With coming up, tax-related stories are making my RSS feeds look like the Nile in flood season. Here are some that have caught my eye:
- Emma Ross-Thomas at Bloomburg News reports that “Tax dodgers multiply as underground economy cushions job cuts.” According to the article, in times of economic distress, the proportion of the economy that goes underground expands: businesses go off the books, workers take informal economy jobs, and so forth. The article focuses on the idea that this makes the economy look worse than it is, as the official statistics are only counting the above-ground economy. But I prefer to look at it as people getting good practice in untaxed economic activity.
- Sitara Nieves gives a history of tax evasion, tax resistance, and tax rebellion at The Takeaway.
- Trevor Bothwell at The Libertarian Examiner explains what he finds dissatisfactory about the constitutionalist “show me the law” tax protester set.
- Geov Parrish updates his annual Why Pay Taxes? column for Eat The State but this time there’s something different — a counterpoint argument: “Why I Love Paying Taxes.”
- One silver lining to the recent economic cloud is that with people earning less income, there’s less to tax, and governments are bringing in less money.
Here’s a news piece that quantifies some of this:
In the report, CBO projects that the Social Security trust funds will collect just $3 billion more in cash receipts than they will pay out in benefits in the 2010 budget year that starts in . A year ago, before the economy slipped into recession, the CBO projected an $86 billion cash surplus for the same year.
