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For immediate and direct monetary subsidies there is a brief report by the Treasury department in 2015: https://www.treasury.gov/open/...
However, the more important and far more expensive is the environmental subsidies. Basically, they've gifted corporations the right to sell products that causes pollution when used without having to clean the pollution up. That gift is by definition a subsidy (check your own link if you want) and therefore it's subsidized pollution. We need to start including the full price of a product in it's sale price.

That little slogan on US currency is actually quite hollow. Private businesses have no obligation to accept US currency for payment in the absence of federal statue mandating its acceptance. It is possible for a state, or local laws to require its acceptance but I'm guessing such laws are basically non-existent.

Doesn’t matter what it says; it’s not the position of the Treasury. You can pay off all dollar denominated debts in dollars, but a private party cannot be compelled to accept those dollars in any specific form, whether it be cash or Google Pay. They must only accept dollars, as opposed to Rubles or Euros or what have you. Refusing banknotes is perfectly within their rights as a business. Dollars are a medium of exchange, banknotes are a means of payment.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4...
https://www.treasury.gov/resou...

The US Treasure lays out all of the oil/gasoline subsidies here:

https://www.treasury.gov/open/...

It's the first result that comes up when you google legal tender for all debts public and private.

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/legal-tender.aspx

Alright, that is a fair point. The calculation does become more favorable if you take that into account.

Broadly speaking:
Using the treasury.gov graphs, the average invested amount between 2008 and 2010 is roughly 300 billion USD, and between 2010 and 2015 about 100 billion USD. That averages to roughly 170 billion invested on average over 7 years. ~15 billion USD profit on that average is still less than 1.3% yearly. If we're generous and ignore the invested money after 2010, it's still only a 2.5% yearly profit.
Although the latter is admittedly not all that bad a number, being at least roughly equal to or above normal inflation, I believe my claim still stands.

My math isn't great so I can't calculate the ROI accurately. In April of 2009 there was 238 billion invested. By December there was 80 billion. I just dont see how it makes sense to say "170 billion averaged over 7 years"

I also can't tell from your numbers how much you think the Treasure invested.
According to their chart on https://www.treasury.gov/initi... they disbursed 245.1 billion total.

I can't say I have looked into the specifics, but 3.5% profit over a period of ~7 years (as per the numbers in the CNN-article) isn't great. If you take inflation into account, it's even a net loss.

Getting a much, much better (direct) ROI on that money (just repaying debt would do the trick) would be easy. Don't get me wrong, though: I'm not saying the bailouts weren't necessary, but they definitely weren't great investments regardless of the financial crisis. They were great investments only because of it.

See also here: https://www.nationalreview.com...
(not my favorite source of news, but it's about the points made)

Thanks for the article. Unfortunately it's a gross oversimplification.

The comment I was replying to was about bank bailouts. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is poorly understood, or just intentionally misrepresented. TARP was a plan for the government to buy from the banks the "troubled assets" (mortgage backed securities) that were killing their balance sheets due to mark-to-market reporting rules. But it never happened, for a couple of reasons. (1) it was impossible to price the assets and come up with a fair price to pay for them, and (2) Warren Buffet invested $5 billion into Goldman Sachs in exchange for perpetual preferred fixed dividend stocks and stock warrants. Britain had a similar approach.

The Treasury followed Buffet's lead and morphed TARP into the "Capital Injection Program" (CIP). All the bank deals were structured to make a profit, very similarly to Buffet's, except the dividend paid would grow over time as an incentive to pay back early. A total of $245 billion was invested in banks, of which most was paid back with interest in under two years. The Treasury made $1.4 billion in a year on Goldman Sachs alone. Besides the sliding dividend scale the banks were in a rush to pay it back because Congress started adding new conditions after the fact. Never do business with the mob or the government.

Other TARP funds were hijacked for other purposes, such as propping up GM, Those deals were not structured to make a profit, and they have lost money.

See this for a breakdown of disbursements and repayments:
https://www.treasury.gov/initi...

See this for a good explanation of the program, how banks were forced to be part of it, and how the terms changed after the fact
http://archive.fortune.com/200...

Foreign nations don't own all the US debt. Most of the debt is actually borrowed against the future value of social security, or some such financial nonsense.

Honestly I don't understand how it works but as of February only $6trillion or so is owed to foreign countries.

Considering that the 2017 annual US tax revenue is $1.9 trillion, calling 6 trillion dollars of debt means big problems for the US.

Foreign nations don't own all the US debt. Most of the debt is actually borrowed against the future value of social security, or some such financial nonsense.

Honestly I don't understand how it works but as of February only $6trillion or so is owed to foreign countries.

Per executive order 13692, you cannot send any property to Venezuela.

The executive order states that you cannot send property to a list of people in Venezuela, not to the whole country. Otherwise, US companies wouldn't be able to operate here.

Awfully snarky of you. The law is right there in the order. I'm not even a Trump supporter, but there is nothing even remotely fishy about this order. There are literally a couple dozen of orders under this statute in place.

I shouldn't have to do this, but I will anyway.
https://www.treasury.gov/resou... Enjoy.

Per executive order 13692, you cannot send any property to Venezuela. The IRS considers cryptocurrencies as property. Thus trading - sending or buying - in Venezuelan crypto is not legal. Unless, of course, the underlying executive order is illegal - but that's not been determined yet.

Based on the above, it is quite clear that President Trump didn't add anything new, just explicitly listed Venezuela's cryptocurrency as banned - which it already was, per the earlier EO and existing IRS statutes.

Reagan almost tripled the National Debt; it didn't matter.

The Pentagon regularly spends more than Congress allocates, because (I bet) the Fed doesn't bounce their checks:

For fiscal years 2016 and 2015, inadequate reconciliations of disbursement activity included (1) unreconciled differences between federal entitiesâ(TM) and the Department of the Treasuryâ(TM)s (Treasury) records of disbursements and (2) unsupported federal entity adjustments, which could also affect the balance sheet. [...]

If disbursements are improperly recorded, this could result in misstatements in the financial statements and in certain data provided by federal entities for inclusion in The Budget of the United States Government (Presidentâ(TM)s Budget) concerning obligations and outlays.

Deficits don't matter, the National Debt is a distraction, and the Fed just prints money to support unsupported Pentagon disbursements anyway. The budget negotiations are political theater.

Business don’t have to accept cash...

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy.

https://www.treasury.gov/resou...

This is easily findable in about 10 seconds...

A billion dollars would challenging to launder, unless you can buy T bills with it as a foreign government like they do with China. I bet they don't worry too much about whether that money is legal or not.

http://ticdata.treasury.gov/Pu...

For a few million just head to Zurich, buy a portfolio of watches, put the watches in a safe deposit box, come back a year later, sell the watches and take your cash.

You can't put money in a Swiss bank unless you can prove where it came from, but you can put property in a safe deposit box. And when the time comes to sell you get cash with a bunch of receipts. So when you go to another bank you just say "I got the money from selling my dear old Dad's watch".

I'm sure that's the reason people like IWC make $30-$50,000 watches in limited batches so the price will likely increase.

A million dollars worth of IWC perpetual calendars would easily fit in a safe deposit box.

https://www.deployant.com/revi...

NB none of this applies if you're a US citizen - the Swiss banks won't let you be a customer.

I wouldn't do any of this personally of course, because I am as honest as the day is long - the longer the day is, the less I do wrong!

https://www.treasury.gov/resou...

It is also illegal.

Nope, it's not.

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.

If the goods or services were already provided such that the customer owes a debt, then cash must be accepted or the bill considered paid. That does not help a customer at the supermarket but if the meal has already been eaten or the service provided, then the customer owes a debt and may always pay with cash.

I agree. The "right" rests on a misunderstanding of "legal tender". It means it's valid for exchange, accepting it is not compulsory for a private business. The US Treasury has a page on the topic:

https://www.treasury.gov/resou...

"There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services."

This ignorance leads people to assume they can pay in buckets of pennies and they think they can legally force the receiver to accept it as payment.

I'm not a fan of going cashless, I just don't think faulty arguments should be used to stop businesses.

In the US, you can pay for your debts with pennies if you wish to do so. You can't however force the seller of goods or services to refuse coins or US money.

Interesting fact: in Canada, the Currency Act limits the number of coins you are legally allowed to accept even for the payment of a debt. This is to avoid the "penny bucket" problem.

Here's a quote from the Canadian Currency Act:

Limitation

(2) A payment in coins referred to in subsection (1) is a legal tender for no more than the following amounts for the following denominations of coins:
(a) forty dollars if the denomination is two dollars or greater but does not exceed ten dollars;
(b) twenty-five dollars if the denomination is one dollar;
(c) ten dollars if the denomination is ten cents or greater but less than one dollar;
(d) five dollars if the denomination is five cents; and
(e) twenty-five cents if the denomination is one cent.

No matter how many times you repeat that it's still wrong.

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.

Actually, no matter how many times you repeat it, you are wrong!

It clearly says for payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. That means, if you have a debt on your credit card, or owe money for your mortgage, they can't refuse US money, but if it's to purchase something and they state it upfront, they have every right to refuse cash.

It is also illegal.

Nope, it's not.

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.

I see you've read Coinage Act of 1965. Now the question is have you actually read what is printed on the front of ALL US currency?

"THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE"

It's practically a contract written directly on the damn money we're debating about. Tends to make you wonder who's actually in the wrong here.

Except you don't know how the law works.

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.

Doesn't really matter. B/c if they intend to go to court over it, they'll get laughed at since it'll be essentially paid for in cash through the court via that route, and they won't be able to recover the court fees too, so they'll lose out there too.

When any business can be hit up for their services by refusing legal tender for services rendered (or products delivered), they quickly return to at least accepting cash, even if it's not their preferred method of payment.

After all, on every bill, there is a line that reads: "THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER, FOR ALL DEBTS PUBLIC AND PRIVATE". This quote is missing from any coins, thus being a main reason that the $1 coin has not even come close to replacing the bills in the U.S.

Any business that refuses Legal Tender for services rendered can consider the debt paid in full... IF the state where you are attempting to do so has a law in place that prohibits refusal of legal tender.

See the following for details:
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/legal-tender.aspx/

"...Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise."

All in all, there are still a few holdouts on the "No Cash" bandwagon.

Frankly, as long as my non-credit-card-based debit card is accepted, I'm good to go. It is a shame that more places don't accept such debit cards, though...

Except you don't know how the law works.

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.

You're quite correct. A merchant could allow payment in Bitcoin or some other cyber currency.

Here you go

"This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise."

Here you go

Except you don't know how the law works.

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.

No matter how many times you repeat that it's still wrong.

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.

It is also illegal.

Nope, it's not.

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.

If you eat at a restaurant, and then they announce they don't accept cash as payment, you're perfectly OK to just walk out.

Only if you don't mind getting arrested.

They may not accept your particular brand of credit card, but they MUST accept cash.

Wrong:

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.

I agree. The "right" rests on a misunderstanding of "legal tender". It means it's valid for exchange, accepting it is not compulsory for a private business. The US Treasury has a page on the topic:

https://www.treasury.gov/resou...

"There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services."

This ignorance leads people to assume they can pay in buckets of pennies and they think they can legally force the receiver to accept it as payment.

I'm not a fan of going cashless, I just don't think faulty arguments should be used to stop businesses.

Except that doesn’t mean what you think it does.

This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.

So you’d be paid a visit by the cops for not paying.

https://www.treasury.gov/open/Documents/USA%20FFSR%20progress%20report%20to%20G20%202014%20Final.pdf

No, it sounds like you need to read up on the details.

The US government bailed out both GM and Chrysler.

We gave over $60 billion to the car companies themselves, and that number goes over $80 billion if you include the assistance to their financial subsidiaries.

If you doubt me, go straight to the source at: https://www.treasury.gov/initi...

If you doubt the Treasury, you can send them a FOIA request.

Did something just happen to trigger this? The decades old US sanctions against Iran were partially lifted on January 16, 2016. Why does Apple suddenly feel the need to clamp down now?

The US government has a law that says that businesses must accept US dollars.

What law? I do not believe there is a US federal law that requires private businesses or individuals to accept currency from the Federal Reserve Bank. We all choose to do so because it is incredibly convenient and there are many laws and statues that encourage it.

You are correct. While it is legal tender for all debts, it is not a requirement to accept it. Furthermore, the word "debt" implies repayment. There is a difference between a straight-up trade (buying something at a register), receiving goods in advance (eating dinner, then paying the bill), and financing a debt (buying a car using a loan). There are nuances between those scenarios that affect legal requirements for payment, and furthermore, an additional consideration is payment in dollar equivalents such as using a credit card to purchase something using dollars, but not physical currency.

The long and short of it is you are correct, most transactions have no requirement to use U.S. dollars, but everyone does so anyway because nobody barters in livestock anymore.

Please provide a reference for where you got that information...

Smoking does cause a number of illnesses that are not lethal, but still very costly and may present themselves while a person is still quite young. You also have to factor in that most smokers are from low-income areas, so public school is an assumption. This would then be an extra cost where a person is home sick a lot more than a non-smoker and may also die earlier than the retirement-age resulting in a lower ROI on the person.

A quick search pointed me to:
https://www.treasury.gov/press...
where it points to a total cost of $130 billions. (from 1998, adjusted value would be $195 billion.). $130 billions is excluding the increased cost of reduced mortality, see below quote.

With each cigarette smoked taking seven minutes from the average smoker’s life — and taking
into account the lives lost due to smoking-related fires and smoking during pregnancy — the
estimated cost of reduced mortality is approximately $120 billion per year. This cost is the
equivalent of $5 dollars for every pack sold, and represents the amount over and above the lost
productive output mentioned earlier.
While these costs are impressive, they are highly subjective. Exactly how one would apply this
methodology to the human costs of smoking is a complex and certainly controversial question.
As a result, we have chosen not to include the costs of reduced mortality in estimating the cost of
smoking in the U.S.

Same as your USD

The USD has a lot of people with big guns saying we need to use it or we'll be arrested (in the US) or even killed (see: wars). They have billion dollar budget agencies to ensure the currency is secure and stable.

So no. It's nothing like bitcoin.

and Gold

This is more true. However, gold has a multi-millennia history backing it. Bitcoin has a, what, 10 year history? Gold is basically a bubble, but one which has stood the test of time. Bitcoin... not so much...

Mistake in phrasing on my part. My comment should have opened with "I would imagine that most places that take plastic only advertise it when you walk in."

But you're mistaken about any establishment being forced to take cash to settle a debt. From the US Treasury website:

There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy.

Based on this, a merchant is free to require plastic only. Your offer to pay cash may be rebuffed, but your debt is still open unless and until you find a means to pay the merchant in the merchant's preferred fashion. Failure to do so opens you up to legal action.

1) money will come back into the US and help our economy

False. Many of those who brought money back into the U.S. cut jobs. From the U.S. Treasury itself:

In assessing the 2004 tax holiday, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reports that most of the largest beneficiaries of the holiday actually cut jobs in 2005-06 - despite overall economy-wide job growth in those years - and many used the repatriated funds simply to repurchase stock or pay dividends.

Also, as the New York Times pointed out, using the government's own reports:

About 92 percent of it went to shareholders, mostly in the form of increased share buybacks and the rest through increased dividends.

In other words, no help to the economy.

2) whoever does it will be crucified for being easy on big business income taxes

Which Bush was but then again, this was the same guy who handed over $700 billion of taxpayer money to banks and Wall Street firms so they could pay out their bonuses. Obviously he didn't care about being crucified or what the people thought. It wasn't his money.

Heh. I actually reported one of these to the appropriate two websites earlier this week, and when I read the headline I was like "well, that was fast" :-). Then I found another on my voicemail. So... apparently not the same ones. Well, maybe they are clearing the foreign competition away to allow domestic conmen to prosper under an anticipated Trump administration.

Banks insure depositors by paying into the FDIC insurance fund. Most of the time when a bank goes belly-up, the insurance covers it. It's only when many banks get in trouble at the same time, as happened during the Financial Crisis a decade ago, that the Federal Reserve and Treasury stepped in to bail them out.

As of July 2016, The Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has collected about $8 billion more than it paid out, representing about a 2% profit on the $400 billion disbursed. The program isn't over yet, so we don't know the final impact on taxpayers, but they haven't lost *yet*

https://www.treasury.gov/initi...

Quoting at random from the IRS website.
'Was the estate tax retroactively reinstated for decedents dying in 2010?
Yes. '
On congresses right to do this:
'The Supreme Court “repeatedly has upheld retroactive tax legislation against a due process challenge”. Indeed, the Supreme Court in Carlton rejected the executor’s Due Process argument and upheld the retroactive application of the tax law based upon a two-part test that emerged from its analysis. The test upholds retroactive tax application if: (1) the legislation has a rational legislative purpose and is not arbitrary; and (2) the period of retroactivity is not excessive.'
https://www.treasury.gov/conne... - lists quite a lot of legislation doing this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - is also relevant.
This is analogous to the case of Ireland. Ireland is a member of the EU, and has signed various treaties saying what freedom they have to subsidise firms.
Removing taxes from a company counts as subsidy.

"The FCC employee was taken aback. Press charges? We don't do that."

They don't have the power to do that.

The IRS does - and they will. Your call after notifying the FCC/FTC should have been to the local branch.

https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsro...

https://www.treasury.gov/tigta...

Employee withholding taxes are a better indication of employment, cover most of the population every 2 weeks, and unlike estimates from the BLS, aren't distorted by adding fudge factors to get the numbers you want.

The problem with using withholding taxes is that the numbers could end up being far more skewed than you believe the BLS numbers to be. A large portion of the population works more than one job. By counting the number of people getting paychecks, even if you get the amount that they're getting paid, you risk strongly over-counting the number of people employed to one degree or another. Someone working a full-time job and a part-time job could be counted as two people employed, while someone working three part-time jobs could count as three people employed.

The BLS numbers aren't perfect, but they're the best information that we have. The tax-based numbers wouldn't go back more than a few years if we tried to start using them, so a new program to keep that information (and the highly individualized data associated with it) would have to start, run probably at least a decade, and might then be able to start producing useful numbers that could be published.

It would still be missing critical data, though: why people are unemployed. It only captures who isn't working. It doesn't include anything about those who went to school, stayed at home to be a parent, stay at home or cut back hours to care for an ailing family member, retire, or go on disability. It also misses people who own their own business with no employees, paying their taxes quarterly instead of monthly or biweekly, and one has to make estimates of how many of those are still in operation in between, and even with those numbers, many of them have separate jobs.

The end result is less, and probably muddier, data than we have now.

Withholding taxes are down, even as the "official" unemployment rate drops and more people enter the workforce. What that means is that people are making less money, good full-time jobs are being replaced by crap full-time, part-time, or no jobs.

That doesn't seem to be the case. According to the Treasury's monthly report (the latest available is for May 2016), individual income tax revenue for the current fiscal year is up over the same period in 2015, with $1.038 trillion this fiscal year compared to $1.015 trillion last fiscal year, an increase of about 2.3%.

I searched for the withholding tax revenue and didn't see it, so I checked the report for January 2016, before most people have started paying whatever back taxes they owe, and the revenue was even stronger: a 3.2% increase over the same period the year prior. Maybe you have the actual withholding numbers, which I'd love to see if that were the case. The available evidence, though, contradicts your assertion.

They do. Here is an example. This family is under suspicion - note SUSPICION - of money laundering. There has been no trial. Nothing has been proven. Their name simply turned up in the "Panama papers" a few months ago, and the US Treasury department must have already had their eye on them so they simply issued a statement. Due to that statement, all the credit card companies immediately dropped their services to businesses owned by this family.

The result is a large, successful shopping mall is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because they owned both the mall and half the stores in it. The mall cannot collect payment from its customers. The stores can no longer accept credit cards. Oh they still accept cash, but I doubt stores the likes of Gucci, Prada and Luis Vuitton are going to walk to the mall and pay their rent in cash. It is a very high end shopping mall.

Since the mall almost went bankrupt, the US Treasury department struck a deal to allow the suspected family to "wind down" operations in an orderly fashion, so the mall now accepts credit cards again. So do pay attention to this. The UNITED STATES TREASURY is applying US law in Panama, telling Panamanian banks what to do, giving authorizations and citing US law, etc. And again I repeat this is merely "suspicion" on the part of the US government. There has been no trial, no sentencing. I'm not saying the Waked family are nice guys or 100% legit. What I AM saying is due process is out the window. Make no mistake, you cannot run and hide from US law even in another country.

Most Americans would not need to actually file for taxes, the IRS already has all the data it needs

And therein lies the rub. The "IRS already has all the data it needs" because companies are submitting it via the same system you're saying they don't need. EFTPS tells the IRS how much was paid in total employment taxes, and the W-2 (W-3 from the company's end) filings with the SSA gives an employee-by-employee breakdown. They cross-reference the two together to confirm that the amount claimed as paid in the W-2s matches the amount actually paid. But to get into EFTPS, you need your mailed PIN. (The SSA has their own system, with a forced password reset after a few months of non-use.)

The whole system needs to be overhauled in one fell swoop.

Take the bottom 50% (which inevitably includes those above the poverty line, who are earning income). In 2014, they earned about $1 trillion dollars. Total EITC payments were around $65.6 billion. Which more than offsets the 6.2% paid by FICA. And we're not even talking about other benefits - this is direct tax compensation given on the 1040 (which also lists your FICA you're responsible for). So no, the poor generally do NOT pay FICA taxes.

EBT purchases are tax exempt. Yes, they pay property tax, like we all do. But we also gave $50 billion in 2014 to the poor, about $725 per taxpayer in the bottom 50%. I assume that offsets most of the aggregate property taxes paid..

Overwhelmingly, the aggregate tax load (taxes paid minus direct compensation given) for the poor is negative. EITC offsets FICA, Section 8 offsets property taxes, EBT is tax free, etc. Some do fall into corner cases - but many do not.

Now consider that everyone in the top 10% is also paying $8000 in FICA annually (a capped, defined benefit plan that is not available to all the rich - it phases out, even if they paid in). They overwhelmingly pay all of the capital gains taxes, the luxury taxes, and corporate profits (which are given to the rich as bonuses). The top 1% probably fund - directly - 50% of the Federal Government. And they are apparently NOT paying their fair share?

They would probably block payment by credit cards or something

This. The banks are so scared of the government nowadays they will bend over backwards and do everything the government says. There's an interesting case happening here in Panama with the Waked family being "investigated" for money laundering. Please note they are being INVESTIGATED. They have not been tried or convicted - this is merely the US government pointing a finger and saying "these might be bad guys" because of the Panama paper leak. So what happens then? This family owns many big chain stores. The banks just dropped them (because of US government pressure) and will not process credit card transactions for them. So they can only accept cash in their stores now. Again it must be noted that no one has been found guilty, no one has gone to trial and nothing has been proven.

Stores who rent space in their mall won't get their contracts renewed and have been threatened by the banks - because guilt by association as another favorite government tool. Oh and get this - if you are a US citizen you are being told it is a crime punishable by up to $500,000 or 10 years in PRISON if you shop at a store owned by the Waked family, because you'll be blah blah blah whatever facilitating money laundering (IANAL). So you, a US citizen living as an ex pat in a 3rd world sovereign nation can be arrested by the US government for making the mistake of shopping in a store which the US government seems to have slapped with a modern day bill of attainder. Nice huh? Welcome to the brave new world. And if you think THIS is government power, wait another 20 years.

As stated in the subsequently linked article, it is not some weird mystery / secret what words are flagged. Dept. of Treasury maintains an easily accessible list of "Specially Designated Nationals" which is their compilation of probably most/all of the keywords that will be searched to find if there are matches.

In this case, "ISIS" is all over that document, like in 30 different places.

More relevantly, it's a wake up notice to share-everything 20-y.o.s to be aware that not everything is a happy go lucky social media commenting platform with no consequences. And Venmo should make that clearer to users that the comment field is not just a joke.

You didn't read the post you replied to or didn't understand it. You and he both managed to say that cash must be accepted for payment of debts. What you apparently didn't get was the part where he said that cash can be refused as payment for goods and services. If someone refuses a sale on whatever grounds, that doesn't mean that either of you owe each other anything. If you walk into a store trying to buy something, and they don't take cash, and you walk out with whatever goods, you would be arrested for theft. Please test this theory if you don't believe it. Alternately you can read what the Treasury has to say about it.