How long before the IRS lowers the threshold to your income level?

As you may have read, Congress is considering a requirement that the IRS report certain bank transactional data on individuals making $400,000 or more - sounds like a big number since the median household income nationwide is about $66,000. Since the vast majority of elected officials have never operated a business, they often think of only two types of earners - corporations and individuals. Of course, the uninformed believe that every business is a corporation and that all corporations are big entities. What the majority of the electorate and their elected officials fail to realize is that of the approximately 31 million businesses in the USA approximately 29 million of them are pass-through entities like sole proprietors, S-corp, limited partnership, and LLC; meaning, their net profit passes-through to the owner's personal tax return as income. These earnings are taxed at the same progressive tax rates that all income is taxed for all other individual employee; meaning, the tax rate increases as you make more EARNED income. Yes, these same earned income rates apply for millionaires and billionaires too. If you don't really quite understand the difference between active and passive income, or income and wealth, then you owe it to yourself to acquire the knowledge directly by actually reading the tax code and not just parroting the national news channel of your choice. You will learn that pass-through entities do not pay the corporate rate, but instead they pay the earned (active) income rate for individuals. Now before some of you go getting yourself all sideways trying to explain that some of those entity types make millions of dollars, please acknowledge that 96% of all businesses in the USA have less than $1M in revenue and/or less than 10 employees. Are these the tax returns the IRS is really worried about? Do they really need to see transactional data for all employees who earn more than $400,000 AND all small businesses who earn more than $400,000? You may agree that they do, but consider this for a moment. If you work for a company and they pay you $500,000 per year, how much of that do you need to reinvest in capital purchases in order to keep your job - the correct answer is zero - you don't need to invest anything because your employer makes those investments. However for a small pass-through business earning $500,000, they may need to buy vehicles, computers, new facilities, or other equipment that costs $100,000 per year; meaning, they need to allocate $100,000 to perpetuate their business. Sure, the small business can accelerate the depreciation under the current IRS section 179 rules or they can use a standard depreciation schedule depending upon the asset. Regardless, the employee who earns $500,000 and the small business owner with $500,000 in income do not have the same demands on their earned income. In either scenario, I do not feel the IRS needs to be peeking over the shoulder of every American. If Big-Tech can figure out a women is pregnant and start showing her pop-up ads for baby products because they can see from her Google maps history that she traveled to the doctor and the baby store a number of times, then surely the IRS can allocate monies from their $12.3B budget to develop similar tech by analyzing tax returns? I'll end my post in this manner, you may not earn $400,000 today, but I suspect two things are probably true. Number 1: If you could make less than $400,000, you probably would like to make that amount and even more. Assuming you do achieve that income level would you want the IRS looking at your bank transactions? And Number 2: When was the last time Congress passed a law that never expanded significantly beyond its scope? So if Congress passes this law and the current threshold is for earners over $400,000, how long do you think it will take before they go hunting for more money to fund their welfare state and lower that threshold to the salary you are earning right now? Yeah, the original income tax for the USA was only for the 1%, but now you pay income taxes too.

Robert Carroll

Senior Technical Consultant/Architect | Software Implementation & Configuration Expert | Driving EHS Compliance & ROI in IT Solutions

3y

I never heard about this interesting topic before you wrote about it here. After reading it, I can safely say that I’m not for it in general or principle. That seems like a means to add more unnecessary government oversight where they have no business to be looking. I could say more, but I’ll leave it at this for now.

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