[nmrm]

> (in fact, just today a contractor offered me no tax if I paid him cash...)

Which means he's probably not paying tax on that himself. Which is tax evasion, pure and simple. Which is illegal for good reasons.

[nmrm]

I've worked with a lot of contractors. Invariably, if you bitch about guberment and then have a polite chat with the ones who make these kinds of offers, they're trying to get around paying taxes. This might be anecdotal, but it's not pure speculation.

You can disagree with the tax system in the US, but that doesn't make tax evasion legal.