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Totally reasonable
(discuss.online)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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/uj
The "money spent on survival" is the standard deduction and deductions in general. Deductions are viewed as if you never made that money in the first place. Whether standard deduction should be larger is another question.
Corporations can tell the government what their deduction is, the government tells normal humans what their deduction is.
Person: $16k for food is part of standard deduction. No deduction for car or rent if you are an employee.
Corporation (which is legally treated as a person): $150k for food for one party. $150k for CEO's Mercedes. $500k for condo for ceo to use when visiting.
Yeah, because $16k is enough to survive.
A diet of nothing but rice and beans, living in a rented room in a garage, and dumpster diving for all the remaining necessities and you can almost live in California!
That’s the thing. Corporations report their own deductions, but individuals have to follow existing law, when there’s a high variance among necessary spending
People can report their own deductions, too. It's just not worth it for most people.
The problem is that the IRS "doesn't have the resources" to audit corporations and millionaires. They basically only audit small business owners.
Edit for sarcasm quotes
Even that though, you can only deduct part of your living expenses. There is no food deduction afaik, there is no deduction for insurance as far as I know.
I'm pretty sure I read that auditing the wealthy is a huge profit center for the IRS, because they find people who aren't paying what's owed. Naturally conservatives (of any party) hate this and gut it whenever possible
Auditing in general is profitable, but it's mostly due to it being automated for people that aren't making 7 figures. Auditing the not absurdly wealthy is also generally a positive revenue. Auditing the extremely wealthy tends to not be a great net benefit as the costs of lawyers and court time outweighs the settlement check at the end. There's an argument to be made it's worth the cost to ensure the ultra wealthy do actually pay though.
It's billions of dollars of tax "avoidance", cheating, and simply not paying. Unfortunately, the wealthy who are calling the shots don't really want to pay millions for IRS lawyers
Yeah, if you look at the numbers it's obvious. But libertarians don't let facts get in the way of a good narrative.
Which is ass backwards. Audit those with the highest amounts and they made way more money. It's proven it worked that way until they cut funding for it
You can also report your own deductions if you itemize. If your income is low, the standard deduction is probably just significantly bigger than your itemized deductions.
Legal deductions are extremely limited if you are an employee. You can't deduct your car, your rent, or the big screen TV you bought.
For employers, anything that didn't end up in the bank at the end of the year is a deduction.
Pretty sure that's the point
I'm pretty sure you are correct.