what the law we passed says they don't owe instead of replacing the tax laws with ones that cause them to actually owe taxes is some kind of nonsense populist rhetoric.
The idea is we should be outraged at the tax law and fix it, instead of celebrating the loopholes for billionaires.