Paying in cash absolutely helps commit tax fraud. It doesn't mean your contractor will commit fraud, but if they wanted to, it's a lot easier if you pay with cash compare to check or credit card.
That's 100% on them. I'm under no obligation to give some credit card company my personal information just so more fingers are in the pie when accusing the contractor of fraud.
Cash is good and I accept 0% of the blame of what other people do in response to me paying them with cash instead of something else.
> That's really more of a "Want to pay more than your fair share of taxes? Help them commit tax fraud".
This seems like a trope put forth by the middle men other than the government who want to keep getting their cut of every transaction in the world. "Don't cut out Visa and PayPal, that's practically stealing from your neighbor!"
You can obviously accept payment in cash and report it as taxable income, and not doing this is a good way to get caught, because if you're spending thousands of dollars a year more than you're declaring in income and the government asks you where it came from, you're going to have a bad time.
Meanwhile people who want to risk going to jail can do it just as well by deducting personal expenses as business expenses, or just making up business expenses and hoping nobody comes to check. All while letting payment processors siphon off something like 5% of your gross revenue, which for these kinds of things is often in excess of half your net income because your net margins were less than 10% to begin with.
Given that America is a democracy, it would appear that a majority of Americans do not share your morals, so on the contrary it is your moral duty to pay your taxes.
I would bet that in aggregate, more than half the taxes you pay go to your state, or some local polity smaller than state. Local political entities (county, city, town) are absolutely democracies and also have the maximum amount of actual impact on your life. The federal government is mostly irrelevant.
By avoiding paying taxes, you first and foremost damage the community you live in.
I don't know if I would agree with that take taken by itself without qualifiers. "if you're American" is doing some lifting but could mean anything. But otherwise I kind of agree, the average American is getting fleeced while the ultra wealthy are avoiding massive tax costs while benefiting the most from state infrastructure and economic policy.
No taxation without representation, so if your Congresscritter declares they don't represent you (because you identify as the opposite party and therefore are the enemy) then you have no responsibility to pay tax, a uniquely American sensibility
Of course the legal and ethical way to perform a tax protest is to simply have so little income that you don't owe them a thing
> Of course the legal and ethical way to perform a tax protest is to simply have so little income that you don't owe them a thing
That's the way it works. If you're really wealthy your team of accountants can find all sorts of ways to hide income and reduce it to zero or less. The more money you have coming in the less income you have to report, until the government you bought fair and square ends up owing you. Taxation is wonderful extra teat at which to suckle.
Bulk of income taxes go to the feds. Plumber will still pay plenty of sales tax. I'd say the value of having a plumber that likes you outweighs what benefits one receives from government programs, making it rational to stiff the man.
Cutting Google out of the mix can be seen as a net positive for the community. The same can't really be said for taxes that go to your local services.