Last month, Blue America endorsed Diane Young to replace Trump sycophant John James in the suburbs north of Detroit, basically southern Macomb County plus Rochester Hills in Oakland County. Although Trump took the district 49.8% to 48.8%, when Democrat Gretchen Whitmer won the governor’s race, she took the district by a robust 8.5 points. Voters there backed Dana Nessel by 2.5 points and in 2012 Obama won the district by nearly 6 points. It’s a swing district. James was elected by less than half a percentage point. Diane— and the progressive policies she’s running on— is the right person to swing it back. Author of the book Owning Your Financial Success, her field of expertise is taxation. You can contribute to her campaign here.
The IRS Has Self Checkout Cashiers!
-by Diane Young
As a financial planner, I read a lot of reports on the economy, trends, and what is happening in the business world. As most of you have experienced while shopping, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of self checkout cashiers. Businesses were thrilled with the prospect of not having to hire, train, and pay a cashier when their customers could do the work for free. And self-checkout machines can’t call in sick. Those machines seemed like a gift from heaven. Until they weren't.
But there turns out to be a serious downside to self checkout machines. Shoplifting SKYROCKETED wherever self checkout machines were installed! With a person at the cashier station, only about 0.3% of transactions were lost. At self checkout lines, the rate has soared to 6.7%! That is a huge hit to the bottom line. So big, in fact, that many companies are reducing their self checkout lanes and bringing back humans. When there’s a person, possibly even a friend or neighbor, working at the checkout counter, people are less likely to steal. But when faced only with a computer screen who you won’t run into at church or PTA meeting, the temptation to skip a few items at the scanner rises. I mean, who does it really hurt? Just that big faceless corporation.
To me, this is what is happening at the IRS. There are so few humans at the checkout counters, that people are stealing left and right. Businesses and billionaires can push the envelope when it comes to their taxes because no one is really checking their cart. No one is looking, so more and more wealthy millionaires and billionaires are letting a few extra items slide into their bag. And they may justify it because it is just a faceless government entity that they’re stealing from.
Except the government isn’t a faceless entity… it is 1.4 million active-duty military personnel, 16.4 million veterans, 6,500 food inspectors, and 21,000 border control agents. I could go on, but you get the picture.
When people and big corporations don’t pay their fair share, it takes money that would be used to defend our country, and for benefits for our veterans. It takes money from funding our crumbling infrastructure. The same infrastructure that these businesses depend on to move their goods around the country and the globe. It means one less food inspector making sure the food you eat is safe.
Most people pay their taxes. Primarily because they earn a simple paycheck where the tax is withheld and can be calculated easily. In a sense, workers who collect a paycheck must stand in the fully-manned cashier line. Businesses and self-employed folks, on the other hand, can decide to self checkout and be as creative as they want because no one is checking their cart. The IRS just announced that 125,000 wealthy Americans have failed to file their taxes since 2017!
That would change if we had more auditors. It would only take a few audits for word to spread and people would start paying attention and become more compliant. Because the IRS has been dramatically underfunded for a very long time, there are fewer and fewer humans doing the “checkout”. In fact, there are roughly the same number of IRS agents today as there were in the 1950’s, when our economy was one-seventh of the size it is now.
My opponent, John James, thinks the status quo is okay. When he says he wants to “stop 87,000 new IRS agents from picking through your pocketbooks,” what he really means is that he doesn't want his wealthy friends and family being audited so they have to pay their fair share of taxes. And this would lead to an increase in the deficit by $24 BILLION, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That is a LOT of slippage at the self checkout counter.
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