Financial Surveillance

[ndrosen]

The Democrats seek to impose further reporting requirements on banks, including on quite small accounts, in order to help the IRS catch tax evaders. This follows in the footsteps of the FATCA law, which demanded that foreign banks serving Americans abroad provide financial reports, and resulted in Americans having their accounts terminated, and finding it difficult to obtain banking services; there was an increase in Americans renouncing their citizenship. The new reporting requirements would infringe on people’s privacy, and impose costs on financial institutions, which would be passed on, one way or another.

One reason to support land value taxation is that, because land is visible, assessing and taxing it does not require this kind of prying. Unfortunately, today’s advocates of soaking the rich (and incidentally the non-rich) are mostly not aware of LVT as an alternative way of shifting the tax burden to the privileged.

Comments

[selenite0]

Too many of the "soak the rich" crowd only want to tax the rich because they're not allowed to murder the rich. So they're indifferent to the tax method.

[ndrosen]

Too true.