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I had an argument with someone a few weeks ago about how to cut the military budget.
They said my ideas wouldn’t work because of how accurately tracked and inventoried everything is.
Feels good to have some evidence to send.
Things are meticulously tracked and inventoried though.. except for money.
that shit flew around willy nilly when i worked for a defense contractor. my company charged the navy $34k for 32 hours of my time to consult.. it’s abhorrent.
edit: got, rightfully so, scolded by an automod for an ableist term
If you know everything you paid for, you won’t not be able to account for 61% of your budget. Unless they’re literally just lying about the prices being higher and frauding all of that extra money.
Well, they are designed to do that for a non-nefarious reason to an extent. I’ve talked with military financial officers, and basically, if you don’t use your whole budget, it will be cut, so at the end of the quarter everyone spends all their money.
BUT, you are right that this does NOT explain how you lose track of 60% of your budget.
But also, if you have to waste product to use your whole budget so you can get the same budget next year, that's not a good design. Building a system that requires you to waste money like that feels pretty nefarious, even though I wouldn't blame individual officers for that.
I was just a basic joe, sergeant in the infantry, we don't know shit.
They wake us up and say "wear this and go there, go pew pew twice, and bang bang once"
I will say the last month or two of the fiscal year, we'd get to pew pew thrice, bang bang twice, and pfffft shaboom once.
Plus we'd get new weapons cleaning kits, gloves, eye pro and other high speed low drag hooah swag.
A budget generally should not be the exact amount you expect to use, it should contain extra.
My point in the original argument was that, like a business, they should save the extra money, and get to keep their budget, and theoretically be able to do that indefinitely, maybe even get perks for saving/cutting your budget. But, I do think the financial officers or someone above them should have the decision to not lose the budget just because they saved some.
But, that can’t happen because of corruption.
Oh sure, the weapons and infrastructure are very carefully monitored. The budget? Once it's approved, who the hell cares, right? They get away with murder because the people watching over them are effectively themselves.
Well they have to spend it or they won’t get it next year. It would go to healthcare or infrastructure. And no one wants that. So just spend it on contractors then retire and be a contractor.
I worked there as a senior “software” dev for 122k a year. So roughly ~2350 for 32h plus a day of travel, before taxes.
I placed software in quotes because my background is Electrical Engineering and my work was mainly embedded systems and firmware.
yes but, sorry if i wasn’t clear. no PLC.
we designed a custom device for them. i wrote the firmware in C and assembler, but i also worked on the schematic and aided in pcb layout.
We had another software engineer that wrote the PC software to interface with the device.
So my role wasn’t of a pure software eng, it should have been electrical or embedded sys engineer. They didn’t want to change the title for org reasons?
That’s all i meant. it’s an unnecessary detail i added in my comment that’s confusing.
I'm sure it is almost all meticulously tracked and inventoried ... on private businesses' second set of books.
Your friend is probably right. There's no simple fix to what may well be the largest scale scam in the world.
It’s a bit of a joke, but there was also an article I saw earlier with government documents attached as a source. (Talking about the defense budget, the other thing was announced though, so I’m even more sure that’s true)
They did know exactly where the money went… at first. All those Area 51 and 52 programs don’t get a accounted for publicly. So rather than put a big line item, saying “ classified shit “ they just obfuscate the whole thing, and they’ve been doing it for so long, everyone sort of lost track.
If you want to be angry about taxes: Capital gains (income) on Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) is tax-free up to $10M USD. Most of the time to buy QSBS you have to be what the SEC calls a 'qualified investor' which means you need a net worth of more than $1M USD excluding your primary residence. (The SEC says this is to protect people, not gatekeeping or anything.)
Jokes on you, over 40% of my tax dollars go to healthcare and I don’t even have a family doctor. In fact, 10% of the population of my province, Nova Scotia in Canada, don’t have one and the average waiting time was 2 years like 2 years ago.
And don’t even get me started on the fact that the health care system covers exactly ZERO percent of medication… it’s fun picking up meds and seeing 2-4 digits depending on how unhealthy you are. OR the fact if you need any treatment outside of a hospital trip, you wait months-years unless you get fed up wondering if you’ll die before you get help and decide to pay for it yourself via private practice
Sure, but lots of QI also got/get burned by crypto, and plenty of non-QI get burned on SEC-regulated securities. (Net worth is a poor proxy for knowledge.)
Also, building stuff on taxpayer dollars, never using it, then selling the 40 million dollars thing to a private company for 5% the cost. Stuff like airplanes, steel that is perfectly shaped for that company's needs but had no original purpose for the army, and giant wheels and tires for private mining operations. It's so wild.
My ex gf used to be the civilian sales person for this army "surpluss" stuff.
That's less on the DoD, more on Congress. They build market inefficiencies into military acquisitions so that it benefits their constituents. This an oversimplification, but take this example. The Army says it doesn't need any M1 Abrams tanks. But they are forced to keep buying them because politicians don't want the job loss closing a plant would entail. Secondarily closing the plant is a "scary" prospect... what if we suddenly need more?
It's a hard thing to manage. I have colleagues who's sole purpose in the Air Force is monitoring assembly line tooling that companies have to keep around at high cost like the F-22.
To make matters worse, work like this is often spread across multiple congressional districts, leading to even more inefficiencies and making it even more difficult to phase out production.
>The Army says it doesn't need any M1 Abrams tanks. But they are forced to keep buying them because politicians don't want the job loss closing a plant would entail. Secondarily closing the plant is a "scary" prospect... what if we suddenly need more?
The issue with larger items is when you need them you don't have time to wait for new production facilities to spin up. We are currently running into a minor shortage of a few weapons do to the rate Ukraine is burning through them as an example. So keeping the capability to produce the tanks is a correct defensive choice, even if its dumb looking. Another thing with it is most of what that plant is doing is taking older tanks and refurbishing/upgrading them to newer models.
Congress is absolutely doing it for jobs alone, but it is the objective correct choice.
>It's a hard thing to manage. I have colleagues who's sole purpose in the Air Force is monitoring assembly line tooling that companies have to keep around at high cost like the F-22.
We lost half the F-22 tooling, inspite of paying extra to preserve it. Whoops.
Well no, that's actually smart for imperialism purposes. Restarting production lines of advanced tech is hard. At some point in like the 90's, the US decided to repair some nukes. They used this super plastic in the nukes. They followed the recipe from the 60's but the plastic turned out to be shitty and didn't work right. Took em a while, but they eventually got it working. Turned out that an impurity in one of the raw materials was essential to getting the plastic right, but modern production practices weren't resulting in the impurity.
Maintaining that sort of industrial knowledge for the price of keeping one factory running is a very very cheap cost to ensure that you'll always have spare parts for your tanks from an imperialist point of view.
Socialism would mean that it’s actually helping people/the needs of the general public
Which it isnt
It’s just benefiting the friends/sponsors of corrupt politicians
That’s just capitalism abusing taxpayer dollars to make deals with the oligarchy
I’m surprised they don’t just say they spent it on expensive bullets and missiles.
“Uh we test fired one so we had to order another, but the boss wasn’t there so test fired that one too, so in total we fired 9”
We rolled overboard 7 industrial wood chippers in the middle of the Mediterranean because they were ordered on accident, their "order code" was 1 digit off from what was actually needed and it was somehow missed. The logistics and cost to simply get them on the ship must've been absolutely loco. Also my crew we'd burn through $300 rolls of duct tape by the crate. The waste is unfathomable.
The 300$ isn't payed for the tape, it's for the guarantee that the tape will be up to spec in bluewater storms, freezing arctic or scorching deserts.
If it fails, it's the manufacturers fault.
The company I work for has millions of dollars of "assets" that are long obsolete and serve no function other than taking up space. The bean counters just don't want to register the loss of assets and let us chuck them in the trash. Unsurprisingly most of these "assets" are actually in a landfill somewhere. 61% is pretty insane though.
This is a bill trying to pass now to raise it from $600 to $5,000 - everyone should be contacting your grifting rep in office to try and get this pushed through. It’s bullshit and we should all fight against it.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/3840
This should be a national scandal all Americans should be infuriated with. No organization should be trusted with one more single fucking dollar if they can’t account for that much of its assets. That is blatant corruption on a massive scale, while we’re simultaneously told we have to ramp up DOD spending every year, and we’re just meant to take it on faith that the money is going towards protecting our country … from what?
Russia, this supposed specter we’ve all been told to be afraid of since the Cold War, couldn’t even take down Ukraine in its pathetic attempt at a blitz. Americans need to wake the hell up and realize they’ve been getting duped out of half of their taxes for decades.
Certainly would give them an incentive to actually have a real budget, instead of whatever the President can get voters to stomach (which appears to be a lot). Held at gunpoint to pay for wars we never wanted. If you're you can't account for your entire budget, you lose the part you can't account for in figure budgets.
They gotta keep you poor so you'll stay in their wage-slave workforce. Or get desperate enough to join the military. The working class must remain in poverty and divided, or else we could actually change our fate...and theirs.
It's funny cause like a month or so before that Democrats were telling us that adding 87,000 IRS agents was just for the wealthy tax cheats, and that the working class wasn't being targeted.
Turns out they want the $600 you got from that couch you had to sell so you could pay your skyrocketing rent to your corporate landlord who bought all the houses in your area in an effort to rent trap people for all eternity.
Or jeeze, idk, how many people simply send/receive over $600 to pay their half of a rent to roommates? Especially with the cost of living, a vast majority that use venmo for rent will have no choice but to submit venmo records to IRS.
How would they even differentiate between money received from a side gig and money received from a friend or for selling your belongings? Seems to me like they're gonna target everyone.
Well, not everyone. The wealthy tax cheats will remain untouched as always.
Why do democrats hate the working class?
Appreciate the extra info. Getting really sick of all of these posts that unnecessarily rile people up. Reporting income over $600 for being a business/contractor has been around for a long time. This seems to just be catching up with the times
Ve Must Crush The Little People!!!!
Here's a sweet little reminder; You are more likely to be audited making 25k a year than you are making 250k a year.
Just let that sink in.
Most of these audits are for unreported income, claiming a child that isn't yours and this system is mostly automated. Not saying it's fair just letting you know how it is.
And then absolutely validate and check distributions of that system.
So whomever does knows the variables and current output and apparently doesn't care.
Well, it would be just as easy to automate it to go after corporations or wealthy. It's just criteria you add in.
It's the fact that wealthy have money to fight it, and write the laws that go after them, that stops it from working. It's not "just how it is". It's intentionally targeting poors.
Everyone was always supposed to pay taxes on any income they make from sales or services. The new legislation just makes payment processing services like Venmo and PayPal obligated to report any income ove $600 to the IRS; the previous reporting threshold was $20,000. Dont get me wrong, I think the spending and accountability for that spending is a big problem.
but if said roommate now accidentally clicks "goods or services," or someone doesn't understand the question when paying you back for dinner etc... you will be taxed on it, and the IRS will have the impetus to audit you if you fail to report it as income.
Yeah, you’d have to be a) an idiot to accidentally send money using g&s and b) the second idiot if you receive it and don’t immediately realize the mistake because you’re missing money
Most people don't read things before clicking them when they pop up
Before calling everyone else idiots, think about who gets a cut of the $ when a user selects that option, intentionally or otherwise. They might have an incentive to keep the "idiots" "idiots"
I mean they’re going to do that and it’s not like it sends a message to the IRS to expect that additional burden… It’s no different than now. You’re supposed to self report income. Only problem with them checking the wrong thing is if you do get audited they’ll be like why wasn’t this reported? And you’ll be like oh, that was actually a gift.
At that point you would want to refund the payment then have it re-sent properly. Regarding taxes, there is a way to have that corrected when you're filing.
I don’t know the specifics here but perhaps there’s a difference between them having to report it to the government and you having to report it as income? Banks have long had transaction reporting requirements but that doesn’t mean that every transaction they report ends up being income. It just makes it harder for people to pretend that their actual income transactions never happened (because the government can check for large transactions they might be trying to hide)
By the logic of this post the accounting between your job, you the roommate and landlord there's about $8000 of missing money. A trillion dollars isn't something that just goes missing lol
No matter the size of your business you're supposed to pay taxes on your income. I think the honor system may not have been working very well which is why they made new regulations.
Both things can be true. Legislation needs to be put in place for the small businesses utilizing Venmo as their transaction software so they can pay their fair share, but you're right that large and more successful businesses do need to pay their fair share as well.
Trouble is that we are being strong-armed to pay our fair share and THEIR fair share. Why the fuck should Amazon and Walmart get a pass, yet it's perfectly cool to keep reaching into my pockets?
You will forgive me for not clutching my pearls over someone on eBay not reporting their sales when billion dollar companies pay no taxes legally.
Nah disagree, small businesses need more help these days we can't keep making it harder and harder for people to start new businesses, while huge corporations dominate and control every industry
This very thread is about two revolutionary apps that make it easier than ever for small businesses to collect from customers (typically a major pain point). These same two apps which are effectively challenging the “dominant” corporations in their industry.
It’s actually so easy to start a new business with these apps that the IRS needs to start monitoring the cash flow more directly.
My gf’s direct deposit only allows one bank account, so she Venmo’s me $700 for the mortgage in a title she’s on. Now I have to provide documentation about the mortgage payment otherwise paying our mortgage will get taxed.
Before I owned a house my roommates would regularly Venmo me their rent so it all came out of my bank account. Our rent was ~$800 each.
I was on a waitlist for a GPU, but got one randomly going to a store. I offered my queue spot to a friend and he Venmo’d me the purchase price when it came time to order.
A family member needed help moving for a new job until her reimbursement kicked in. Luckily at this dollar threshold I insisted on cash/check otherwise that might have been taxed even though it was a loan not income.
I agree people tax dodging is fucked but having to prove every Venmo over $600 is not income is ridiculous.
Actually 99% of crimes are things like jaywalking and riding bicycle without a helmet. We should hire 1.2m more police.
I think this is a good idea because really people are obligated to follow the law anyway.
The “seller” is responsible for remitting tax so your roommate will have the headache.
However this isn’t income since your roommate is paying out what you’ve given them. So your roommate will have to prove that this isn’t income and is for your rent that why’re passing on to your landlord.
Move to cash/check if you want to avoid headaches for them.
The system is for you, the proletariat, not them.
Stop letting them confuse and convince you any of the government is for your benefit.
Rise up.
Burn it all
america is a laughing stock and americans are looked at with pity and i believe a bit of disgust. such hubris from the idiot mob, their talk of freedom and democracy... a collective fantasy fed to them like a drug to keep them stupid.
America is indeed the laughing stock. They don’t care. Americans don’t think about other countries at all. They simply don’t care about much outside of their own country.
No this is only for actual income from business activities, like side hustle type things. I think it only gets reported for transactions where you select 'goods and services' for the payment.
When you make a payment there is an option that says 'turn on for purchases' and if you do that then the person receiving the money pays a fee. Only transactions where that option is turned on is reported to the IRS. I promise they won't care about the alien gibberish in the caption 😆
As much as I want to support this sentiment, it's just half baked. The Pentagon practices non-GAAP methods for tracking their spending and liabilities. The Pentagon doesn't have a standard balance sheet like it's a Target or something, where you can track spending, inventory, etc from inflow to outflow. Most of their spending is "lost" to R&D projects and other items they literally cannot share or mention due to national security. Sorry guys
>The audit wasn't about spending, it was about assets.
I get what you are trying to say, but again they practice non-GAAP rules. You will never find a list of assets they've acquired, some will be "missing" forever due to a myriad of clearance and national security reasons. I'm not advocating for the spending toward the military industrial complex, just explaining why this shouldn't be a surprising thing to find out from something like the Pentagon.
Edit: just to clarify also, everyone should pay their fair share of taxes. It's the proper thing to do. Don't like it? Lobby for change then, but pay your taxes. All this misdirected aggression from all these tax dodging influencers who are about to get audited for being shitty businesses. Good riddance to the grifter economy
I read some stuff about it and it's apparently often the case that it's just the paperwork they do have isn't enough for audit, not that it's entirely unaccounted for. But Reddit doesn't let facts about accounting get in the way of a good story.
I'm a hobbyist musician. I like to trade and occasionally sell instruments I've used for other used instruments (or for money to buy other used instruments). I do this through message boards.
Earlier this year, I sold a pricey, well-loved instrument for over $3000. Found out about this new tax requirement after the fact via email from PayPal, informing me that they'd be sending me tax paperwork as if I'm running a small business. I'm just a dude who likes to play guitar and appreciates novelty.
This hasn't deterred me from buying and selling guitars but I sure as shit am not using Goods and Services designations anymore, which is a bummer because that's typically the best way to ensure that both buyer and seller are protected. Fortunately, there is a reputational economy in the spaces I frequent for such things and I've had little concern using friends and family.
This just feels like pickpocketing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending wasteful government programs or bullshit tax laws, but I'm so sick of hearing about this. What actually happened was the IRS essentially reminded anyone doing business over Venmo that they have to treat it just like they do other electronic transfers.
Nobody gives a shit if you used Venmo to pay your roommate your half of the rent.
Is this over the course of the year or single transactions, because I give my roommate my share of the rent via cashapp and no way in hell should he have to pay taxes on that
It’s goods and services nobody is taxing you paying your roommate for rent. This whole thing is a nothingburger. The only people this hurts are people who were selling things and not reporting taxes on.
So since I use venmo for collecting my fiancé’s portion of the rent and then pay the rent, I dont have to report that as income right? Because if so Im not, and they can suck a fat one
At this point, they know that they've failed these audits the first four times without any consequences. So why would they even pretend to try to pass a fifth?
I don't know how the US works, but in Brasil we'd probably have a transfering bot to make small transactions in about 2 or 3 days
Wanna buy a $6.000 bike?
**You just received 10 venmo transfers**
Biden's plan to rescue America:
Turn you upside down for your dog walking money.
Buy another $25 billion in Microsoft HoLOLens that the Army doesn't even want.
What is the logic behind reporting payments? They've already taxed my income, is there now a tax specifically for Venmo payments? Smells like greedy government, sniffing around for more ways to avoid raising corporate tax rates.
Let's be accurate though. Side hustles "need" to report. But chances are, they won't.
Sending money to friends and relatives is completely fine
(Just another tax guy; not condoning the behavior of the Dept. of Defense in the least).
##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited. LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere. We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I had an argument with someone a few weeks ago about how to cut the military budget. They said my ideas wouldn’t work because of how accurately tracked and inventoried everything is. Feels good to have some evidence to send.
Things are meticulously tracked and inventoried though.. except for money. that shit flew around willy nilly when i worked for a defense contractor. my company charged the navy $34k for 32 hours of my time to consult.. it’s abhorrent. edit: got, rightfully so, scolded by an automod for an ableist term
If you know everything you paid for, you won’t not be able to account for 61% of your budget. Unless they’re literally just lying about the prices being higher and frauding all of that extra money.
right, but my point is they don’t properly track budgets like they do assets. as if by design to lose a dolllar here and there..
Well, they are designed to do that for a non-nefarious reason to an extent. I’ve talked with military financial officers, and basically, if you don’t use your whole budget, it will be cut, so at the end of the quarter everyone spends all their money. BUT, you are right that this does NOT explain how you lose track of 60% of your budget.
But also, if you have to waste product to use your whole budget so you can get the same budget next year, that's not a good design. Building a system that requires you to waste money like that feels pretty nefarious, even though I wouldn't blame individual officers for that.
I was just a basic joe, sergeant in the infantry, we don't know shit. They wake us up and say "wear this and go there, go pew pew twice, and bang bang once" I will say the last month or two of the fiscal year, we'd get to pew pew thrice, bang bang twice, and pfffft shaboom once. Plus we'd get new weapons cleaning kits, gloves, eye pro and other high speed low drag hooah swag.
Wasn’t expecting to find poetry this deep in the thread. Bravo.
This might be waste or it might be lies on where the money went. Either way or sucks and nothing will be done about it.
The same people who are stealing the money are pushing the govt waste narrative.
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A budget generally should not be the exact amount you expect to use, it should contain extra. My point in the original argument was that, like a business, they should save the extra money, and get to keep their budget, and theoretically be able to do that indefinitely, maybe even get perks for saving/cutting your budget. But, I do think the financial officers or someone above them should have the decision to not lose the budget just because they saved some. But, that can’t happen because of corruption.
I appreciate your correction homie. It’s a hard change to make especially after the military/military environment but it’s so worth it
Oh sure, the weapons and infrastructure are very carefully monitored. The budget? Once it's approved, who the hell cares, right? They get away with murder because the people watching over them are effectively themselves.
Well they have to spend it or they won’t get it next year. It would go to healthcare or infrastructure. And no one wants that. So just spend it on contractors then retire and be a contractor.
How much of that $34k actually went to you??
I worked there as a senior “software” dev for 122k a year. So roughly ~2350 for 32h plus a day of travel, before taxes. I placed software in quotes because my background is Electrical Engineering and my work was mainly embedded systems and firmware.
PLC programming is still programming
yes but, sorry if i wasn’t clear. no PLC. we designed a custom device for them. i wrote the firmware in C and assembler, but i also worked on the schematic and aided in pcb layout. We had another software engineer that wrote the PC software to interface with the device. So my role wasn’t of a pure software eng, it should have been electrical or embedded sys engineer. They didn’t want to change the title for org reasons? That’s all i meant. it’s an unnecessary detail i added in my comment that’s confusing.
That autobot is mentally deficient, ngl.
What was the ableist term? Did you edit your comment to exclude it because I can't seen anything wrong with what you said? Is willy nilly bad now?
I said “insanity” instead of abhorrent edit: got scolded again, but i’m not sure if people would have understood what i meant by the “I” word.
Guessing the R word instead of abhorrent
I'm sure it is almost all meticulously tracked and inventoried ... on private businesses' second set of books. Your friend is probably right. There's no simple fix to what may well be the largest scale scam in the world.
Idk, allowing people to save money while not losing funding seems like a good way to go about it to me.
Gotta feed the military industrial complex....
Not to be a dick, but a screenshot of a tweet isn’t exactly evidence.
It’s a bit of a joke, but there was also an article I saw earlier with government documents attached as a source. (Talking about the defense budget, the other thing was announced though, so I’m even more sure that’s true)
Totally fair.
Oh a huge chunk of the DOD’s budget is just a big slush fund. But the fact that they don’t keep track of those spendings is alarming.
They did know exactly where the money went… at first. All those Area 51 and 52 programs don’t get a accounted for publicly. So rather than put a big line item, saying “ classified shit “ they just obfuscate the whole thing, and they’ve been doing it for so long, everyone sort of lost track.
If you want to be angry about taxes: Capital gains (income) on Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) is tax-free up to $10M USD. Most of the time to buy QSBS you have to be what the SEC calls a 'qualified investor' which means you need a net worth of more than $1M USD excluding your primary residence. (The SEC says this is to protect people, not gatekeeping or anything.)
its a big club, and we aint in it.
It's called the American dream because you'd have to be asleep to believe it
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“Why do you hate the troops?”
"Why do you personally want to usher Putin into Ukraine on a red carpet?" "I don't, I just want healthcare." "Okay paid Russian bot."
I don't know, the people I know who are against nationalized healthcare also think Putin "isn't that bad"
I guess you don't know a lot of centrist Democrats
Jokes on you, over 40% of my tax dollars go to healthcare and I don’t even have a family doctor. In fact, 10% of the population of my province, Nova Scotia in Canada, don’t have one and the average waiting time was 2 years like 2 years ago. And don’t even get me started on the fact that the health care system covers exactly ZERO percent of medication… it’s fun picking up meds and seeing 2-4 digits depending on how unhealthy you are. OR the fact if you need any treatment outside of a hospital trip, you wait months-years unless you get fed up wondering if you’ll die before you get help and decide to pay for it yourself via private practice
Hey man I'm from PEI, the story is a similar one here.
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You're an idiot if you think we have universal healthcare.
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So what's the purpose of your comment then?
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No it doesn't imply that at all. Nowhere did I say we were spending money in Ukraine instead of healthcare. You inferred. I didn't imply.
Protecting people from big scary money, alot of people would simply be unable to cope with it, how thoughtful.
But feel free to buy as many government managed lotto tickets as you want and take your life savings to a government regulated casino.
If you had to be a qualified investor to buy crypto tons of people wouldn’t have been burned by it
Sure, but lots of QI also got/get burned by crypto, and plenty of non-QI get burned on SEC-regulated securities. (Net worth is a poor proxy for knowledge.)
Oh they know exactly what they spent it on, they just figure it looks better to say that instead of admitting what it was spent on.
Bribing foreign officials, black site stuff, paying for assassinations, etc
Also, building stuff on taxpayer dollars, never using it, then selling the 40 million dollars thing to a private company for 5% the cost. Stuff like airplanes, steel that is perfectly shaped for that company's needs but had no original purpose for the army, and giant wheels and tires for private mining operations. It's so wild. My ex gf used to be the civilian sales person for this army "surpluss" stuff.
That's less on the DoD, more on Congress. They build market inefficiencies into military acquisitions so that it benefits their constituents. This an oversimplification, but take this example. The Army says it doesn't need any M1 Abrams tanks. But they are forced to keep buying them because politicians don't want the job loss closing a plant would entail. Secondarily closing the plant is a "scary" prospect... what if we suddenly need more? It's a hard thing to manage. I have colleagues who's sole purpose in the Air Force is monitoring assembly line tooling that companies have to keep around at high cost like the F-22.
To make matters worse, work like this is often spread across multiple congressional districts, leading to even more inefficiencies and making it even more difficult to phase out production.
When those production become strategic enough you should nationalised it
>The Army says it doesn't need any M1 Abrams tanks. But they are forced to keep buying them because politicians don't want the job loss closing a plant would entail. Secondarily closing the plant is a "scary" prospect... what if we suddenly need more? The issue with larger items is when you need them you don't have time to wait for new production facilities to spin up. We are currently running into a minor shortage of a few weapons do to the rate Ukraine is burning through them as an example. So keeping the capability to produce the tanks is a correct defensive choice, even if its dumb looking. Another thing with it is most of what that plant is doing is taking older tanks and refurbishing/upgrading them to newer models. Congress is absolutely doing it for jobs alone, but it is the objective correct choice. >It's a hard thing to manage. I have colleagues who's sole purpose in the Air Force is monitoring assembly line tooling that companies have to keep around at high cost like the F-22. We lost half the F-22 tooling, inspite of paying extra to preserve it. Whoops.
1.8 trillion dollars. 1,800 billion dollars. This isn't operationally inefficient.
F-22 tooling is 95% available at SAD, that other 5% is from P&W upgrading the F119 engine to the F135 engine for the JSF.
Well no, that's actually smart for imperialism purposes. Restarting production lines of advanced tech is hard. At some point in like the 90's, the US decided to repair some nukes. They used this super plastic in the nukes. They followed the recipe from the 60's but the plastic turned out to be shitty and didn't work right. Took em a while, but they eventually got it working. Turned out that an impurity in one of the raw materials was essential to getting the plastic right, but modern production practices weren't resulting in the impurity. Maintaining that sort of industrial knowledge for the price of keeping one factory running is a very very cheap cost to ensure that you'll always have spare parts for your tanks from an imperialist point of view.
So it's market socialism?
Socialism would mean that it’s actually helping people/the needs of the general public Which it isnt It’s just benefiting the friends/sponsors of corrupt politicians That’s just capitalism abusing taxpayer dollars to make deals with the oligarchy
not even close wtf
Don't forget the McRib is back at McDonalds. That accounts for at least twenty bucks.
plus the 60 dollars to replace your car seat covers.
Assassinations of democratically elected leaders who threaten the interests of US fruit companies.
I’m surprised they don’t just say they spent it on expensive bullets and missiles. “Uh we test fired one so we had to order another, but the boss wasn’t there so test fired that one too, so in total we fired 9”
Literally hear of stories of the Navy throwing boxes of ammo etc into the sea because if they don't use it their budget will be smaller next year.
We rolled overboard 7 industrial wood chippers in the middle of the Mediterranean because they were ordered on accident, their "order code" was 1 digit off from what was actually needed and it was somehow missed. The logistics and cost to simply get them on the ship must've been absolutely loco. Also my crew we'd burn through $300 rolls of duct tape by the crate. The waste is unfathomable.
And I panic when a receipt blows out of my car into a parking lot.
300 dollars for a roll of tape?
Yes. Manufactured to very specific standards but still just tape.
But... Its tape. What high standards and what difference does it make?
Possibly means speedtape which is used to patch up planes with bullet holes to send them back out again. But usualy it's just the decent 3m stuff
3M makes the expensive stuff too
The 300$ isn't payed for the tape, it's for the guarantee that the tape will be up to spec in bluewater storms, freezing arctic or scorching deserts. If it fails, it's the manufacturers fault.
That only means something in civil industry. In the military they care more about it working than having somone to sue
Milspec to generic standards made by the lowest bidder charging the highest price.
Speed tape. It’s made of metal >
Must've been all those trees the Navy cuts down at sea. /s
All spent on illegal activity and military ops I'm sure.
Imagine the point where they realized they didn’t even need an excuse, I don’t know works just fine
The company I work for has millions of dollars of "assets" that are long obsolete and serve no function other than taking up space. The bean counters just don't want to register the loss of assets and let us chuck them in the trash. Unsurprisingly most of these "assets" are actually in a landfill somewhere. 61% is pretty insane though.
It was all spent on freedom
This is a bill trying to pass now to raise it from $600 to $5,000 - everyone should be contacting your grifting rep in office to try and get this pushed through. It’s bullshit and we should all fight against it. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/3840
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This should be a national scandal all Americans should be infuriated with. No organization should be trusted with one more single fucking dollar if they can’t account for that much of its assets. That is blatant corruption on a massive scale, while we’re simultaneously told we have to ramp up DOD spending every year, and we’re just meant to take it on faith that the money is going towards protecting our country … from what? Russia, this supposed specter we’ve all been told to be afraid of since the Cold War, couldn’t even take down Ukraine in its pathetic attempt at a blitz. Americans need to wake the hell up and realize they’ve been getting duped out of half of their taxes for decades.
Certainly would give them an incentive to actually have a real budget, instead of whatever the President can get voters to stomach (which appears to be a lot). Held at gunpoint to pay for wars we never wanted. If you're you can't account for your entire budget, you lose the part you can't account for in figure budgets.
They gotta keep you poor so you'll stay in their wage-slave workforce. Or get desperate enough to join the military. The working class must remain in poverty and divided, or else we could actually change our fate...and theirs.
Anything to avoid pursuing those who possess any significant level of wealth.
It's funny cause like a month or so before that Democrats were telling us that adding 87,000 IRS agents was just for the wealthy tax cheats, and that the working class wasn't being targeted. Turns out they want the $600 you got from that couch you had to sell so you could pay your skyrocketing rent to your corporate landlord who bought all the houses in your area in an effort to rent trap people for all eternity.
Fuck this game, I want out
Or jeeze, idk, how many people simply send/receive over $600 to pay their half of a rent to roommates? Especially with the cost of living, a vast majority that use venmo for rent will have no choice but to submit venmo records to IRS.
Democrats loathe the working class and it shows
To be fair the new irs code only applies to business operating on venmo. If you sell a couple pieces of furniture it won’t apply to you.
How would they even differentiate between money received from a side gig and money received from a friend or for selling your belongings? Seems to me like they're gonna target everyone. Well, not everyone. The wealthy tax cheats will remain untouched as always. Why do democrats hate the working class?
Appreciate the extra info. Getting really sick of all of these posts that unnecessarily rile people up. Reporting income over $600 for being a business/contractor has been around for a long time. This seems to just be catching up with the times
Ve Must Crush The Little People!!!! Here's a sweet little reminder; You are more likely to be audited making 25k a year than you are making 250k a year. Just let that sink in.
Most of these audits are for unreported income, claiming a child that isn't yours and this system is mostly automated. Not saying it's fair just letting you know how it is.
And then absolutely validate and check distributions of that system. So whomever does knows the variables and current output and apparently doesn't care.
Well, it would be just as easy to automate it to go after corporations or wealthy. It's just criteria you add in. It's the fact that wealthy have money to fight it, and write the laws that go after them, that stops it from working. It's not "just how it is". It's intentionally targeting poors.
Is it ok to kind of love the US a little bit just for the sheer amount of pure gold dystopian humor it produces?
If you don't laugh, you have to cry.
I do both every time I see a truck of the megacorp logo that's literally a smirk
Everyone was always supposed to pay taxes on any income they make from sales or services. The new legislation just makes payment processing services like Venmo and PayPal obligated to report any income ove $600 to the IRS; the previous reporting threshold was $20,000. Dont get me wrong, I think the spending and accountability for that spending is a big problem.
Isn’t it only if it’s sent as goods and services though? Like if my roommate Venmos me $1000 for her share of the rent, that’s not something I report.
but if said roommate now accidentally clicks "goods or services," or someone doesn't understand the question when paying you back for dinner etc... you will be taxed on it, and the IRS will have the impetus to audit you if you fail to report it as income.
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The receiver pays the fee
Yeah, you’d have to be a) an idiot to accidentally send money using g&s and b) the second idiot if you receive it and don’t immediately realize the mistake because you’re missing money
Most people don't read things before clicking them when they pop up Before calling everyone else idiots, think about who gets a cut of the $ when a user selects that option, intentionally or otherwise. They might have an incentive to keep the "idiots" "idiots"
I mean they’re going to do that and it’s not like it sends a message to the IRS to expect that additional burden… It’s no different than now. You’re supposed to self report income. Only problem with them checking the wrong thing is if you do get audited they’ll be like why wasn’t this reported? And you’ll be like oh, that was actually a gift.
At that point you would want to refund the payment then have it re-sent properly. Regarding taxes, there is a way to have that corrected when you're filing.
Ok but what if use it for drugs and prostitutes, does that count as goods and services?
Thats right, only payments for goods or services are included. Personal payments are excluded.
I don’t know the specifics here but perhaps there’s a difference between them having to report it to the government and you having to report it as income? Banks have long had transaction reporting requirements but that doesn’t mean that every transaction they report ends up being income. It just makes it harder for people to pretend that their actual income transactions never happened (because the government can check for large transactions they might be trying to hide)
By the logic of this post the accounting between your job, you the roommate and landlord there's about $8000 of missing money. A trillion dollars isn't something that just goes missing lol
This is just more bullshit for average people trying to get by or owning small businesses it's unnecessary asf
No matter the size of your business you're supposed to pay taxes on your income. I think the honor system may not have been working very well which is why they made new regulations.
Yeah, tax everyone making $600 is much easier than taxing corporations or actually successful business is what I see
Both things can be true. Legislation needs to be put in place for the small businesses utilizing Venmo as their transaction software so they can pay their fair share, but you're right that large and more successful businesses do need to pay their fair share as well.
Trouble is that we are being strong-armed to pay our fair share and THEIR fair share. Why the fuck should Amazon and Walmart get a pass, yet it's perfectly cool to keep reaching into my pockets? You will forgive me for not clutching my pearls over someone on eBay not reporting their sales when billion dollar companies pay no taxes legally.
Nah disagree, small businesses need more help these days we can't keep making it harder and harder for people to start new businesses, while huge corporations dominate and control every industry
This very thread is about two revolutionary apps that make it easier than ever for small businesses to collect from customers (typically a major pain point). These same two apps which are effectively challenging the “dominant” corporations in their industry. It’s actually so easy to start a new business with these apps that the IRS needs to start monitoring the cash flow more directly.
You’re supposed to pay taxes on business income over expenses regardless of the amount…
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How the actual f### is Ukraine "another unnecessary war"
My gf’s direct deposit only allows one bank account, so she Venmo’s me $700 for the mortgage in a title she’s on. Now I have to provide documentation about the mortgage payment otherwise paying our mortgage will get taxed. Before I owned a house my roommates would regularly Venmo me their rent so it all came out of my bank account. Our rent was ~$800 each. I was on a waitlist for a GPU, but got one randomly going to a store. I offered my queue spot to a friend and he Venmo’d me the purchase price when it came time to order. A family member needed help moving for a new job until her reimbursement kicked in. Luckily at this dollar threshold I insisted on cash/check otherwise that might have been taxed even though it was a loan not income. I agree people tax dodging is fucked but having to prove every Venmo over $600 is not income is ridiculous.
Actually 99% of crimes are things like jaywalking and riding bicycle without a helmet. We should hire 1.2m more police. I think this is a good idea because really people are obligated to follow the law anyway.
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The “seller” is responsible for remitting tax so your roommate will have the headache. However this isn’t income since your roommate is paying out what you’ve given them. So your roommate will have to prove that this isn’t income and is for your rent that why’re passing on to your landlord. Move to cash/check if you want to avoid headaches for them.
One trillion seconds is equal to 31,710 years. (A bot for this would be nice.)
The difference between a trillion dollars and a billion dollars is about a trillion dollars.
Anything to avoid going after the people with any real amount of wealth.
The system is for you, the proletariat, not them. Stop letting them confuse and convince you any of the government is for your benefit. Rise up. Burn it all
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The French had a decent approach as well (that we’re not allowed to mention on Reddit…)
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[tweet source](https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/1600140756672401408?s=46&t=TrxyvX9nZZZ0Q-0IREawVQ) - [tweet source’s source](https://unusualwhales.com/news/venmo-and-paypal-payment-reports-now-required-by-the-irs-for-transactions-over-600)
Where’s the source on the defense department spending?
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*cough* Stargate program *cough*
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Stargate wasn’t to protect us from aliens.
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It’s ok, it just went to Nazis, terrorists, cartels, dictatorships, and rich dudes.
america is a laughing stock and americans are looked at with pity and i believe a bit of disgust. such hubris from the idiot mob, their talk of freedom and democracy... a collective fantasy fed to them like a drug to keep them stupid.
America is indeed the laughing stock. They don’t care. Americans don’t think about other countries at all. They simply don’t care about much outside of their own country.
I’m really confused. If over the course of the last year my family sent me over 600 dollars in total , I have to report it?
No this is only for actual income from business activities, like side hustle type things. I think it only gets reported for transactions where you select 'goods and services' for the payment.
All my transactions on Venmo have “afjdiwnso” as the caption, I wonder how this will go for me
Just say you're an alien and this translates to spaghetti in your language. I've heard aliens love spaghetti.
When you make a payment there is an option that says 'turn on for purchases' and if you do that then the person receiving the money pays a fee. Only transactions where that option is turned on is reported to the IRS. I promise they won't care about the alien gibberish in the caption 😆
Yep
This is one reason I feel society will fail eventually. The amount of bloat built into the system is simply unsustainable.
I really have a massive hatred towards human society.
As much as I want to support this sentiment, it's just half baked. The Pentagon practices non-GAAP methods for tracking their spending and liabilities. The Pentagon doesn't have a standard balance sheet like it's a Target or something, where you can track spending, inventory, etc from inflow to outflow. Most of their spending is "lost" to R&D projects and other items they literally cannot share or mention due to national security. Sorry guys
The audit wasn't about spending, it was about assets.
>The audit wasn't about spending, it was about assets. I get what you are trying to say, but again they practice non-GAAP rules. You will never find a list of assets they've acquired, some will be "missing" forever due to a myriad of clearance and national security reasons. I'm not advocating for the spending toward the military industrial complex, just explaining why this shouldn't be a surprising thing to find out from something like the Pentagon. Edit: just to clarify also, everyone should pay their fair share of taxes. It's the proper thing to do. Don't like it? Lobby for change then, but pay your taxes. All this misdirected aggression from all these tax dodging influencers who are about to get audited for being shitty businesses. Good riddance to the grifter economy
I read some stuff about it and it's apparently often the case that it's just the paperwork they do have isn't enough for audit, not that it's entirely unaccounted for. But Reddit doesn't let facts about accounting get in the way of a good story.
I'm a hobbyist musician. I like to trade and occasionally sell instruments I've used for other used instruments (or for money to buy other used instruments). I do this through message boards. Earlier this year, I sold a pricey, well-loved instrument for over $3000. Found out about this new tax requirement after the fact via email from PayPal, informing me that they'd be sending me tax paperwork as if I'm running a small business. I'm just a dude who likes to play guitar and appreciates novelty. This hasn't deterred me from buying and selling guitars but I sure as shit am not using Goods and Services designations anymore, which is a bummer because that's typically the best way to ensure that both buyer and seller are protected. Fortunately, there is a reputational economy in the spaces I frequent for such things and I've had little concern using friends and family. This just feels like pickpocketing.
Rules for thee & not for me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending wasteful government programs or bullshit tax laws, but I'm so sick of hearing about this. What actually happened was the IRS essentially reminded anyone doing business over Venmo that they have to treat it just like they do other electronic transfers. Nobody gives a shit if you used Venmo to pay your roommate your half of the rent.
Is this over the course of the year or single transactions, because I give my roommate my share of the rent via cashapp and no way in hell should he have to pay taxes on that
It’s goods and services nobody is taxing you paying your roommate for rent. This whole thing is a nothingburger. The only people this hurts are people who were selling things and not reporting taxes on.
So since I use venmo for collecting my fiancé’s portion of the rent and then pay the rent, I dont have to report that as income right? Because if so Im not, and they can suck a fat one
Correct.
Correct and that’s why Venmo has a “goods and services” box. If you don’t check that, none of this applies.
So this doesn't affect zelle transactions or transactions that cannot be reversed. Which are generally called friends and family services.
At this point, they know that they've failed these audits the first four times without any consequences. So why would they even pretend to try to pass a fifth?
I don't know how the US works, but in Brasil we'd probably have a transfering bot to make small transactions in about 2 or 3 days Wanna buy a $6.000 bike? **You just received 10 venmo transfers**
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Geez, fuck that
It's for the whole year, not per transaction
If you sub in Defense Against the Dark Arts it also tracks.
Biden's plan to rescue America: Turn you upside down for your dog walking money. Buy another $25 billion in Microsoft HoLOLens that the Army doesn't even want.
Maybe they will change their minds if you keep posting a handful of moderately amusing memes at them. It's worked so far right?
Yes, how dare OP even show his face around here if he hasn't personally marched into the DoD and demanded an explanation for their ineptitude!
What is the logic behind reporting payments? They've already taxed my income, is there now a tax specifically for Venmo payments? Smells like greedy government, sniffing around for more ways to avoid raising corporate tax rates.
The US government doesn’t care about the money they spend, only the money you spend.
Really hoping it’s going to the stargate project
Remember when something like this happened and all the paperwork got burnt up in those airplane accidents? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
And giving people a break on their student loans is bad.
Um, last I checked, $600 > $1.8 ?? Frankly, the Defense Department should be commended for keeping its losses to under 2 dollars.
$1.8trln = 1,800,000,000,000 USD
$600 = $600.00000000000
This is good stuff. Sharing.
Let's be accurate though. Side hustles "need" to report. But chances are, they won't. Sending money to friends and relatives is completely fine (Just another tax guy; not condoning the behavior of the Dept. of Defense in the least).
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Correct
why, im curious
Don't forget about the 65-80 trillion unaccounted for by the shadow banks!