Yeah, in our litigious society- in part thanks to stupendous medical expenses- an injured party and their lawyers will go after anyone with the “deep pockets” to make a suit worthwhile. The Sandy Hook settlement had to prove (or present a plausible threat of being able to prove) that the gun manufacturer in question was guilty of malfeasance in their advertising. If it weren’t for federal legislation protecting gun manufacturers from being sued simply for making and selling guns, they’d be sued out of existence.
That’s true. And if you live in any urban area - which is where most Americans live - outside of “Appalachia” then it will NOT cover your living expenses. Nor will it be sufficient to move to a zipcode where it could do so, not to mention the problems around moving away from friends/family/social support.
Really? Outside of the immediate area, did anyone hear about or note the mass shooting in Gary, Indiana early on July 5 that left three dead and seven wounded, or was news of that incident swamped by the media frenzy over the July 4 parade shooting in Highland Park, Illinois?
No, only some mass shootings are well publicized, and I suspect a lot has to do with how photogenic the victims are.
@Martin_Hyde addressed the other numbers but lest anyone conflate “virtually everyone” with something like 99%, it’s more like two thirds for initial denial of SSDI.
I’ll not opine on the quality of this system here in FQ.
CNN mentioned that over the first 6 months of 2022 there have been 300-plus shooting incidents with 4 or more victims, so almost 2 a day. You only hear about the ones with a shocking venue - school, July 4th parade, etc. - or where the body count is excessively high even for the USA.
Seriously? They look like gifts to me. Hasn’t anyone challenged them on that?
I have no idea. I do know that some people have gotten into tax trouble from fund-raising. Some don’t. There might be an amount that triggers it or something.
I think that was a different platform, where people were raising funds for a busines venture and “donors” would receive the product when/if it actually went into production. Those weren’t gifts because the people who were providing the funds were meant to get something in return. But fundraising campaigns to pay medical bills or funeral expenses or to help a family whose house was destroyed by fire aren’t going to be providing goods or services to the donors and gifts are never taxable to the recipient ( and they are only taxable to the donor under circumstances that wouldn’t apply to a GoFundMe campaign)
That is a whole lot of “duh!”. Yes, it would be nice to have universal health care. But for those that can, and until we have a reasonable system, properly insure yourself. My very example is probably a proof case of your first paragraph and what I talked about: Poor people with minimal insurance. You can sue them. but you’ll lose out.
If you aren’t living paycheck to paycheck, get better auto insurance. Even more-so if you own a house and don’t want to lose it.
I don’t have a house to loose.
Frankly, I am one of those people that if you sued there’d be little to confiscate. I’m not living paycheck to paycheck, but there is no way I can, with my current job, amass a great deal of wealth. I do insure my vehicles, and because they’re fully owned I insure them for liability and not the physical vehicle itself but I can only afford so much. No one who sues me is ever going to collect a multi-million award for the simple reason I do not have that many assets and likely never will.
What do you consider “proper insurance”? I have a friend with some wealth who once stated what he considered a minimum level of insurance, and honestly the premium per month would exceed what I was paying in monthly rent at the time! (As I mentioned, I’m doing a bit better these days - now it would only be about 2/3 of what my rent is). Then again, he had a LOT of assets to protect. And the means to do so. What is your definition of “proper”?
For people below a certain income level - and there are tens of millions of people in that category - the system is NOT reasonable in any sense of the word. Any sort of serious illness or injury could bankrupt them even with insurance. “Proper” insurance is too expensive to purchase because, to be frank, you must eat and have a roof over your head before other considerations. Always and ever one paycheck away from disaster and no way to get off that treadmill.
These days I’m a bit better off, but for years I purchased the legal minimum of vehicle insurance not because I wanted to deprive some other party of satisfaction in the event of an accident but because even after food stamps and a garden to grow food and family helping me out when they could and working two jobs for a time and looking for better that was all I could afford. Literally. At one point selling our wedding rings to make ends meet for another couple months on an apartment that had once been nice but was at the time leaking every time it rained and just generally falling apart because that was all we could afford at the time.
If you’ve never been that sort of poor I’m not entirely sure you understand. Sure, there are jerks who are just cheap bastards but quite a few people are driving around with minimal insurance, or even no insurance, because there’s more month than money.
When you’re already living on the edge of disaster the prospect of being sued just isn’t so alarming, there is a strong tendency to laugh at the prospect of bankruptcy when you’re already bankrupt and scavenging cans off the side of the road hoping you can make the rent this month.
The middle class in the US lives in fear of falling into poverty. Those actually in poverty just ignore the risks because they no longer have much to lose. Threats of “you’ll lose your house!” ring hollow to someone who not only doesn’t own a home but is themself facing homelessness because their minimum wage job doesn’t pay enough to cover the rent even for a run-down place in a slum.
This is the issue with private health insurance - even with good insurance, some have co-pays or deductibles or whatever euphemism the insurance company uses, ensuring that the insured themselves must shell out thousands before insurance kicks in for part. A lot simply don’t have that much. The “lucky” ones can pay off that catastrophe over the next decade, assuming it’s not the breadwinner in the hospital.
Not to mention the financial incentive in a private insurance company is to deny all claims if possible for whatever reason. (What Grisham novel was that?)
I don’t know if the Grisham novel, but we once acquired a company that had a captive workers compensation insurer and administered their own claims. The claims managers seemed genuinely surprised that summarily rejecting 100% of all claims initially was not SOP in WC.
The Rainmaker.
Regarding income taxes on donations: even if the donations are taxable, wouldn’t the recipient be allowed to shelter them by deducting the medical expenses?
I know that the expenses have to exceed some percentage of the recipient’s income. But I’d think that would be the case for most people injured in a shooting.
Well, sure, that’s possible - but most people aren’t up on sheltering their money from taxes in that manner, which leaves the question of whether or not they can get good tax/legal/financial advice.
While recuperating from disaster.
It’s a fucked-up “system”
For the third or fourth time, and links have already been provided. These donations are NOT taxable to the recipient. And the amount doesn’t trigger anything. I don’t know why one poster insists on repeating her error in FQ.
What about if the go fund me was intended for $500k, but it unexpectedly took off and rises to $1million?
Is it still a gift? Or taxable?
Any gift of over $16K is taxable and is to be paid by the giver, not the receiver. Regardless of the amount.
So if some individuals gave the person more than $16k they would need to pay the tax, not the receiver.
It doesn’t matter how much the GoFundMe raises - if the funds are truly gifts (there is no expectation of anything in return) the funds are never taxable to the recipient. They might be taxable to the donor under certain circumstances. There is an annual exclusion of $16, 000 per donor per recipient. That means I can give my daughter $16K and my son $16K without paying gift tax. And my husband can also give each of them $16K without paying gift tax.
If I give an individual person more than the excluded amount, I have to file a gift tax return for the amount over the excluded amount. But I still don’t pay tax - the gift tax return just keeps track of the non-excluded amount from year to year. When I die, if the total of my estate and all the non-excluded gifts I made in my lifetime is more than the lifetime exclusion amount ( about $12 million in 2022) , then my estate will pay tax on the amount over the exclusion.
There was a cute blog post by Wozniak many years ago where he describes a visit to Vegas. His daughter wanted to know what the slots machines in the restaurant were all about, so he gave her a few dollars to let her learn how they just drain your money. She won $14,000.
So it turned into a lesson on taxes. Since she was too young to gamble, he had to claim the prize. Pay $7,000 income tax on the prize. Then he had to give his daughter the $14,000 she’d won. Pay another $7,000 in gift tax since he’d already given her her limit for the year. So she got $14,000 from the slots company, and he paid the government $14,000 out of his pocket.
I assume this was because there’s some limit at which you pay the taxes that year? Or perhaps he meant he owed the government that eventually? Or is paying up front an option?
These numbers make no sense. Where was he living that the marginal income tax rate was a combined 50%? And he wouldn’t just have to have exceeded the gift exemption for the year but to have exceeded the lifetime limit, which has been in the millions at any time in the last few decades (currently $12M).