Completely seriously; while I’m sure essentially no one actually does, the IRS is not going to like network with the FBI or your local police department if you, for some reason, decide to pay taxes on your weed sale profits. Unless you report that you’re selling sex slaves they seriously could not care less.
I know it’s just a joke image but I do love the idea of someone who makes much of their money illegally but also has this very honorable commitment to paying their fair share in taxes.
I know it’s just a joke image but I do love the idea of someone who makes much of their money illegally but also has this very honorable commitment to paying their fair share in taxes.
If you’re convicted of criminal activity you’d be smart to include that in your taxes. The last thing you need is to be convicted of tax fraud in addition to getting convicted of drug trafficking. If the government already has a record of you profiting from criminal activity, make sure you give them their cut.
More specifically the IRS field book discourages reporting illegal income to other agencies for basically everything besides terrorism. Also, when you file taxes there’s a reason there’s an “other income” field. Nobody expects you to list “MS-13” as your employer. You can report money earned from illegal activities to avoid additional federal charges being tacked on
Exactly. I’ve seen such a gigantic rise in like “conspiracy-everything” posts online (wherein people seemingly assume that everything ever done by the government is in some way a poorly concealed conspiracy) and i think anyone who has actually worked under government funding can pretty quickly attest that this just… isn’t how things work.
All these “little conspiracies” operate under the assumption that the US government is this hyper-connected, ultra advanced and professional shadowy room where everyone is out to get non-government employees for vague purposes (“they just want to have control… man…”.)
When really, 99% of government employees are like some guy or gal you went to high school with who is working in a cubicle because the benefits are pretty decent
Anyway, not to make the joke post too serious. I just always worry the naively minded might take posts like this too seriously lol
The number of people in government who get promoted because they’re awful and that’s the easiest way for their boss to be rid of them…
And reporting “other income” wouldn’t flag you as a likely criminal anyway, unless it was a massive amount. They don’t know if you got it from selling weed, picking pockets, or mowing your neighbor’s lawn (no, Bill is not going to submit a form 1099 for you, he’s just going to hire a professional lawn service instead if you’re going to be weird about it).
…I do love the idea of someone who makes much of their money illegally but also has this very honorable commitment to paying their fair share in taxes.
There’s, perhaps, a more practical explanation. As I’ve read before (in some other phrasing): If you’re going to commit a crime, commit only one at a time.
In this case, if you’re going to make your money illegally, for goodness’ sake, don’t evade taxes.
Seriously though, some people have almost pulled off some crazy illegal shit and then got caught because a headlight was out or someone was doing something stupid. If you’re going to commit crime, one at a time.
Timothy McVeigh was pulled over for driving without a license plate an hour and a half after blowing up the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.
Within 90 minutes of the explosion, McVeigh was stopped by Oklahoma Highway Patrolman Charlie Hanger for driving without a license plate and arrested for illegal weapons possession. Forensic evidence quickly linked McVeigh and Nichols to the attack; Nichols was arrested, and within days, both were charged.
He likely would always have been caught, but he got picked up quick because of that.
Actually what happened is that some criminal got caught. And in addition to everything, he was accused of tax fraud. He successfully argued though, that because there wasn’t a field to properly declare his taxes, rhat he would be committing fraud by lying about his income, and as such had no option. This is what led to those fields to exist
Also you’re allowed to plead the fifth on the origin of the income IIRC, though honestly that’s just as likely to get you looked at by the FBI/local constabulary.
Slightly related question: is money laundering, in itself, illegal?
Like, say I have $1000 from my regular W-2 job, taxes paid.
I launder it through a bunch of accounts. Is that illegal?
Or is it the mixing with dirty funds that makes it illegal?
Not sure you can “launder” clean money.
If you get paid money legally and just… transfer it a bunch through various banking accounts or similar. That is obviously not illegal in any way.
If you get paid money legally and then say, “buy a lot of car washes” at the car wash your cousin owns and then he pays you the money back and you two don’t report that to the IRS, that would be tax fraud (though laws on “gifting” money get pretty vague)
Basically, it’s really hard to somehow illegally “launder” clean money
I think it was an episode of Suits or something similar where a guy was divorcing his wife but wanted to hide certain legal assets but hide it from his wife.
The episode made it sound like he had to launder the money so it looked like, on paper, it didn’t belong to him and it implied that it wasn’t legal but they did it anyway. I can’t remember the details but basically why I asked.
… so far. Just wait til fascists are in control, and they kill all social programs then reallocate those resources to shit like that. The German government did that in the late 30s. They started using all government and private records to root out undesirables.
Ten years ago I wouldn’t have worried either, but now? I wouldn’t give my information to anyone.
The grifters have succeeded 100% if you think paying taxes is honourable in any way shape or form, especially in a declining empire that fields the most onerous army in history.
I like clean water, good weather forecasts, and I want to fix the bridges.
If you think the State, choosing to ignore certain negative externalities through regulations — like water pollution — by not holding the guilty parties accountable and pushing up pollution targets, is going to get you clean water, as opposed to any other system where accountability is not distorted by coercitive rules that are almost impossible to challenge: I don’t know how any more naive that position could be. When pollution is not associated with having to pay for cleanup and the financial consequences are negligible, even the stock market picks up on it and publicised major pollution events don’t mean a company’s valuation plummets.
I didn’t know weather forecasts and bridges were more difficult for people not paid by taxes.
Yes, a good chunk of the American tax income goes to pretty bad stuff, but A. not all of us are American, and B. not all of that tax goes to bad stuff
The IRS is in the USA.
You can’t choose where tax goes to. One penny for child murder to one dollar for cancer research is still not making the child murder acceptable. With that ratio the US would never wage war.
Taxation is not voluntary and is deployed with violence. The US also wants control of the world’s financial institutions to be able to tax any US person in the world without too much difficulty.
Charitable donations are tax deductible, your goal should be to spend your entire tax return on charity so your tax is at worst an interest free loan to the government and at best it might actually do some good in the world.
Idk man I’ve worked in social services under a multitude of government funded grants and I’m pretty sure tax evasion is extremely bad for many of the homeless veterans / abused children / etc I’ve worked with who are dependent on said grants.
Because when the Fed sends trillions of dollars into the money supply and the federal and State governments create budgets they are less responsible than people doing their best to give the minimal required amount that won’t get goons sent to their house to kidnap them?
what the hell does decline have to do with the morals of it? In any case, while there are certainly misused funds, the truth of the matter is that it is vitally important to keep society functioning, and that doing this requires a lot of money. If not taxes, where else do you propose this funding come?
An empire in decline is historically more morally degenerate and bloated by endless bureaucracy that feeds off the declining numbers of productive enterprises they can tax.
Society and the State are not the same. How can it be true that taxation is vitally important to make society function then?
Voluntary funding through free markets under common law agreed upon by all parties in contractual relationships.
It sounds odd but there was a Supreme Court about it. Essentially someone claimed they shouldn’t have to pay taxes on the profits of crime and the Court ruled they did. So they had to create a way for people to do that. For what it is worth, the 5th amendment protects you from incriminating yourself, so you are allowed to decline to provide the details of where the money came from, but it’s a bit like paying your parents for something you broke and then just not telling them what it is, and then expecting them not to look around the house.
“it would be an extreme if not an extravagant application of the Fifth Amendment to say that it authorized a man to refuse to state the amount of his income because it had been made in crime. … He could not draw a conjurer’s circle around the whole matter by his own declaration that to write any word upon the government blank would bring him into danger of the law.” … "It is urged, that, if a return were made, the defendant [Sullivan] would be entitled to deduct illegal expenses, such as bribery. This by no means follows, but it will be time enough to consider the question when a taxpayer has the temerity to raise it.”
That’s what ended up getting Capone too: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2018/10/17/al-capone-sentenced-to-prison-for-tax-evasion-on-this-day-in-1931/?sh=2a73f4f27c4c
I love how the government gets to have it both ways. You gotta report income from illegal activities, but you can’t deduct costs from illegal activities. I’m of the opinion that deductions shouldn’t be a thing at all, but I’d at least like some consistency!
Dang.
“We’re not the cops, we just want our cut.”
– IRS Probably
It’s cool if you return it at the end of the year that you don’t have to pay taxes on it. You could steal something, use it to make more money, and then return it. This avoids paying any kinda sales taxes when you took it. And since inventory is taxed you wouldn’t have to pay on that.
Someone could exploit this. Make a fake company that steals from the real company, returns the property at the end of the year.
My first job was at a place called Cybo Robots in Indianapolis. The R&D department there created something that iRobot turned into the Roomba, when they bought the company. The entire point of the company was to lose money as a tax write off. The owner owned several other profitable companies, and needed a money sink so that he could get out of paying taxes, so he created Cybo Robots.
My point here is that not only could someone exploit this, they already are in multiple ways.
Technically, if you intend to return it eventually, it’s not theft.
Theft, under the common law of England, as brought to the U.S., is the deprivation of personal property of another with the intention to permanently deprive them of it. If you don’t have that intent, it’s not theft. That’s why we have “joyriding” and “grand theft auto” as separate things.
Just be rich and pay nothing instead
