- This unreported income is being earned, for the most part, not by drug dealers or Mob bosses but by tens of millions of people with run-of-the-mill jobs—nannies, barbers, Web-site designers, and construction workers—who are getting paid off the books. Ordinary Americans have gone underground, and, as the recovery continues to limp along, they seem to be doing it more and more.
I've never reported my music sales. That's literally tens of tens of dollars not reported.
I've only reported my photography side business earnings one year. It broke $20k so I figured "people" might ask questions about where that came from. Also, that same year I also invested some money into gear and expenses for my business so I wanted to write that stuff off. So figured I should be "legitimate" and claim the income BUT also claim my expenses and write offs. Most years it's under or around $10k and the last two I haven't done much anyway, so we'll just say there's the possibility I haven't reported it in those cases...
I bet the amount of money off the books in the service industry is jaw-dropping. It makes perfect sense that this would be the case, and will continue to be. It's just too easy, and it's human nature. You have money in your pocket, and you have the choice to keep it, or simply "give some of it away." I know what I've done in the past. Combine the recession with the fact that the service sector is only growing larger in this country and the trend will be for more money to move underground. If the government wants to capture some of this they need to design a tax system that works with human nature and the types of jobs that people engage in that generate this income, because right now setting cash aside to give away when it's physically in your fist feels almost physically wrong to people and so it's just not gonna happen. Humans aren't machines, and you have to respect the psychology of them in the aggregate, if not, you're the one being unreasonable, not them.
I bet the amount of money off the books in the service industry is jaw-dropping. It makes perfect sense that this would be the case, and will continue to be. It's just too easy, and it's human nature. You have money in your pocket, and you have the choice to keep it, or simply "give some of it away."
I would assume this is where most of the (non-drug) 2 trillion in the article comes from, but that's such a mind-boggling number I can't really be sure. How much is the entire service industry worth?
I like the idea of these jobs because they have features of an actual free market and how people would behave in such scenarios
I grew up working on our family farm and many other small operations. Farmers used to deal almost exclusively in cash. There were some crackdowns in the last ten years or so, and the practise has declined. Lots of seasonal stuff though, like planting and digging season, is still paid in cash. Good help is hard to find. If I was a farmer and someone said they would only work for cash, I'm not likely going to say no, especially if its only for a couple of weeks. Milking the EI money (unemployment insurance) is an artform on PEI. Its been going on for a long time, and won't be stopping anytime soon. In my own line of work most people are using some sort of healthcare package to pay me, so I gotta stay aboveboard. I can definitely see the appeal though, and have worked here and there out of my house for cash. Just for friends mainly.
Most of my jobs have been "unreported income" and not really things I can put on my CV. For example, one winter I earned a bit of cash selling Christmas trees with my friend who'd gotten some crazy deal on about 500 of them of varying sizes and species. My duties included unloading the truck, taking money, giving change and acting surprised when cops showed up. My stance on it is, if you make it hard for people to earn a living or throw too much paperwork in front of them, they'll go do whatever they want to make sure they've got some money in their pockets.