As someone who has to pay back half of my COVID relief but so many rich people and corporations don't- I feel this deep in my black soul.
$7000 on top of my student loans👍
115Quick question? How come you gave to pay half of it back? On what grounds?
39They "reassessed" my account and that's all the reason they gave.
43On what grounds? It keeps the rent pigs in line. /s
But also not /s
11
I made a $10,000 payment to close out mine a few years ago. Turns out I was right that Biden wouldn't do anything meaningful on that front, and I was tired of being gouged on the interest.
I still support cancellation though. I wish we were spending 200 billion on that instead of another country's war.
-52They should just make it legal to discharge student debt in bankruptcy again
1
We should subtract from the military’s budget anything they can’t explain on an audit.
80"Why do we have to explain a $880,000 missile that bombed a villiage full of brown people? Or a $72,000 drone made out of consumer parts but the company is owned by my cousin?"
38
They know exactly where it went. Operation Freedom, abbreviated OF on the ledger...
39it's worse than that, they don't know that they don't know. literally no one ever holds them to account, they've never been asked the question so why would they need the answer.
19
That 'we don't know where 2 trillion went' is a myth--that number represents accounting reconciliations between their myriad of different archaic and highly secured systems. It doesn't mean that actual resources are missing or can't be accounted for.
37I remember reports of literal pallets of cash going missing during desert storm
31"missing"
14Yeah that money came from Iraqi oil sales. And seems to have likely gone to (mostly) Iraqi contractors and Iraq government. It was literally their money going back to them. The accounting was not well documented. But once again, the money isn’t missing. And it definitely wasn’t money collected by the IRS from taxpayers.
1
It's an infestation of unconnected dots that could hide countless incidents of corruption. Were we to connect them all and compute the sum of adjustments, the discrepancy could be smaller or greater, exponentially.
The problem is our government favors the DoD like a prodigal son and is not eager to facilitate an audit that might reveal trillions in corruption. It already doesn't like the published records of trullions in bad investments while leaving our troopers with insufficient armor and a DVA that leaves IED victims to the streets and the elements.
So until I see otherwise, I'm going to assume that's trillions going to defense contractor lobbyist junkets and bribes.
9That doesn't really matter though. The point still stands regardless of if it's explained by money literally disappearing into a hole or huge rounding errors and inefficiencies in their accounting systems.
They are still allowed much much more leniency with much larger amounts of money (aren't they aren't ever properly held to account for it) than regular people are allowed with comparatively tiny amounts of money.
8A big part of it is reporting requirements, despite what some people think different portions of the government have different requirements. The reason a person gets inquiries about Venmo payments is because the IRS requires corporations to report that information to them and it's a mainly automated process.
Regulatory reporting requirements of Corporations to the IRS can't be copy pasted onto Pentagon spending reconciliation.
A better comparison, that is still not accurate, would be a cash business that has to report income to the IRS and has trouble getting granular details organized.
Complaints about transparency and accountability on the Pentagon budget are a valid complaint, but this is a poor example.
5Cash business is a great example, considering 99% under-report their income by a huge amount...
1
as if I know exactly where the fuck all my money went all the time
3"accounting reconciliation" hahaha that's fuckin hilarious
0
Ha you can't even receive $50 of digital payments (venmo, cashapp, whatever) without passing an invasive KYC check. Fuck big brother.
27I'm not reporting that someone sent me their share of the mortgage through an app rather than cash. Get fucked.
23That’s a personal transaction and not business so you don’t have to claim it anyway.
8If you're paying a mortgage and someone is paying you for one of the rooms, as far as the IRS is concerned that is income 🙁
3Yeah you do it's still income...
If someone else is paying you for your mortgage anything past the interest is considered income since it's paying down the principal.
And you don't have to worry about reporting it venmo will already do that for you :/
0
you don't have to report anything, thats also why they do random audits.
1Venmo reports it
3
I'm honestly pretty upset about having to report "income" on reselling random old used shit out of my closet and garage on ebay all of the sudden.
Taxes have fucking been paid. This shit is not the same as wages and shouldn't be treated the same.
15The $600 paypal/venmo/etc reporting thing has been postponed and is not a thing for this coming tax season.
11Good, this is going to be so annoying. If I send my roommate $1000 to cover my portion of rent (which I used to do every month at my last place) it's not fucking "income" for them lol.
5
Now, my advice for those who die
Taxman!
Declare the pennies on your eyes
Taxman!
8It's all Stargate wars obviously.
5Image Transcription: Twitter Post
Brave New Films, @bravenewfilms
The Pentagon: we don't know where $2 trillion went.
The IRS: you sent $600 on Venmo. Don't forget to report it.
4I just got a notification from eBay that said they won't release my money from selling until I provide them with my SSN or tax ID because I've sold over $600 this year. It was probably like a total of $602 because I rarely ever sell anything on there except old tech stuff when I really need money.
2Sorry to be that person but this doesn't make sense for a couple legitimate reasons.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/6179467
For sure BS the DoD isn't really improving. Yet this is an apples to oranges comparison.
-3It's not about taxes, not really. It's the hypocritical and one-sided scrutiny of citizens vs corporations and the military industrial complex.
24It's still wrong. Even when not about taxes directly.
It demonstrates either ignorance about government responsibilities, ignorance about GAP, or combination of both.
People passing this around should do better to come up with an applicable comparison regarding oversight the IRS has. There are many examples.
But the IRS isn't the GAO. Auditing the DoD will never be something the IRS handles.
-5
My reading: Uncle Sam’s Ledger Logic:
$2 trillion vanishes into the Pentagon void? “Oops, slipped through the cracks!”
Your $600 Venmo transfer? “Caught you red-handed! Now, where’s our cut?”
8On the other side of the meme, why shouldn't money obtained via a 3rd party platform need to be reported to the IRS? I don't understand the complaint.
Is your business suddenly special and tax-exempt just because you sell your custom knick-knacks on Craigslist on or accept venmo for your at-home dog grooming service or whatever?
2The joke is that they hold taxpayers to ridiculously high standards, to the point where the concept of $600 of unreported income is something the government will harass you for. While they can just accept billions of their own spending going unaccounted for without a second thought.
And yes someone running their own small business struggling to survive is not worth taxing. Even if they were paying "what they owe" they would contribute nearly nothing compared to the rich people. And suffer far more for it.
10
Thank you, the internets tendency towards pure emotional reaction to things they don't understand is honestly just exhausting sometimes.
0
And everyone is gonna downvote me for mentioning Monero as the real fucking solution.
-28Yes, because it isnt.
17Well I'm just not going to counter you with the obvious. Figure it out your gorramn self.
-5
If a value overflow incident happened with Monero, it never would have been detected.
3Spooky
-5Told ya.
-12
"We don't know where 2 trillion went" is a headline similar to the ones we'll be seeing a few years after this debacle in Ukraine.
-30Weird example, as you're saying pretty explicitly exactly where the money went, and plenty of people would be fine with it
21Well Gary Webb would have had a good argument about the CIA's history of exactly that but he commited suicide by shooting himself in the head. Twice. Two weeks before he was going to court as a journalist with evidence that the CIA was dealing cocaine to America.
4
