Labor

Paying taxes is just about as much fun as a root canal.  As such, apparently more and more people are just deciding not to do it.  As the Wall Street Journal points out today, the IRS saw a 40% surge in returns that owe tax penalties between 2010 and 2015.

For reasons that aren’t clear, a growing number of people who pay taxes quarterly are getting their payments wrong and incurring penalties as a result. These taxpayers often owe estimated taxes because they have income that’s not subject to the same withholding as wages earned by employees.

 

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

A few weeks ago the Board of Trustees of Social Security sent a formal letter to the United States Senate and House of Representatives to issue a dire warning: Social Security is running out of money.

Given that tens of millions of Americans depend on this public pension program as their sole source of retirement income, you’d think this would have been front page news…

Via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

According to the June 2017 snapshot from the Social Security Administration, nearly 61.5 million people were receiving a monthly benefit check, of which 68.2% were retired workers. Of these 41.9 million retirees, more than 60% count on their Social Security to be a primary source of income.

In case you missed it, South Korea has introduced what is being called the world's first tax on robots amid fears that machines will replace human workers, leading to mass unemployment. Of course, one can't actually tax robots so what they're actually doing is changing the corporate tax code to provide disincentives for capital investments in technology.  Genius plan if we understand it correctly.  Per The Korea Times:

Following the debacle of James Damore's 'Diversity' memo and subsequent firing, Google decided a companywide townhall meeting was necessary to address staff concerns with executives planning to field employees’ questions voted on by their peers. The questions with the most votes would get asked.

A sampling of some of the most popular questions as of Tuesday, according to employees, reflects the spectrum of views on the memo and its fallout.