I’m not sure why you created this artificial distinction. If it is a legal tax maneuver, a good tax advisor should advise you to take it.
Yes, taxes are important, but a person is under no legal or moral obligation to pay more tax than they are legally required to. It doesn’t matter what the lawmakers “intended”. It only matters what the law states. If the “loophole” is a problem, then it’s up to them to close it.
I guess there aren’t a lot of lawyers or CPAs in this thread.
Sure…I’d take advantage of the law to pay in as little as possible. The only thing better would be to actually get more money back than I put in. By some definitions (see above) that would make me a bad American though.
In December of last year I purchased a $48,000 piece of equipment for my business. I didn’t really want/need to spend the money, but from a tax viewpoint I had no real choice. The tax laws would punish me harshly otherwise.
So yeah, if doing something legal would reduce my tax liability to zero, I’d be an idiot not to do this legal thing.
I will pay every cent the government legally and legitimately asks of me. If the tax code is written in such a way that they do not ask me for anything, then I will cheerfully comply with that.
I must presume that my representatives know more about government finances than I do as a private citizen and so I would be loathe to question their decisions on what I owe for their services.
People who are insisting that they would voluntarily pay taxes they didn’t have to should be aware of the Tax Laws in MA:
You can opt to pay a higher rate in MA by checking a box. Each year the number of people who do so is minuscule. It’s measured in the hundredths of a percent.
On an anonymous message board the opinions might lean on direction, but in real life people only pay what they have to.
Hell no, I wouldn’t pay. It’s a perfectly legal set of circumstances I have found myself in; one which will only apply for this year. And this year, it saves me several thousand dollars?
No-brainer.
While I am not anti-tax, if there was a perfectly legal way for me to minimize my tax burden, I honestly could not say I’d avoid it. Of course I’d take the tax break.
The Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 was designed to give everyone earning under $75,000 (or households earning less than $150,000) $300 per person, plus an additional $300 per dependent child. So a family of four making $30k, who probably pay little if any federal taxes, would receive $1200.
But then Senator John Ensign of Nevada and some other bigoted assholes were worried that illegal immigrants might get some of this free money by using an ITINs (individual tax identification numbers). So they put in a reverse-loophole to excluded anyone who files using an ITIN from having access, including their spouse with a SSN who files jointly.
This ended up hitting military personal the hardest because many are married to foreign nationals (who would have an ITIN for tax purposes). It also hit my wife and I, since I had an SSN and she still had an ITIN at the time.
How many people here refused the rebate?
I’ll admit I was bitter until two years later when we bought a house, got the $8000 first time home buyers credit, then promptly spent 4 weeks in Australia helping their economy recover.
I’m curious–how do you decide how much your fair share is? How do you decide how much someone else’s fair share is?
And do you take the mortgage loophole? Use the dependant child loophole?
I’m curious how many of the people who would be scrupulous about paying their fair share, assuming they live in a state that charges or charged use tax on internet purchases, actually calculated all of their internet purchases including those from Amazon and paid the appropriate taxes?
I am very careful about following all income tax rules, whether they would raise or lower my taxes. I’m not sure about whether I would take specific actions to lower my tax rate to nothing – it would depend on the actions required and when I learned about them. I think if there were some kind of deduction for which I qualified, and it would reduce my tax rate to nothing, I would take the deduction.
Well, to me there’s a big difference between “people specifically passed a law to encourage house ownership, I will take advantage of it while buying a house, and in fact the things that the law was encouraging me to do, I did” vs. the hypothetical in the OP where the “loophole” is very clearly an unintended consequence.
If I didn’t have to do anything proactive, I’d pay nothing.
As for the question posed … how simple is this transaction? I’m pretty lazy. What other short- and medium-term effects would it have? Is it something anyone who meets the other requirements could do or is it one of the requirements, which some people do as a matter of course and I simply hadn’t had any reason to do?
I probably would take advantage, in the end. But if I came across a petition to close the loophole I’d sign it (well, maybe, depending on what the loophole is for and the agenda of the people with the petition).
Very good question. I’ll add a little background to try and help solicit some answers.
Each state charges a sales tax (with which we are all familiar since it’s added at the register on every purchase) and also a use tax, which is complementary to the sales tax but a lot less visible. A person who buys an item in a different state and takes it (or has it delivered) to their home state must pay use tax in their home state. There’s an exception if that person paid sales tax in the state where they bought the item.
So, a person who buys things on the internet is required to pay a use tax on each item purchased (since they bought it from out of state and didn’t pay a sales tax on another state).
Do any of our “I pay my fair share” brethren and sistren actually calculate and pay their use tax on internet purchases each year? If not, then do you still believe you are paying your “fair share”?
Scoring at home? That’s one “Yes” to loophole A, but “No” to loophole “D”.
Uh, what? No idea what you’re talking about, particularly as I have not stated at any point what I would do in the OP hypothetical.
Yes, but you are differentiating two perfectly legal acts. And I found that humorous.
I suspect the goal is that society as a whole benefits. I don’t have cites, but I suspect adopting families are generally more stable (financial and otherwise) and generally raise kids who benefit society (financially and otherwise).
To state it a different way, look at it as an investment in “creating” future taxpayer who will likely pay to the government many multiples of the initial investment.
I was going to say, of course I’d keep paying taxes as usual, and not weasel out of it with games and money-moving.
But fuck that.
Corporations do it all the time. If I could do it too, I’d jump at the chance.
Why is it “weaseling”? You didn’t write the law. What makes a “loophole” different from simply being “the rules”?