Contracting firms are effectively paying payroll taxes indirectly because contractors are (required to be) paying equivalent self-employment taxes, which figures into labor costs for the firms.

And, in any case, a significant part of the left opposes payroll taxes as an an additional (on top of the effects of, e.g, long-term capital gains’ favorable rates) way in which labor is structurally overtaxed compared to other income and would prefer most payroll taxes be abolished and the services they fund instead funded by getting the revenue from taxes that aren't restricted to labor.

That being said, contractor firms get out of lots of substantive workplace protections that are important to the left, which is an issue even without payroll taxes.

All of these gig economy jobs are creating lots of low grade IRS violations, mostly through paperwork complexity. How about creating a gig economy job site to hire off-season HR and Block Accountants to find these IRS violators and extort money out of them with the help of IRS?

What's to crack down on exactly? The government still gets all its taxes. It just gets all of it from the employee (sorry, "contractor") rather than getting half each from the employee and employer.

"Crack down" doesn't necessarily mean "they're doing something illegal _today_." They could certainly go after the contractor laws and change them. It's not all taxes; many protections employees get are skirted via these gig job companies due to everyone being a contractor.

In this case the employee is getting paid potentially paid "less" so wouldn't that men less taxes on that end?

I'm not sure that tax payment by say a random start up or given to en employee would necessarily be 1:1.

Netflix made big profits, but paid little tax, if they had paid it as salary (obviously not going to happen) I bet there would be more tax revenue.

And that's just assuming the objections are about tax revenue... they're not.

They don't get paid taxes if the self-employed person doesn't have money left over at tax season. Most people are getting by month-to-month. Not because they are bad planners, but because there is not any extra money.

The government will crack down when it realizes poor self-employed people cannot or will not pay taxes and that putting them in jail will just cost more money.

What counts as very-left in the US? Serious question; by the standards of everywhere else, the US is skewed very right by default, so what counts as "very-left"?

Well, since we're talking about US politics doesn't it make sense that "very-left" is relative to the current political climate in the US? To bring it back to the pendulum analogy, if I asked you which way a particular pendulum was swinging would you need information about the current state of other pendulums to answer? I can't tell if you're genuinely unable to comprehend the meaning of the comment you're replying to or just taking a shot.

I did say "Serious question", didn't I?

When people from outside the US hear US citizens talking about left-wing politics, we have learned that we need to double-check, because to many US citizens the US democratic party is left-wing, for example. To many people from the rest of the world, the US democratic party is right-wing. We have learned that when people from the US say "left", it's not the same as what we mean.

So when the original comment suggests that the pendumlum will swing "very-left", there's a real chance that to people from outside the US, that actually means "a bit more towards the centre but actually still on the right".

To bring it back to the pendulum analogy, if I asked you which way a particular pendulum was swinging would you need information about the current state of other pendulums to answer?

I would not, but this isn't about the direction of the swing. The original comment was about where the pendulum was going to end up. Apparently, the "very-left". To those of us outside the US, who have learned that what the (majority of the) US considers "left" is what we consider "still on the right", that warrants double-checking.

Well, since we're talking about US politics doesn't it make sense that "very-left" is relative to the current political climate in the US?

I do not expect to see nationlisation of industry and the effective abolition of private property in the US. That's "very-left", but it's almost certainly not what the commenter meant. So I double-checked. As conanbatt pointed out, there is however an actual genuine left movement in the US these days, which didn't really exist a decade ago, so - again - it seems sensible to double-check. Politics is heavily contextual and heavily individual, and to make the kind of assumptions you advocate would, I believe, simply lead to misunderstandings.

> I would not, but this isn't about the direction of the swing. The original comment was about where the pendulum was going to end up. Apparently, the "very-left". To those of us outside the US, who have learned that what the (majority of the) US considers "left" is what we consider "still on the right", that warrants double-checking.

Didn't the OP explicitly mention the swing? As in, "When the pendulum swings very-left (as it will, American politics follow a tick-tock partisan pattern)". What about that suggests a stopping point? If the question was about where the pendulum would stop (they stop in the middle, btw), there would be no mention of a tick-tock pattern. A stopped pendulum doesn't follow a tick-tock pattern, it just stays in one place.

The interesting thing about pendulums isn't where they stop. It's that they continue to swing back and forth.

I'll ditch the pendulum analogy and just ask directly: Why are the political leanings of other countries relevant to determining what is "very-left" relative to the current political climate in the US?

You are now getting mainstream Venezuela support, and prominent political figures talking against private property. The U.S. has now a proper left. This wasn't true 6 years ago, by my interpretation.