Tax changes / proposals - discussion

I doubt that was Shandril writings. Why would you consider “file jouintly” if not married?

I don’t know what jouintly is.

But mfj is massively subsidized. Why shouldn’t someone be able to choose to file jointly with a roommate or sibling to get equal tax treatment?

Shandril said “The simplest change would be to allow anyone to pick whichever filing status they want. … so nobody would pay more taxes”.
Single filers fall into the group of “anyone”, so this IS what Shandril said.

Alternately, eliminating joint filing entirely would accomplish this and reduce complexity overall. So, I was asking if Shandril would find this solution acceptable.

So sorry…

married filing jointly. “read my lips” or read the words. Pretty simple to me!

Are you jealous? Get married or figure out the words!

Yes it’s simple. You’re a socialist. Free stuff for you and groups you are a member of. Gimmee, Gimmee, Gimmee!

There’s nothing inherently wrong with individually being a socialist, clearly it’s not an insult. You are free to vote for your socialist redistribution ideals in our democracy. It’s a free country.

I don’t have to support your socialism to support your right to express yourself.

Get out of here! :relaxed:

You don’t have to be legally married to file MFJ. Common law marriage is recognized by the IRS for purpose of filing MFJ.

You keep saying it’s massively subsidized. Like SpeedingLunatic mentioned, one-income married households do benefit from MFJ, no question. But in 2002, that was 7% of married households with children. Outside of this case, can you provide example of the massive subsidies you claim? I’ll give you another one I know. If one spouse has business losses that offset their tax liabilities entirely, and the other spouse has tax liabilities, they’re better off filing MFJ. Not a very common scenario either and again falls into the category of one spouse not being able to take advantage of all deductions because they have little to no tax liability.

If MFJ is as massively subsidized as you claim, explain these scenarii where similar income couples - low or high income - see noticeably higher taxes by filing MFJ vs. filing single + head of household. Tax comparison for couples with 2 kids

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Individual outliers does not change the net subsidy to the group. You said you wanted all taxpayers to be equal and file as they wish. And then you say you don’t want single filers to be granted the same option to manipulate where income, expenses, and credits are allocated.

You don’t have to be legally married to _____. Just get divorced if you want to be a single filer instead of MFJ or MFS. Equally absurd to your suggestion that siblings common law marry (which afaik is still not a thing) to file joint taxes to get equal treatment???

I am literally a tax accountant and I would normally want to take part in this discussion. But I honestly can’t tell what you two are even arguing about.

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I don’t mind single filers filing MFJ but who is the second SSN on their tax return? If you’re living on your own, isn’t it a bit of a problem? But sure, it should not be limited to married people. Unmarried couples living together under the same household should be allowed to file jointly too if they prefer.

I never mentioned or implied siblings. Weird how you interpreted it that way? Is that a personal thing you’re into? Not judging. LOL

Seriously, common law marriage is recognized in many states, some with restrictions. Basically it’s for cohabiting couples who live together, consider themselves spouses for all intents and purposes, but have not actually gotten married legally. (and just to be extra careful, no I don’t mean, imply, suggest in any way, shape, or form siblings) :wink: And for these common law marriage couples, the IRS allows them to file MFJ.

The idea was to discuss tax reform alleviating the marriage penalty many of us are aware of. But it certainly went on tangents I’d never have suspected.

Married people do not need to be living together either…

There is a marriage penalty when two HOH’s combine, such as in a Brady Bunch household. Or when a single HOH combines with a single person. I once served on an election panel with a woman who referred to a “husband” but somehow let it slip that they weren’t legally married, but had kids with them. We might have talked taxes since it is my forte, and I believe her relatively low income allowed her to claim EITC as a HOH, which being legally married would not allow.

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IRS wants its cut of your crypto profits and has been getting trade data from the various exchanges.

Biden proposal for more IRS enforcement includes, among other things, the plan that your banks will report all your cashflows to the Feds to help them decide on auditing you, and presumably as reasonable cause to undertake those “lifestyle audits” where you’re guilty if they decide you are unless you can prove every cashflow wasn’t income.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-tax-enforcement-target-of-700-billion-wont-be-easy-11620997200

What is harder to fig­ure out is how much money could come from re­quir­ing banks and pay­ment-sys­tem providers to re­port an­nual flows in and out of ac­counts. That is the sec­ond ma­jor prong of the Biden pro­posal; the ad­min­is­tra-tion says it yields the re­main­ing $460 bil­lion for a to­tal of $700 bil­lion.

“Most Amer­i­cans would re­ject the no­tion that we should let those who we deal with in fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions dis­close our per-sonal pri­vate, pri­vacy in­for­ma-tion,” Mr. Crapo said.

While a W-2 is easy to match against tax re­turns, the an­nual dif­fer­ence be­tween money com­ing into a bank ac­count and go­ing out isn’t nec­es­sar­ily in­come. It could just be a first in­di­ca­tor for the IRS.

Mr. Crapo (really?) must be blissfully oblivious to EWS and Chex.

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That kinda made me chuckle a little bit thinking about the volume of data implied. Call me a pessimist, but considering the IRS cannot sort out on time the 2019 returns well into 2021 with the current amount of data they have access to, the possibility of analyzing all transactions for all banks from all taxpayers in a cost-efficient fashion seems rather remote to me.

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I think amount of data would be less of a concern because data would be analyzed by machines. Programs would assign a rating to every citizen based on the divergence between net cashflows and AGI. As an example, if in a year you collected 20 m and paid out 19 m, net cashflow is +1m. If your AGI on the return is 100,000 you would get rated at max and will be flagged for manual review… If AGI was 950,000, your rating would be low (least likely to be audited manually).

I figured they would have more than $1M or so (1.2-2.9M range reported) . They have much higher income but I’m almost up to the same amount of assets at 36…

And if I already have $10MM and move it around between 20 accounts every day, then what?

Net would be 0 right? So your AGI should be close to 0

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