After totaling it all up, the Treasury Department announced Thursday that it had collected $61 billion on Wednesday.
That surpassed the old one-day record of $56 billion set on .
The bulk of the revenue — $49 billion — came from corporate tax payments, also a one-day record for such receipts.
The old mark was $46 billion set .
, and Dec. 15 are both deadlines for corporations to make quarterly tax payments.
I had no idea that they kept track of tax receipts on a daily basis.
Seems like a silly piece of trivia to me, but there you have it.
If you expect a tax refund this year, that means you gave an interest-free loan to the U.S. government last year.
Unless you intend to be so generous, you should ask your employer to reduce the amount withheld from your paycheck by filing a new W-4 Form with additional allowances.
USA Today reports on Americans paying too much too early, and what it costs us:
Americans are enjoying their biggest tax refunds ever — and it’s costing them billions of dollars.
Taxpayers overpaid their federal income taxes by a record 29% in both and , according to a USA Today analysis of Internal Revenue Service data.
That has pushed refunds above $200 billion a year. Final figures aren’t in for , but the average refund so far is $2,423, up 4% from last year.…
The extra withholding gives the government an interest-free loan worth more than $10 billion a year, equal to about $100 per tax return.
“The deficit is a little smaller because of this voluntary tax,” says Leonard Burman, co-director of the Tax Policy Center in Washington.
You don’t need to help them take your money.
As the Wall Street Journal enthuses, federal tax revenue is coming in hand-over-fist so far this year:
In , overall revenue continued to surge, growing at an overall rate of 10.3%, or an $81 billion increase from the year ago period, to $871 billion.
That builds on the astonishing 15%, or $274 billion, revenue increase for , which various fiscal wisemen assured us would fall off dramatically.
Apparently not.
’s double-digit increase is roughly triple the rate of inflation, reflecting strong gains in business profits and individual wages and bonuses — both signs of a vibrant underlying economy.
Corporate income taxes are up 30% , while individual income tax payments have climbed by 10.3% .…
If you’re wondering why the alleged fiscal conservatives at the Journal are crowing about the magnificent swelling of the government coffers, well, it makes for another good occasion to call for cuts in capital gains taxes, doesn’t it?
The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation’s plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.
The numbers could hardly be more stark:
Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession’s impact:
Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago.
Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since , and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.
Meanwhile, the recession is taking a toll on fuel and industry excise taxes that pay for highway, mass transit and airport projects.
Fuel taxes that support road construction and mass transit projects are on pace to fall for the second straight year.
Receipts from taxes on jet fuel and airline tickets are also dropping, meaning Congress will have to borrow more money to fund airport projects and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Some recent tax resistance news of note:
The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress have been looking for coins under the couch cushions that might help them pay for some of their expensive ambitions.
One plan they came up with was to require banks, credit unions, and other such financial institutions to make annual reports to the IRS of all accounts that had more than $600 of combined deposits or withdrawals over the course of the year.
The theory was that the IRS could match this information with the declared income of the account owners, and, if there was a significant discrepancy, could launch an audit to investigate — thereby making it a bit more difficult for people to earn and spend undeclared income, and so increasing the tax base.
Republicans seized on this proposal as a good wedge with which to spoil the Democrats’ plans, and painted it as an Orwellian nightmare of the government peering into everybody’s private business.
At first, the Democrats doubled down, but as anticipated, they have now pared back the proposal such that it will only apply to accounts with at least $10,000 of combined deposits and withdrawals, and exempting certain deposits (such as direct deposit paychecks or social security checks) and withdrawals (such as for the purchase of a home).
Exemptions like those may make the proposal easier to sell on the talk shows, but they would make it considerably more complex for banks to comply, and so this is unlikely to dampen their increasingly loud and organized opposition.
And the Republican kvetching, which had predictably floated free from the actual facts about the legislation almost immediately anyway, isn’t likely to get any quieter.
It remains to be seen whether the proposal will survive its further journey through the legislative meat grinder.
Why this matters for American tax resisters is this:
One of the easiest and most common ways for the IRS to take money, from a resister who refuses to pay voluntarily, is to seize it from their bank account.
For the agency to make such a seizure, though, they must first become aware of the bank account.
The usual way they discover such an account is when the bank sends an annual 1099 report to the IRS indicating how much interest income was earned by the account.
But in recent years, with interest rates so low, banks and credit unions have often offered accounts that do not generate any interest (they use other sorts of perks to entice customers instead).
Such accounts therefore do not generate 1099s and so do not create a paper trail for the IRS to follow.
So resisters have been able to use accounts like this to protect their money from IRS seizures.
Under the new proposals, such accounts would be reported to the IRS if they had a sufficient amount of deposits and/or withdrawals, and so this protection would be diminished or eliminated.
Federal tax revenues are sharply up , largely thanks to booming fortunes of corporations and the wealthy.
This appears to be more than just a rebound from the economic challenges of the pandemic, as the numbers are also way up from the pre-pandemic .
The American Prospect published an editorial by Robert Kuttner recommending that Democrats respond with mass tax refusal to the next presidential election if it is won by fraud by the Republican candidate.
Taxpayers owed considerably more money than usual when they filed their income taxes this year — hundreds of billions more.
And this is contributing to a record amount of income tax collection — both in terms of the raw amount, and in terms of the percent of GDP.
This is probably because of a surge in capital gains last year (from which taxes are not withheld over the course of the year) but may be also because much of the recent increases in wealth have gone to people in higher tax brackets.
This increase in the amount owed may cause a little extra “sticker shock” among affected taxpayers.
On the other hand, refunds were also higher than usual this year, so I suppose it could even-out, attitudes-wise.
Spanish war tax resisters have been ramping up their activity as the Ukraine war prompts ever more military spending in Europe.
In the Basque Country, for example, activists have set up offices of war tax resistance in Donostia, Gasteiz, and Bilbao to help people through the process of resistance and redirection.
Ruth Benn of NWTRCC shared her story of trying to access her IRS account on-line.
The IRS is trying to let taxpayers access their information on-line so that the agency can take some pressure off their grievously swamped phone service lines.
They’re also extra-sensitive to security issues, both because taxpayer account information can be private and sensitive, and because international fraudsters use such information to siphon money from the U.S. treasury.
But at the same time, the steps they take to tighten security are frustrating and user-hostile (as Benn found), and raise the hackles of privacy advocates.
This has put them in a tight spot, and the solutions they’ve come up with don’t seem to be solving their problem while at the same time they’re causing frustration for everyone involved.
Bridget J. Crawford and W. Edward Afield have a forthcoming paper in Tax Law Review in which they analyze the tax resistance of Dorothy Day.
The paper has some good background and overview of her tax resistance and her reasoning behind it, but the authors seem to mostly have the perspective that Day was mistaken and if she only realized what a marvelous social service and wealth-redistribution agency the government is, she would have changed her mind.
The IRS now has its hands on the big budget boost that was recently passed, and one of its first orders of business is to try to boost its depleted and aging workforce.
But that may be easier pledged than done, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The current job market is tight (especially in the finance sector, where the IRS is competing), and agency wages are stagnant against a background of inflation and wage growth in the private-sector.
Expedited hire authority and pay flexibility that were part of early versions of the funding bill were stripped from the final version, so the IRS must plod along as before, though with more budget to work with.
In addition, some of the positions the IRS is hoping to fill are in its hollowed-out human resources department: the same people responsible for recruiting, interviewing, and training new hires.
The founder and former owner of the outdoor recreation gear company Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, has transferred the ownership of the company to a non-profit focused on environmental causes.
If he had sold the company — which is worth something like $3 billion — or if his heirs had inherited it, this would have resulted in a huge tax bill.
But by giving the company entirely to a 501(c)(4) non-profit instead, he avoids those taxes.
So not only was Chouinard generous to environmental causes, he also was able to avoid funding the environmental wrecking ball of the U.S. government.
The U.S. federal government is seeing a surge in tax revenue.
Federal tax collections as a percentage of gross domestic product are higher than they’ve been since World War Ⅱ.
The largest component of this recent increase is from personal income taxes.
In part this is because wages are rising due to inflation and employer competition for labor.
There was an evacuation and large-scale police response at an IRS building in Memphis, Tennessee in response to reports of an “active shooter” in the building.
Those reports were later labeled “misinformation.”
This begins to look like it may have been a case of “swatting” — the use of false, anonymous reports of violent crime in progress to provoke a militarized police response against some target.
I’ve reported on a number of garden-variety bomb threats and “suspicious powder”-style incidents at IRS buildings in the past, but this is the first swatting I’m aware of.
I continue to be impressed at how tax resistance seems to be just part of how politics works in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The latest example comes from a rally by small businesspeople in Butembo, North Kivu who are protesting heavy-handed tax enforcement there.
