On Thursday, November 30, 2017, 11:12:03 AM PST, grarpamp <[email protected]>
wrote:
; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15815811
In that cite, somebody foolishly claimed:
"Case 2: taxes. BTC is an asset. If you buy at price X and sell at price Y,
guess what, you owe taxes on Y-X. I don't understand how this is news to
anyone."
The person writing this apparently does not "get" that the rule for currencies
(Euro, Yen, Pound, etc) is that there are no "gains": A person can change
dollars into Euros; If the relative value between Euros and dollars increases,
and the person changes his asset back to dollars, he then has more dollars, but
this isn't called a "gain", or a "capital gain". That transaction simply isn't
taxable, and the IRS doesn't dispute that.
What happened? As I recall, a few years ago the IRS decided that they would
treat Bitcoin as an asset, not a currency. Why? That was a hugely
self-serving decision! They knew that give the extreme deflationary arc of
bitcoins, taking that position would render most such increases taxable. Had
they treated bitcoin as the currency it clearly was and is, the Federal
government would not be able to rob its claimed share.
My proposed solution is obvious. Consider the following scenario: Suppose the
Federal Government collects 3 trillion dollars in taxes each year. Suppose
each person who paid such taxes, paid 1% of that same value into an AP-type
fund, aimed at tax collectors and other major government employees. That's a
fund of $30 billion. If it costs $100,000 to "predict" a death, that's 300,000
such deaths.
According to Google, the IRS has about 80,000 employees. The Federal
government has about 1.4 million civilian employees. Might there be 100,000
managers? 80,000 + 100,000 = 180,000.
It would be a vastly better deal for taxpayers to contribute to such a fund,
because the Federal government's ability to collect taxes the next year would
be drastically reduced...if the number of employees remaining to collect such
taxes is drastically reduced.
jimbellproject.org
Jim Bell
