Obligatory…
3 Likes
They do amazing things, and also they are very cautious. My second spent some time in the NICU with what turned out to be just rhinovirus because her fever got just a touch too high (like 100.8, and they tell you to go to the ER at 100.7 with newborns). I don’t regret the caution at all, but also the caution never meant that she was a hair’s breadth from death or permanent injury, either.
I’m pulling for Ainsley (same name as a girl in my girl’s class and who lives on my street), and it sounds like she’s doing great, even with all the precautions and caretakers around her.
2 Likes
Lived in SD for 15 years. Made maybe a half dozen visits up to LA during that time and could never wait to get back down to SD. The LA traffic alone makes the city intolerable. Orange County is as far north as I could ever enjoy traveling to.
But yeah, maybe there are some nice pockets in LA to travel to where the vacation experience there trumps what you can find in SD.
1 Like
This is going to have like a 2000% ROI
https://x.com/richardrubindc/status/1700132568018948306?s=46&t=XGja5BtSraUljl_WWUrIUg
1 Like
Using AI to go after suspicious financials seems like an actually smart idea.
Literally just audit every single private jet deduction and yacht deduction.
1 Like
It is maddening, adequately funding the IRS so they can go after wealthy people is something the left and right ought to agree on, but people think in bumper sticker slogans like TAXES BAD GOVERNMENT BAD and we have an understaffed agency that dicks over everyone by going after poor people because those are easy to go after.
I know nothing about forensic accounting, but I’m guessing AI pattern recognition could absolutely wreck shop against some of these shell companies that are designed to be too complicated for human auditors to unravel.
lol they can’t even staff their customer service hotlines. This is the wealthiest empire in human history.
https://twitter.com/RichardRubinDC/status/1700132906918621357?s=20
I think you were trying to be hyperbolic but left off a zero. I think over under is 20,000%… and I’d like the over. These guys are ground zero for totally untested legally but almost certainly actually illegal ‘tax avoidance’ strategies. Not just for themselves but for their clients as well. We’re talking potentially tens to hundreds of billions in government revenue just from putting down official rulings on some of these ‘loopholes’.
And I am totally uninterested in ‘but actually’ takes from so called experts telling me that this problem is really not that big. Bullshit. I’m old enough to remember the Panama Papers. The data those experts are using is garbage so the results of their models are also garbage, as is the entire framing of the question they’re asking and why they’re asking it… and when you dig into their funding it’s always exactly what it looks like.
These guys reached the stage where these strategies had names like ‘double irish with a dutch sandwich’ a long while ago. (that’s an actual thing google it) There are a LOT of these strategies in use out there, and they work fine because the IRS doesn’t have the resources to fight when things get complicated and expensive, which of course is what every single one of these strategies is designed to be.
Imagine saying with a straight face that this country has a spending/budget problem when we aren’t able to actually collect taxes from the people who own it… and nearly all our government spending is either to protect those people’s right to own everything, help them own more shit overseas, and the money cycles back to them through government contract vehicles.
The global inequality problem is really a tax problem. The global climate problem is really a tax problem. We don’t have a problem today that isn’t substantially changed by solving the tax problem.
3 Likes
the last 50 years of American politics has been an unbreakable alliance between low-info schmucks and the richest people on the planet. Everyone hates the IRS because paying taxes sucks and the system is legitimately over-complicated and customer service is horrible. So convincing Joe Six-Pack to slash funding for the IRS is an easy pitch, and especially if it’s the lovable TV Man from TV making the pitch. So we get worse customer service and more people are more willing to go along with slashing and burning everything.
Actually fixing the agency and making taxes simpler is boring nerd shit, why don’t we just break everything instead.
1 Like
Inflation Reduction Act funded IRS additional 80 billion with a B. I think any concern of why don’t we adequately fund them should stop with that. That is a shit ton of money for 10 years. For comparison, Wikipedia says the largest law firm in the US by revenue made 6 Billion in 2021.
They can hire thousands of top accountants, lawyers, auditors while also upgrading technology and staffing a call center. If they don’t get results then they’re part of the problem, it’s not that the Democrats are “in on it” in terms of their funding.
That’s a lot of money but the IRS is orders of magnitude bigger than the biggest law firm and it’s been critically underfunded for decades. Meanwhile billions and billions of missing revenue is just sitting there on the table.
1 Like
Pay IRS agents 3% of interest and penalties when the amount of tax recovered exceeds 1M. Increase penalties.
The problems are solved. Really smart people will become IRS agents and they will have the right incentives.
I want to see him try that.
I liked this article:
The Screwballz of McCarren, the team that took me in, began over a decade ago as a group of college friends. None of them remain. Instead, the team has performed a Ship-of-Theseus routine as players’ life situations change—new job, birth of a child, moving neighborhoods, being priced out of the city—and they’re replaced with friends and friends of friends. We’ve spent long postgame afternoons trying to figure out the squad’s family tree—who was first, who’s accounted for most players, etc.—which brings us to the most important part of rec league softball: The Hang.
My intramural team in college was like that - we started our team my freshman year as a group of randoms (you could just sign up as a free agent and they’d put a team together), and initially we sucked, but a few of us stuck together and after 3-4 years of “soandso knows a person” we were really good and won a couple championships.
Also, I met my wife playing softball! She’s very much not a softball player, but her coworker (a teammate) brought her one night when we needed subs.
1 Like
Paying prosecutors/law enforcement incentives based upon outcomes seems like a bad idea.
1 Like
I’m not worried about the incentives because people with one million plus in unpaid taxes will always have excellent lawyers to defend them.
Meanwhile we have asset forfeiture taking billions every year at an average of $1200 per victim.