Atrios gets suckered
<blockquote>Perhaps we could just reclassify most household employees as self-employed?
...I'm actually quite serious. It's an absurd amount of paperwork for people who might work for you a few hours per week.</blockquote>
No, it's not. Because you don't have to do all that paperwork for people who might work for you a few hours a week. If they're independent contractors setting the hours and conditions of their work, who also work for a bunch of other people, the paperwork is minimal. If they're part-time or full-time employees (hint: when someone employs the same "baby-sitter" for 12 years with enough total hours a year to trigger tax reporting, that's probably not the right descriptor) whose hours and conditions of work are set by you, and who don't work for a bunch of other people, then by golly you have to behave like an employer.
The reason I say Atrios is being suckered is that this is like the inheritance tax. Plenty of people can imagine a time in their lives when it would be nice to have someone come in and clean for a few hours a week or to take care of the kids for a few nights out a month. So now they're all being recruited to think they're in the same position as people who employ a maid for 20 hours a week or a nanny for 40 or 50. The comparison of tax complications is pretty much the same as that of your or my estate-tax liability to that of a Mars or a Walton.
And even for the people who have to behave like employers, it shouldn't be a big deal. For the last 20 years or so of her life, my mother was an accountant doing small-business and personal taxes. Plenty of her clients had household employees, which meant that a couple times a year she prepared all the necessary forms, put little post-it flags saying "sign here" in the right places, and sent them to those clients. Total elapsed time, a few minutes. (And yes, if you're paying people somewhere north of $10-20K a year to take care of your household and your offspring, you can spare another few hundred for a good accountant.)
Pardon me for suspecting, just a little, that one of the reasons for these patrician complaints is a desire not to behave like an employer. When you're filing taxes for employing someone, you have to obey wage-and-hour laws; you have to pay them on time; you can't lawfully harass them. All those pesky rules that apply to bigger employers for the protection of employees apply to the household ones as well.
...I'm actually quite serious. It's an absurd amount of paperwork for people who might work for you a few hours per week.</blockquote>
No, it's not. Because you don't have to do all that paperwork for people who might work for you a few hours a week. If they're independent contractors setting the hours and conditions of their work, who also work for a bunch of other people, the paperwork is minimal. If they're part-time or full-time employees (hint: when someone employs the same "baby-sitter" for 12 years with enough total hours a year to trigger tax reporting, that's probably not the right descriptor) whose hours and conditions of work are set by you, and who don't work for a bunch of other people, then by golly you have to behave like an employer.
The reason I say Atrios is being suckered is that this is like the inheritance tax. Plenty of people can imagine a time in their lives when it would be nice to have someone come in and clean for a few hours a week or to take care of the kids for a few nights out a month. So now they're all being recruited to think they're in the same position as people who employ a maid for 20 hours a week or a nanny for 40 or 50. The comparison of tax complications is pretty much the same as that of your or my estate-tax liability to that of a Mars or a Walton.
And even for the people who have to behave like employers, it shouldn't be a big deal. For the last 20 years or so of her life, my mother was an accountant doing small-business and personal taxes. Plenty of her clients had household employees, which meant that a couple times a year she prepared all the necessary forms, put little post-it flags saying "sign here" in the right places, and sent them to those clients. Total elapsed time, a few minutes. (And yes, if you're paying people somewhere north of $10-20K a year to take care of your household and your offspring, you can spare another few hundred for a good accountant.)
Pardon me for suspecting, just a little, that one of the reasons for these patrician complaints is a desire not to behave like an employer. When you're filing taxes for employing someone, you have to obey wage-and-hour laws; you have to pay them on time; you can't lawfully harass them. All those pesky rules that apply to bigger employers for the protection of employees apply to the household ones as well.
