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IRS To Go After eBay Sellers
prostoalex writes "Fed up with numerous violations of tax law by individuals and businesses selling goods on eBay, Amazon Marketplace, uBid.com, etc., IRS is pushing Congress to make online marketplaces responsible for reporting the sales information to the tax man, in order to prevent under-reporting of the income. eBay's 'own statistics suggest that there are 1.3 million people around the world who make their primary or secondary source of income through eBay, with just over 700,000 in the United States', News.com says." How long before the same fate befalls the folks who make a living working the Massively Multiplayer secondary markets?
The socialist and marxist rants.
wow. The war in iraq must be getting dicey if we are chasing after the income of less than a million people.
Now wait a minute here.I paid tax on my income when I earned the money from my regular job to buy something and then when I bought it I had to pay a sales tax and now I want to sell it and I have to pay taxes on it AGAIN????
That just does not seem right to me.
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Why all the outrage over this? Auction houses (on and off line) should have to follow reporting rules just as stock brokerages do. And people who make real income from online auctions should pay income tax, just as I do on stock sales. I get a 1099 every year from my brokerage that lists each sale I made. What 90% percent of people don't realize is that you are only taxed on the gain from the sale. Ie I sell a car on ebay motors for less than I paid for it. There is no gain, thus no tax. Most casual ebayers will never pay a dime of tax from their ebay actions.
Hasn't the IRS been pushing this for a year now? Where are we? The same damn place. I got the feeling that whenever this goes through people better run and hide since they will go after everyone just to prove a point, sorta like suing 10 year olds for downloading mp3s.
Blatant lies!?! You cite a blog for your "proof"? How about a reputable site like http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxFacts/Tfdb/TFTem plate.cfm?DocID=457&Topic2id=20&Topic3id=22 ?
I'll save you the time of reading all those complicated tables of numbers you'll find at that site. In 1979 (the earliest date in the table) the top 20% paid 56.4% of total federal tax liabilities. In 2004 (the most recent data in the table) the top 20% paid 67.1% of same. More interestingly, as for the share of individual income tax liabilities, the top 20% paid 64.9% in 1979, and paid a whopping 85.3% (more than the 80% cited by the OP) in 2004. And guess what? In both cases these percentages have gone *up* during the Bush years, contrary to popular belief that the Bush tax cuts were "for the rich".
One last statistic that is also interesting. The bottom 40% now "pay" a negative precentage of individual income taxes. And the bottom 60% combined pay less than 1%. That means the top 40% pay over 99% of individual income taxes.
I think these inconvenient facts show that your statements are the real propaganda, ignorance and prattling truisms.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
The "flat tax" example just illustrates that you can make the "20% of taxpayers pay 80% of the taxes" argument even with a flat tax. That it's not an artifact of the progressive tax code.
Let's rewrite Bumfuckville's income tax code to something more "fair": The town budget is $200,000. So to meet the budget we need to collect that much in taxes. But everyone in town must pay the same amount, right? To be fair? There are 161 people in Bumfuckville. So let's divide the town budget by 161: Thats $1242 per person. Fair, right? Here's Bumfuckville's new tax table:
Income bracket/Old tax rate/New tax rate
$10,000/5%/12.4%
$30,000/5%/4.1%
$100,000/5%/1.2%
$500,000/5%/0.25%
Now there's none of this commie "progressive tax" or socialist "flat tax". Now we've got a tax code that even Jesus would be proud of: The Fair Tax. Tax rates are kind of high on the lower income folks, but that's because the town has just been wasting most of that budget on gold plated drinking fountains for city hall and the pinko mayor. Let's cut the budget in half to $100,000. That'll provide some much needed tax relief:
Income Bracket/Original Tax Rate/Fairer Rate (after budget cuts)
$10,000/5%/6.2%
$30,000/5%/2.1%
$100,000/5%/0.6%
$500,000/5%/0.13%
Now we're reduced waste and made the tax code "fair". Can I get an "Amen"?
I am not a crackpot.