Uh... no it doesn't.
IRS is getting desperate......
- Thread starter AKUMATOTENSHI
- Start date
Uh... no it doesn't.
Ups, minor detail. "Enforcing murder laws prevents..."
Even with that correction you're wrong. I did not keep from murdering my ex-wife because I was afraid of the law. I just didn't feel she deserved it.
On the other hand, there are people who murder their ex-wives every day because they are super annoying.
The law doesn't factor into it at all.
In some murder cases of today the law doesn't factor into it at all. However, if there was no law against killing people, I am absolutely 100% sure there would be more people killed that there are today.
If you could just go out on a random Friday night killing herds of annoying people without any consequence, you don't think there would be any more mentally unstable people who would do that... or mentally stable for that matter?
Last edited:
I think you're still wrong. The "free market" of murder would quickly correct that. Say Bob kills Anne. Anne's brother Sam decides to take revenge and kills Bob. Josh is watching this and decides against killing Lucy in case Lucy's brother comes after him.
So while consequences are important, they aren't why people don't kill willy nilly.
Unless Lucy's brother also finds Lucy to be a real pain in the ass... in which case she really gotta go. Yes, it will be a free market like in the good old days of the Wild West.
Last edited:
The point is we don't enforce any law based on the amount of revenue it generates or the cost to enforce them....that's banana republic small town police force setting up speed traps talk! Literally all but a handful of the thousands of laws enforced in this country don't generate more revenue than they cost to enforce. To claim that we should only enforce laws that generate more revenue than they cost to enforce or else you'll "bankrupt a country" is utterly absurd! Not to mention the basic concept of deterrence; the fact you're enforcing a law deters people from breaking it, or as you said enforcing murder laws prevents other murders from happening. It's very possible that FACTA doesn't generate a dollar in fines but deters hundreds of millions in tax evasion, hard to put a solid number on that but the amount that suddenly left overseas accounts and the amount of money that participated in the amnesty program tends to reinforce that. Hell I'm guessing that the IRS conducting basic audits doesn't generate more revenue than it costs if you just look at the amount of extra revenue it brings in, but if we stopped doing audits of tax returns we'd end up with Greece level tax collection. Without knowing where the "administrative costs of 2.000 times the tax revenue it generates" meme comes from it's impossible to know how it was calculated and if that was taken into account.
By the way, it took me literally 15 minutes to complete my FBAR filing this year. There's plenty of stupid bureaucracy to rail about, although most in my experience is at the state and local level, but this really isn't a big deal.
The results and many of the use-cases of laws like "structured transactions" does make one wonder though.
Off topic, but related to the banana republic comment, how about the viral stuff this week involving a man being arrested, detained, cited, harassed, whatever it was, for eating a breakfast sandwich on the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transport) train platform... Eating on the platform is an actual crime!!
Easier to get fines out of people who can afford food, then spending on homelessness, sanitation and drug users.
Last edited:
BART police, we're talking the organization that shot an unarmed man in the back while being held face down on the ground by a BART police officer with a knee to his back. Sounds like they're a bit slow on the lessons learned uptake.
