That's what ALL income taxes are! No matter what the good or service you sold, it was part of your life that you *actually* sold. Your precious irreplaceable minutes.
Fundamentally, not a different concept from a finger, kidney, egg, or hour. You only have so many of each, once sold, you aren't getting it back. The IRS either has a claim on all, or none. If you choose not to work, you can avoid paying the tax. You can also avoid the tax by keeping your kidney or egg.
Personally, I would try to move away from the income tax concept, but that's just me.
Ethics and taxes have little to do with each other. But here I don't even see applying income tax to this as unethical (putting aside the issue of whether the tax regime itself is ethical...)
She worked. She was compensated. She can pay taxes with he rest of us. Her service was egg production. Had she been as altruistic as she presented she would have done the work without compensation.
Her potential for injury, pain, and suffering is nonsense. We all have that. I've been injured at work before, as have millions of others. That doesn't make my salary exempt. "Not in the profession of"... that has also never been a requirement. As for sperm donors and blood donors, raised by the article, they're not paid enough to even trigger the need to generate a 1099. I don't even remember blood donors getting paid at all, unless you count the cookies and juice as payment.
So I have no trouble not only with requiring her to pay taxes but also penalties.
Your argument in the vein of selling a used good, for example, selling the old lawnmower is not that unreasonable. If I were a line-drawer at the IRS I might ask if it's self-replaceable or not? Kidney, not replaceable, nor human eggs. Sperm and blood, replaceable. So selling the latter would be selling the work, selling the former would be selling used property. That where you're going?
I had never thought about it before, but it does seem she's getting money for a product, so why wouldn't it be taxable? I understand that she had to undergo medical procedures as well, but in the end, she agreed to sell the eggs that were the result.
I think it sucks, but I don't see why it's not taxable.
But fascinating if it could be capitalized...
And when do ethics enter the equation for the IRS? Is that something they ever bring to bear?
My understanding of tax law (not my specialty) is that they count income from any source whatsoever, but that 'self employment income' means income from operating your own business.
Could be I'm wrong here, but if I had a yard sale, I'd declare the proceeds as "other sources of income" and attach an explanation to the return. Seems to me, that's the thing to do here. It's part of taxable income, but at least the client shouldn't be subject to self-employment tax.
You'd declare the proceeds not at all (or with basis = proceeds, depending on how paranoid you are about the kind of audit where you have to prove that everything you didn't report wasn't income; gross income is statutorily defined as net income from the sale of property), because you have basis in your stuff, and selling that stuff at a loss is a nondeductible personal loss.
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Fundamentally, not a different concept from a finger, kidney, egg, or hour. You only have so many of each, once sold, you aren't getting it back. The IRS either has a claim on all, or none. If you choose not to work, you can avoid paying the tax. You can also avoid the tax by keeping your kidney or egg.
Personally, I would try to move away from the income tax concept, but that's just me.
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She worked. She was compensated. She can pay taxes with he rest of us. Her service was egg production. Had she been as altruistic as she presented she would have done the work without compensation.
Her potential for injury, pain, and suffering is nonsense. We all have that. I've been injured at work before, as have millions of others. That doesn't make my salary exempt. "Not in the profession of"... that has also never been a requirement. As for sperm donors and blood donors, raised by the article, they're not paid enough to even trigger the need to generate a 1099. I don't even remember blood donors getting paid at all, unless you count the cookies and juice as payment.
So I have no trouble not only with requiring her to pay taxes but also penalties.
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Sounds like a great tax court case, tho.
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I think it sucks, but I don't see why it's not taxable.
But fascinating if it could be capitalized...
And when do ethics enter the equation for the IRS? Is that something they ever bring to bear?
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Like the oil companies.
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Depletion+Allowance
"and other natural deposits."
;)
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Could be I'm wrong here, but if I had a yard sale, I'd declare the proceeds as "other sources of income" and attach an explanation to the return. Seems to me, that's the thing to do here. It's part of taxable income, but at least the client shouldn't be subject to self-employment tax.
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You don't have basis in your body.
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