Cash is king, why? Because it's anonymous, not able to be tracked as cash is physical, forever separate from the net, something eloquently articulated in The Conversation partly titled, You can't hide side hustles from the IRS anymore if you use online tech to get your money. To yours truly, paying taxes is legit, something the ultra rich don't do as they have the means to hire expensive minons to leverage the arcane tax code in order to evade what they should rightfully pay as citizens of the good ole USA. The other reason why cash matters is privacy and total control of one's money. If everything's online and electronic, privacy's but a word and complete control is but a mirage.
Why cash is king ...
However, that’s not true of income from other sources. If you make money cleaning houses, catering out of your own kitchen or through another informal side hustle in exchange for cash, chances are this work has been “under the table.”
It’s been up to you, not your customers, to report any income earned this way to the IRS for tax purposes. And there is a good chance that you didn’t, given that the underground economy makes up at least one-tenth of the overall economy.
That’s changing, in part because of how informal transactions happen. It’s far more common these days for customers to make these payments through apps like Venmo, Stripe and Square or online platforms such as Etsy, Poshmark, Rover and Upwork than to use cash or checks.
This can even include illicit activities, like drug dealing. And believe it or not, even when you make money through illegal transactions, the IRS still requires these payments to be reported for tax purposes.
The IRS has long identified informal payments as a significant source of the “tax gap” – the difference between what taxpayers owe and what they pay.
IMHO, the real tax gap is the ability of the big corporations and the ultra rich to dodge the tax man by offshoring monies and/or doing the tax code manipulation bit.
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