Comment by AnthonyMouse

> People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact with friends and family without reporting income, and this is a huge amount of lost tax revenue.

Is it though? The entire bottom 50% of the population paid something like 3% of total federal income tax, by intentional design of the tax system. Babysitters don't owe any significant amount of taxes whether they report it or not and under some circumstances (e.g. EITC) their effective rate can even be negative. Forcing them to report the income can't seriously be the justification for all of this mass surveillance.

> Heck, in the era of ZIRP, many economists were seriously talking about negative interest rates. You can't do that if a person has the option of taking out cash and hiding it under the mattress.

That doesn't have anything to do with physical cash. You could do the same thing by borrowing at a negative rate and investing the money in any security/asset/commodity. Which is why negative interest rates are crazy and never really happened.