Looks like they are not worried about taxes ever becoming simpler. Intuit has spent about $11.5 million on federal lobbying in the past few years to kill bills that would have simplified taxes. [1]
If $2.3MM/yr over 5 years is enough to reshape the trajectory of fundamental laws in this country, why aren't people just Kickstarter-ing cannabis decriminalization, marriage equality, and copyright law changes?
My point is: that's not a lot of money. Not that I think you can get important changes done for $2.3MM.
There is real conservative opposition to return-free filing. For instance, conservatives in general think the tax code is both too complex and too onerous. In a return-free system, citizens are given a summarized bill and encouraged not to consider the line items. The concern is that the bill is unfair, and the less citizens have it shoved in their face, the less likely we are to get a fairer tax code.
(I think this is silly and that we are probably under-taxed, but I understand the logic.)
Mostly because no one has done it yet, and congressmen are much more open to corporate lobbying and serving elite and business interests than they are interested in serving the people, mostly because the government wants taxes. Taxes come from business, and business often comes from making things that should be easier harder. In a world of perfect competition everything would cost next to nothing and profits would be non-existing. The world would be at equilibrium. Lots of business is about making sure the world never gets to that state so the game can go on.
It is certainly not the case that conservatives, who make up roughly half the government and who apparently constitute the bulk of opposition to return-free filing, want more taxes. The belief that Americans are over-taxed defines almost half of American conservative ideology.
There is wanting taxes, and then there is wanting taxes. One is the tax rate, and other is how much business is done. The logic goes that if the government generates more jobs through lower business tax then they can get more revenue from the income tax. I guess I should restate and say that the government wants more revenue, whichever way it comes in and is more amenable to policies that produces more revenue for itself and for business in the country.
Conservatives want lower tax rates. One common conservative argument is that if you tax less, businesses will expand more and you may even make more in taxes overall.
That's valid, but the nuance I left out of my comment was the common conservative belief that the government is simply too big, and that by cutting taxes, we can starve it back to an appropriate size. Many conservatives would not be happy with a more efficient mechanism to generate the same revenue we get today.
why aren't people just Kickstarter-ing cannabis
decriminalization, marriage equality, and
copyright law changes?
I would imagine it's a lot cheaper to bribe a politician when:
1. The bribe doesn't get any publicity/press coverage/cause any embarrassment. Campaign donations from big corporations are "business as usual" and the politicians don't look corrupt in the press - but do the same way in a public, attention-grabbing way and the guy looks bad if he accepts.
2. The vote you want to affect is low key and doesn't contradict the politician's public position on major issues. Changing a politician's opinion on the Concrete Masonry Products Research Education and Promotion Act of 2015 would be much cheaper than changing their opinion on overturning Roe vs Wade
3. You want to maintain the status quo. Creating new legislation and getting it through the system is a bunch of work - compared to turning up on the vote day and saying 'no'.
4. There are future votes and future bribes to look forward to. If I give a politician $200,000 to vote a certain way, he might take the donation then vote a different way - and if I ask him to vote that way and promise him the money afterwards, I might refuse to pay after he votes. But if there are 10 votes and I donate $20,000 before each one if he voted how I wanted in the last vote? Then neither of us can screw the other over too badly because we know we'll be making the same deal next year.
5. There's aren't other well-funded lobbyists bidding against you. Because if there are you'll need to get into a bidding war and they might have a lot of money to throw around. If people who vote against copyright extension get $20,000 from me but people who vote for it get $50,000 from Disney I'm going to need to up my game - and Disney probably has pretty deep pockets.
TLDR: I'd expect cannabis decriminalisation or copyright law reform to cost a lot more than blocking tax code simplification.
With that said, if someone would like to organise an attempt I certainly think it would be interesting to see if a kickstarter-like approach would work.
It's even simpler, really, and a classic and well-researched defect in representative democracy. Any time there is an interest group (which can be one person, one corporation, an industry, etc.) that wants something that is highly advantageous to itself and costs a very large number of other people a very small amount of money each, that interest group will always pay a small portion of its benefit to politicians for support, and politicians will always support it. This is because it's not worthwhile for millions of individuals to band together and defeat something that costs each one only a few cents. Literally, the time it takes (whether to make a donation, write a letter, or make whatever other trivial contribution) exceeds the value of shutting down the special interest.
Intuit likes income-tax returns and tax laws in general that are complex. But there are hundreds of other special interests, most very narrow, that favor specific bits of the tax code and will lobby to keep them. Collectively, these things cost us trillions of dollars, but individually they are impossible to defeat because no single one is large enough to be worthwhile.
This happens in all representative democracies where tax law is set by the legislature. There are ways to avoid it, but there is currently no state that has tried to do so (probably because this problem is extremely profitable for the political industry).
If I can elaborate on that concern a bit: if government is allowed to be loud about transfer payments and quiet about taxes then it can successfully bribe the middle class with their own money.
It is entirely possible to run a tax system without W-2 employees having to do a return at all. Many nations do it. American conservatives strongly prefer a government which is not sized like the government of those nations.
Is there anyone on this thread that would disagree with that? Hurting people to make a political point is immoral. I don't think anyone is advocating for that.
If by painful, you mean making sure everyone knows exactly how much money they are paying in taxes, then yes, Conservatives want that.
If you mean we want to make it hard to file taxes, as in make it complicated to figure out your tax return, and so on, then I'll have to ask where you got that idea. Most of the tax reform rhetoric I've seen is based on making it simpler to pay taxes, while at the same time more obvious how much you are paying.
I'm not a conservative ("Do what is best for the public school system shalt be the whole of the law" comes close to what I believe), and I do not believe yours is a remotely reasonable summary of what conservatives believe, let alone a charitable one.
I feel comfortable at this point saying directly: you have misunderstood the point Patrick was trying to make.
>If $2.3MM/yr over 5 years is enough to reshape the trajectory of fundamental laws in this country, why aren't people just Kickstarter-ing cannabis decriminalization, marriage equality, and copyright law changes?
Not all political battles are equal.
1) There are lobbies dedicated to keeping cannabis illegal and marriage unequal. There aren't any lobbies dedicated to keeping taxes simple.
2) It's easier to kill proposed legislation than it is to propose new legislation and get it passed.
> There is real conservative opposition to return-free filing. For instance, conservatives in general think the tax code is both too complex and too onerous. In a return-free system, citizens are given a summarized bill and encouraged not to consider the line items. The concern is that the bill is unfair, and the less citizens have it shoved in their face, the less likely we are to get a fairer tax code.
I'm a conservative, and I do believe the tax code is complex and onerous. Its made that way by lobbyists trying to get their special deals, and politicians using a revenue generation mechanism to push behavior.
The thought that its is only Intuit's 2.3MM/yr keeping the tax code complex is a bit bogus. There are many industries that rely on the current tax code's deductions and complexities to survive. The amount of money by companies, unions, and NGOs is staggering. They are backed by the helpful idiots in the media that continually preach that any tax code change is an assault on the poor. Even showing no understanding of basic math when deduction + flat rate taxes are suggested.
And yes, since I barely trust government accounting, having been the victim of a $1,000+ mistake which took a long time to resolve and hurt quite a bit and growing up under Indian Health Service, I don't believe in a return-free system. The thought anyone would take "trust us" from the IRS (or any government agency) is so foreign to my thinking, I just don't understand how it would work.
I believe in a flat rate tax with a larger base deductible with no social, moral, or lobbyist driven deductions. The IRS should have no political or social ties. It is there to raise revenue, nothing else.
> Even showing no understanding of basic math when deduction + flat rate taxes are suggested.
As a left-winger, my views and yours probably aren't that far off. I would be fine with a flat tax (that was actually collected from everyone) and a large deductible. Even more so if it was coupled with a meaningful basic income guarantee.
The problem is that I don't actually believe politicians when they say that is what they will do. With all the talk about "job creators", it really, truly sounds as though the modern GOP actually wants a regressive system where the rich pay almost nothing and there is no deductible because the poor need to pay their "fair share" (whatever that means).
So it isn't that we don't understand math. My preferred tax code probably looks surprisingly similar to your preferred tax code, I just don't trust any of your politicians to actually move us in that direction (and for the record, it's not like I trust HRC to do any better).
> the modern GOP actually wants a regressive system where the rich pay almost nothing and there is no deductible because the poor need to pay their "fair share"
None of the information I've seen posted for alternate tax systems by conservatives / GOP have ever had anything like that. That is something I hear a lot from papers that lean left, but is not the reality of any of the plans. Even the sales tax-based plans take great pains to make it easy on lower income folks. I just see it as more bad math.
I don't believe politicians will change the tax system because it is a powerful tool to impose their will and gain campaign contributions. Its a basic self-interest thing which explains the majority of politics.
But have any Republican elected officials actually put these policies into action? I mean, let's take Scott Walker. What has he done in Wisconsin? Seems like a lot of giveaways to the wealthy and not much else. This despite having a pretty solid mandate as mandates go these days (given that he survived a recall).
There are lots of reasonable-sounding proposals on various topics on both sides of the aisle (mostly from think tanks). The important thing is what happens when a party actually gets into government.
To your point, what has the Obama administration done when it comes to these issues while it has had power, especially considering the pretty strong mandate he had with control of both houses and a super majority in the Senate. The important thing is what happens when a party actually gets into government....
If you call a bill with all of the benefits up front and the costs hidden over years of implementation, bundled with the final takeover of student loans to help finance this, "reform". Then I wish he world have actually spent the capital you speak of on something that was less insurance company hand-out and wealth redistribution plan than it is healthcare reform
I often wonder if a much simpler bill that proposed a national catastrophic insurance program where the Feds pay 100% over $50,000 for a health incident would have been cheaper and tipped the actuarial tables to push insurance rates down?
Can you detail Gov. Walker's "What has he done in Wisconsin? Seems like a lot of giveaways to the wealthy and not much else."? I am not familiar with those parts of his policies?
As to the rest, I pointed out in another comment that the tax system is too nice a tool for politicians to alter.
Unemployment ticking under the national average, real budget reforms, and dismantling public unions. There are a lot of blue states that could use a Scott Walker.
If that's what it was, why did he publicly back expanding Act 10 to hit police and fire unions on the eve of his Presidential campaign announcement? You think WI isn't a swing state, and he won't need every cop in the state to GOTV for him?
Something else I hate about political arguments on HN: they put me in a position where I might actually have to speak up in defense of Scott Walker. Blech.
That's a fair point. But it's worth noting that Wisconsin's overall drop in unemployment rate since 2011 has slightly outpaced the drop in unemployment rate nationwide, which isn't a mean feat considering that neighboring Illinois has trailed the nation in the recovery.
As for the public unions--I'd like to see someone take on the police and fire unions too, but that probably has to wait for another day. Walker's motivations for those measures are irrelevant. Pension and healthcare liabilities are going to take state and municipal finances off a cliff. There's pretty much no hope of averting disaster, but states that don't deal with their public union problem will catabolize more of their GSP base before the inevitable crash happens.
The basic idea is that the Government should treat everyone equally. Treating someone differently because they have a lower income than others is discriminatory. Just as treating someone with a higher income differently is discriminatory.
Plus, as soon as you open the law up to treating people differently based on some arbitrary criteria, you open it up to corruption. A few "bribes" here and there, and suddenly this company is part of a group that gets special treatment. Or this rich person is able to avoid paying extra taxes because of some loophole created because the Government treats some group differently.
Thus, it's not about the "poor" paying their fair share. It's about everyone paying their fair share.
Treating someone differently because they have a lower income than others is discriminatory.
Wealth is not a protected class; unlike gender, race, and religion, we don't have a legal mandate to avoid making decisions based on a person's wealth.
It's about everyone paying their fair share.
What does 'fair' mean, though? Another 'fair' scheme might be that everyone pays the same raw amount (rather than a fixed proportion of their income). After all, isn't it discriminatory to include a person's income in the formula for how much one should pay? Our tax code then looks like:
Tax(person) = requiredRevenue / nPopulation
Unfortunately, this ends up requiring poor people to pay more than they actually generate, requiring government to throw the poor in jail for tax evasion and tax more to cover the cost of the prisons.
Ok, so we should be allowed to use a person's income as a parameter to the tax equation. The 'flat' tax scheme is to use a formula like:
Tax(person) = fixedRatio x person.Income
The fixed ratio can again be figured out by looking at total income of the population and the required revenue.
Two major criticisms (amongst many):
a) The marginal utility of money is greatly increased when you don't have much of it. A 15% tax on $20k a year will lead to eviction, hunger and health problems, creating social ills that we'll need government programs to deal with. Or they'll just not pay the tax, so again with the prisons. And again, the overall tax needs to be increased to deal with a stupid choice in the tax code. This is inefficient and arguably unfair.
b) Furthermore, if we don't want to punish the poor for being poor, we have to reduce the ratio, meaning we greatly reduce investment in infrastructure, education, etc, mainly as a result of undertaxing the wealthy to avoid punishing the poor. This also seems hella backwards.
with r_i fixed coefficients. So now we have four parameters to choose (or more, if we want a more general polynomial). And suddenly this requires real policy decisions to be made with some nuance...
So to me, it comes down to a question of whether we want to over-simplify the question of how to fund government - negatively impacting either a broad class of the population or drastically degrading the services provided by government - or whether we trust a segment of the civil service to do something a bit more nuanced.
I come down on the 'fix the fucking government' side, personally.
>> Treating someone differently because they have a lower income than others is discriminatory.
> Wealth is not a protected class; unlike gender, race, and religion, we don't have a legal mandate to avoid making decisions based on a person's wealth.
Discrimination and protected classes are two different concepts. It seems like you're arguing here that something shouldn't be thought of as discrimination because the discrimination isn't occurring against a legal "protected class." That's wrong. For one, we had unfair discrimination before we ever had "protected classes."
> a) The marginal utility of money is greatly increased when you don't have much of it. A 15% tax on $20k a year will lead to eviction, hunger and health problems, creating social ills that we'll need government programs to deal with. Or they'll just not pay the tax, so again with the prisons. And again, the overall tax needs to be increased to deal with a stupid choice in the tax code. This is inefficient and arguably unfair.
I disagree. If you know exactly how much money you have to pay each month, you can budget for it. A well planned budget can make $20K a livable income. I grew up in a family of 4 at that level. We tithed 10% of our income on top of the taxes we paid. We never were on Government welfare. And I never went hungry or didn't have a home. It wasn't easy, lots of people helped us, but I never realy realized we were "poor" until I went to college.
Sure it's just my family, but I'm pretty sure a lot of other families I knew as a kid were in similar situations.
> b) Furthermore, if we don't want to punish the poor for being poor, we have to reduce the ratio, meaning we greatly reduce investment in infrastructure, education, etc, mainly as a result of undertaxing the wealthy to avoid punishing the poor. This also seems hella backwards.
The goal is to help make it so that the poor are no longer poor. Government overspending, discriminatory taxation, loophole filled regulation, etc, helps mess things up so that it's really hard for the poor to stop being poor.
Fixing the tax code would be one step in solving the overall problem.
my parents lived off of grits (we're from the South) for three weeks when they were first married. They made it, with no help from the government - and my Dad never finished school, and could barely read. A lot of people have expectations of success without work.
I don't see how you can get a fair flat tax, once you take into account transfer payments and entitlements that benefit lower-income people. I think you can make government's intake look fair with a flat tax, but that the inevitable outcome of that will be a system that lowers the burden on the wealthy by doing fewer things for the poor.
I don't think the complexity of the tax system is really that much of a problem. And for the past few years, I've been getting a face-full of the system in all its complex and frankly idiotic glory. I think it's fine that the system kind of screws people like me, and also benefits accountants and a tax preparation industry. We can afford it.
"I don't think the complexity of the tax system is really that much of a problem."
The fact that TurboTax exists means the complexity of the system is a problem. For the average citizen to need a program to attempt to follow the law and still not get all the deductions owed points to a problem. The fact that the programmers at TurboTax have screwed up in recent years and cost people money and made them not comply with the law says the system is too complex.
Influencing individuals is relatively cheap. You just have to overwhelm them. Our laws are made by a limited group of individuals. Ergo, influencing laws is relatively cheap once you've got a few million dollars to burn and can gain billions off the results.
I do not believe that sweeping US federal tax reform is a matter of a few million dollars of lobbying.
I believe that a few million dollars can get you a bunch of state court judges, and even that the state government that can be influenced by lobbying expenditures might be "where all the real governing is happening".
I do not believe the narrative that Intuit's pitiful lobbying expenditure is stunting our tax system.
If the disclosure in ProPublica had been that Intuit was spending 10x, 20x more than that --- and it has the resources to do that --- I'd believe it more. As it stands, the specifics revealed by ProPublica make me less concerned about Intuit's influence.
Yes, from [1], I would never support return free filing. The tax code is far too complicated, and the IRS far too inept for me to trust that they would not screw my taxes up.
That said, if we went to a flat tax, or a national sales tax, or something else that drastically simplifies the tax code, then the issue would be moot. And most of those simplifications would be supported by Conservatives. (Note, I mean real Conservatives, many of the politicians who say they are conservative really aren't.)
If "flat tax" only means go to a single income bracket and percentage, it would not simplify the tax code much at all. The progressive part of tax code involves a single lookup at the end.
The complexity exists almost entirely in tax expenditures -- deductions, exclusions, credits, etc., etc., etc.
I don't know what "real Conservatives" think, but in polling many tax expenditures do very well. For example, 68% of Republicans, 63% of Democrats, and 58% of Independents oppose it eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction. (http://www.scribd.com/doc/117298635/CBS-News-Poll-Fiscal-Cli... Q47)
> The complexity exists almost entirely in tax expenditures -- deductions, exclusions, credits, etc., etc., etc.
I'm not sure what everyone else thinks, but any flat tax I'd support would have to do away with all of those things. And I'm pretty sure most of my conservative friends would agree.
In that poll you linked to, see the "Which Type of Plan Do You Prefer?" question 42. Republicans favored eliminating more deductions.
Also, that survey is really bad. In q44-51, they didn't mention cutting spending at all.
Change: "q51 (In order to reduce the budget deficit, would you favor or oppose) Reducing some government programs and services that benefit people like you?" to "q51 (In order to reduce the budget deficit, would you favor or oppose) Cutting spending on some government programs and services that benefit people like you?" I expect a lot more Republican responses would favor that idea.
And they should at least have mentioned reforming social security and medicare/aid.
>>In that poll you linked to, see the "Which Type of Plan Do You Prefer?" question 42. Republicans favored eliminating more deductions.
It's really easy to support eliminating generic tax expenditures.
The rubber meets the road when you start listing out the highest cost ones: exclusion of fringe benefits from income; tax advantaged retirement accounts, contributions, and limited social security taxability; mortgage interest deduction and home sale capital gains exclusion, charitable deduction, deduction for state and local taxes, preferential rates for capital gain and dividend income, capital gain basis step up at death, child tax credit and child tax exemption.
>> "Reducing some government programs and services that benefit people like you?" vs "Cutting spending on some government programs and services that benefit people like you?"
What's the difference? Are you really going to tell me that these spending cuts are going to be pain free because it'll just come out of waste, fraud and abuse?
Dan Carlin in his Common Sense podcast aired the episode [Kickstarting the Revolution](http://www.dancarlin.com/product/common-sense-282-kickstarti...) where he suggests that, being that the game is what it is (regarding campaign financing, lobbying and other such means of influencing political outcomes and the use of money), while we may not agree with the game, we should at least, as citizens, play the game.
If people have donated over $65 million to get Star Citizen developed, one would imagine the public could easily finance...broader causes. And considering $2.3 million over 5 years is enough to influence lawmakers to continually reject tax code reform, it seems getting something passed would be less costly and a one-time affair.
I almost like to imagine a political party or super pac with public causes (you name it) itemized its willing to support, with a donation page for each, taking that money and doing the very same thing corporations do, but effectively on behalf of citizens.
Let's say hypothetically that Crate and Barrel spent a few million lobbying on behalf of gay marriage, on the theory that the uptick in marriages would be good for business. anything wrong with that?
This isn't an obscure issue where a small amount of lobbying is going to push legislation in favor of a small interest group. It's literally one of the most scrutinized and contentious issues on the political table.
NB: the conservative opposition to tax free filing exists and isn't illogical. I for one do my own taxes each year, and the rage induced by thinking about the mortgage interest deduction is sufficient to keep me from voting for another cycle.
Doesn't say in the article but I assume they are keeping Mint? Desktop apps like Quicken (and the similar Microsoft Money) were dead to me the minute that came on the scene (almost 9 years ago at this point).
I'm a happy user of many web-based services, but why would anyone give all their personal financial data to single company? Ok, the success of Mint proves me wrong, I just don't get it.
It's not only that they can use your data to build and sell a profile, there is a realistic chance that the data gets leaked.
wesabe[0] can supposedly by run on your own server; not sure if there are any forks that are useful/updated, and have never tried it myself.
I'm with you. Can't figure out how millions of people just give away every piece of information about themselves with hardly a second thought (financial data -> mint; phonebook -> whatsapp=facebook; mail -> gmail=google; etc.)
> Ok, the success of Mint proves me wrong, I just don't get it.
Well for one thing people are lazy and Mint devs actually take care of handling logins for all of those banks, credit cards companies, and credit unions.
I'm not entirely sure if there's any other alternative non web base software that can do this. I would assume those apis are different between all those companies.
Sure I can input my stuff manually but then again I'm lazy.
Quicken can download transactions from every bank I've used. From what I can tell, it uses the same APIs that Mint does. But the data is never stored anywhere but my home server.
Quicken's bank feeds are processed the same way mint's are - through an Intuit service that makes the call to the financial institution. That call ostensibly adds other functional value (transaction categorization, friendly names for businesses), but Intuit's in custody of your financial data (and passwords) to perform that feature.
Fortunately, Intuit's also (currently) takes lots of care to ensure proper data-at-rest and in-flight custodial procedures, but you're still trusting someone to do things right.
Also, I'm not sure that your bank or credit union or especially credit card warrants all that much trust either - what are the chances that they could resist a well-planned hack? Or that they aren't already selling your data?
At some point, it's better that you have a copy of your data too if all the third-party advertisers already have one.
Because it's extremely convenient, and they provide a useful service? The trade-off between someone else doing work for you, so you can do something else you want to do, is never going away.
The other response cover the WTF WRT specifically web based company, I propose the general response of people aspire to getting actionable analysis. Companies don't actually have to provide actionable measurable quantitative analysis results, they just have to promise it could happen.
My personal experience with Quicken and Mint is I never got any actionable measurable results from the effort. Yes I saw all the ads about how I'd get special offers to save $5 on my car insurance or it would make me save for retirement or whatever, but over many years of Quicken and a couple years of Mint it never amounted to anything valuable. Then it becomes an insurance and sunk cost game, well, I've tossed away all this time and effort to organize unnecessary data, I guess I need to keep going to "save" my sunk cost. Eventually I chucked them both. The minimal time to maintain adds up over time and cuts into actual analytical analysis (not to mention recreational time) and in return, as mentioned, I got nothing out of it. Not all aspirational products are worthless to all people, I'm sure there exists someone who got something measurably important out of their mint or quicken experience. Just not me or anyone I know.
It is kind of the diet industry is a good analogy to the personal budgeting industry. The dieting industry makes people feel they're doing something important when they pick up a book or try to live off nothing but grapefruit juice for three days; all that really happens in the end is the provider makes money.
FWIW, I was able to install on Windows 10 and create a new Money database. I didn't try any operations beyond that, but it seemed to install and work ok for me.
Most of the suggestions I've seen are either Mint (another Intuit product), Personal Capital (more investing focused), Hello Wallet (a bit lacking on features, but it connects to bank accounts), and PocketSmith (a really expensive Mint on steroids).
I've been using Money Lover for a while now and it's actually really good! The UI is nice and intuitive, there're lots of features and it doesn't require bank connections to work.
It would be awesome if financial companies were required to provide free api's along with the full financial history. Currently companies like BOA charge you for automated access to your account and others actively limit Mint, for instance, from retrieving information on behalf of customers.
I switched from Quicken to Moneydance some time ago. The export/import worked fine. I had been a Quicken customer a 10-15 years and I was just so infuriated with all the UI churn to justify the upgrades and their turning off online transactions after a few years, FOR NO REASON.
MD is written in Java, it's simple, it's supported, they come out with new versions, and you can upgrade if you want.
I am not at all affiliated with the company that makes Moneydance. Just a completely satisfied customer who didn't want to pay Intuit another penny, for the rest of my life.
The tax law should be as simple as this: there is a BGI (basic guaranteed income) and every dollar above at a fix percentage regardless how wealthier you are.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] thread[1] http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax-...
My point is: that's not a lot of money. Not that I think you can get important changes done for $2.3MM.
There is real conservative opposition to return-free filing. For instance, conservatives in general think the tax code is both too complex and too onerous. In a return-free system, citizens are given a summarized bill and encouraged not to consider the line items. The concern is that the bill is unfair, and the less citizens have it shoved in their face, the less likely we are to get a fairer tax code.
(I think this is silly and that we are probably under-taxed, but I understand the logic.)
Conservatives make up the core opposition to return-free filing.
Conservatives definitionally do not want more taxation, or complicated taxation.
So I'm not sure the notion that Intuit's lobbying has killed return-free filing holds up.
Of course they do. Making something more burdensome makes it easier to attack politically. The Republican ideal tax return would be 796 pages long.
"Tax returns too long? Vote Republican! We'll cut taxes on the rich!"
1. The bribe doesn't get any publicity/press coverage/cause any embarrassment. Campaign donations from big corporations are "business as usual" and the politicians don't look corrupt in the press - but do the same way in a public, attention-grabbing way and the guy looks bad if he accepts.
2. The vote you want to affect is low key and doesn't contradict the politician's public position on major issues. Changing a politician's opinion on the Concrete Masonry Products Research Education and Promotion Act of 2015 would be much cheaper than changing their opinion on overturning Roe vs Wade
3. You want to maintain the status quo. Creating new legislation and getting it through the system is a bunch of work - compared to turning up on the vote day and saying 'no'.
4. There are future votes and future bribes to look forward to. If I give a politician $200,000 to vote a certain way, he might take the donation then vote a different way - and if I ask him to vote that way and promise him the money afterwards, I might refuse to pay after he votes. But if there are 10 votes and I donate $20,000 before each one if he voted how I wanted in the last vote? Then neither of us can screw the other over too badly because we know we'll be making the same deal next year.
5. There's aren't other well-funded lobbyists bidding against you. Because if there are you'll need to get into a bidding war and they might have a lot of money to throw around. If people who vote against copyright extension get $20,000 from me but people who vote for it get $50,000 from Disney I'm going to need to up my game - and Disney probably has pretty deep pockets.
TLDR: I'd expect cannabis decriminalisation or copyright law reform to cost a lot more than blocking tax code simplification.
With that said, if someone would like to organise an attempt I certainly think it would be interesting to see if a kickstarter-like approach would work.
Intuit likes income-tax returns and tax laws in general that are complex. But there are hundreds of other special interests, most very narrow, that favor specific bits of the tax code and will lobby to keep them. Collectively, these things cost us trillions of dollars, but individually they are impossible to defeat because no single one is large enough to be worthwhile.
This happens in all representative democracies where tax law is set by the legislature. There are ways to avoid it, but there is currently no state that has tried to do so (probably because this problem is extremely profitable for the political industry).
It is entirely possible to run a tax system without W-2 employees having to do a return at all. Many nations do it. American conservatives strongly prefer a government which is not sized like the government of those nations.
If you mean we want to make it hard to file taxes, as in make it complicated to figure out your tax return, and so on, then I'll have to ask where you got that idea. Most of the tax reform rhetoric I've seen is based on making it simpler to pay taxes, while at the same time more obvious how much you are paying.
I feel comfortable at this point saying directly: you have misunderstood the point Patrick was trying to make.
Not all political battles are equal.
1) There are lobbies dedicated to keeping cannabis illegal and marriage unequal. There aren't any lobbies dedicated to keeping taxes simple.
2) It's easier to kill proposed legislation than it is to propose new legislation and get it passed.
I'm a conservative, and I do believe the tax code is complex and onerous. Its made that way by lobbyists trying to get their special deals, and politicians using a revenue generation mechanism to push behavior.
The thought that its is only Intuit's 2.3MM/yr keeping the tax code complex is a bit bogus. There are many industries that rely on the current tax code's deductions and complexities to survive. The amount of money by companies, unions, and NGOs is staggering. They are backed by the helpful idiots in the media that continually preach that any tax code change is an assault on the poor. Even showing no understanding of basic math when deduction + flat rate taxes are suggested.
And yes, since I barely trust government accounting, having been the victim of a $1,000+ mistake which took a long time to resolve and hurt quite a bit and growing up under Indian Health Service, I don't believe in a return-free system. The thought anyone would take "trust us" from the IRS (or any government agency) is so foreign to my thinking, I just don't understand how it would work.
I believe in a flat rate tax with a larger base deductible with no social, moral, or lobbyist driven deductions. The IRS should have no political or social ties. It is there to raise revenue, nothing else.
As a left-winger, my views and yours probably aren't that far off. I would be fine with a flat tax (that was actually collected from everyone) and a large deductible. Even more so if it was coupled with a meaningful basic income guarantee.
The problem is that I don't actually believe politicians when they say that is what they will do. With all the talk about "job creators", it really, truly sounds as though the modern GOP actually wants a regressive system where the rich pay almost nothing and there is no deductible because the poor need to pay their "fair share" (whatever that means).
So it isn't that we don't understand math. My preferred tax code probably looks surprisingly similar to your preferred tax code, I just don't trust any of your politicians to actually move us in that direction (and for the record, it's not like I trust HRC to do any better).
None of the information I've seen posted for alternate tax systems by conservatives / GOP have ever had anything like that. That is something I hear a lot from papers that lean left, but is not the reality of any of the plans. Even the sales tax-based plans take great pains to make it easy on lower income folks. I just see it as more bad math.
I don't believe politicians will change the tax system because it is a powerful tool to impose their will and gain campaign contributions. Its a basic self-interest thing which explains the majority of politics.
There are lots of reasonable-sounding proposals on various topics on both sides of the aisle (mostly from think tanks). The important thing is what happens when a party actually gets into government.
As to the rest, I pointed out in another comment that the tax system is too nice a tool for politicians to alter.
Wisconsin's unemployment has been lower than the national average since before Walker took office.
> dismantling public unions
Except police and fire unions because it was more a political attack on the left's power base than a principled stand.
Something else I hate about political arguments on HN: they put me in a position where I might actually have to speak up in defense of Scott Walker. Blech.
As for the public unions--I'd like to see someone take on the police and fire unions too, but that probably has to wait for another day. Walker's motivations for those measures are irrelevant. Pension and healthcare liabilities are going to take state and municipal finances off a cliff. There's pretty much no hope of averting disaster, but states that don't deal with their public union problem will catabolize more of their GSP base before the inevitable crash happens.
The basic idea is that the Government should treat everyone equally. Treating someone differently because they have a lower income than others is discriminatory. Just as treating someone with a higher income differently is discriminatory.
Plus, as soon as you open the law up to treating people differently based on some arbitrary criteria, you open it up to corruption. A few "bribes" here and there, and suddenly this company is part of a group that gets special treatment. Or this rich person is able to avoid paying extra taxes because of some loophole created because the Government treats some group differently.
Thus, it's not about the "poor" paying their fair share. It's about everyone paying their fair share.
Wealth is not a protected class; unlike gender, race, and religion, we don't have a legal mandate to avoid making decisions based on a person's wealth.
It's about everyone paying their fair share.
What does 'fair' mean, though? Another 'fair' scheme might be that everyone pays the same raw amount (rather than a fixed proportion of their income). After all, isn't it discriminatory to include a person's income in the formula for how much one should pay? Our tax code then looks like:
Tax(person) = requiredRevenue / nPopulation
Unfortunately, this ends up requiring poor people to pay more than they actually generate, requiring government to throw the poor in jail for tax evasion and tax more to cover the cost of the prisons.
Ok, so we should be allowed to use a person's income as a parameter to the tax equation. The 'flat' tax scheme is to use a formula like:
Tax(person) = fixedRatio x person.Income
The fixed ratio can again be figured out by looking at total income of the population and the required revenue.
Two major criticisms (amongst many): a) The marginal utility of money is greatly increased when you don't have much of it. A 15% tax on $20k a year will lead to eviction, hunger and health problems, creating social ills that we'll need government programs to deal with. Or they'll just not pay the tax, so again with the prisons. And again, the overall tax needs to be increased to deal with a stupid choice in the tax code. This is inefficient and arguably unfair.
b) Furthermore, if we don't want to punish the poor for being poor, we have to reduce the ratio, meaning we greatly reduce investment in infrastructure, education, etc, mainly as a result of undertaxing the wealthy to avoid punishing the poor. This also seems hella backwards.
So maybe we end up with something like:
Tax(person) = min(0, r_0 + r_1 person.Income + r_2 (person.Income - baseIncome)^2)
with r_i fixed coefficients. So now we have four parameters to choose (or more, if we want a more general polynomial). And suddenly this requires real policy decisions to be made with some nuance...
So to me, it comes down to a question of whether we want to over-simplify the question of how to fund government - negatively impacting either a broad class of the population or drastically degrading the services provided by government - or whether we trust a segment of the civil service to do something a bit more nuanced.
I come down on the 'fix the fucking government' side, personally.
> Wealth is not a protected class; unlike gender, race, and religion, we don't have a legal mandate to avoid making decisions based on a person's wealth.
Discrimination and protected classes are two different concepts. It seems like you're arguing here that something shouldn't be thought of as discrimination because the discrimination isn't occurring against a legal "protected class." That's wrong. For one, we had unfair discrimination before we ever had "protected classes."
Just remove 'fair' from the sentence.
> a) The marginal utility of money is greatly increased when you don't have much of it. A 15% tax on $20k a year will lead to eviction, hunger and health problems, creating social ills that we'll need government programs to deal with. Or they'll just not pay the tax, so again with the prisons. And again, the overall tax needs to be increased to deal with a stupid choice in the tax code. This is inefficient and arguably unfair.
I disagree. If you know exactly how much money you have to pay each month, you can budget for it. A well planned budget can make $20K a livable income. I grew up in a family of 4 at that level. We tithed 10% of our income on top of the taxes we paid. We never were on Government welfare. And I never went hungry or didn't have a home. It wasn't easy, lots of people helped us, but I never realy realized we were "poor" until I went to college.
Sure it's just my family, but I'm pretty sure a lot of other families I knew as a kid were in similar situations.
> b) Furthermore, if we don't want to punish the poor for being poor, we have to reduce the ratio, meaning we greatly reduce investment in infrastructure, education, etc, mainly as a result of undertaxing the wealthy to avoid punishing the poor. This also seems hella backwards.
The goal is to help make it so that the poor are no longer poor. Government overspending, discriminatory taxation, loophole filled regulation, etc, helps mess things up so that it's really hard for the poor to stop being poor.
Fixing the tax code would be one step in solving the overall problem.
I don't think the complexity of the tax system is really that much of a problem. And for the past few years, I've been getting a face-full of the system in all its complex and frankly idiotic glory. I think it's fine that the system kind of screws people like me, and also benefits accountants and a tax preparation industry. We can afford it.
The fact that TurboTax exists means the complexity of the system is a problem. For the average citizen to need a program to attempt to follow the law and still not get all the deductions owed points to a problem. The fact that the programmers at TurboTax have screwed up in recent years and cost people money and made them not comply with the law says the system is too complex.
It's called the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock_paradox — "the low costs of rent-seeking relative to the gains from rent-seeking."
Influencing individuals is relatively cheap. You just have to overwhelm them. Our laws are made by a limited group of individuals. Ergo, influencing laws is relatively cheap once you've got a few million dollars to burn and can gain billions off the results.
I believe that a few million dollars can get you a bunch of state court judges, and even that the state government that can be influenced by lobbying expenditures might be "where all the real governing is happening".
I do not believe the narrative that Intuit's pitiful lobbying expenditure is stunting our tax system.
If the disclosure in ProPublica had been that Intuit was spending 10x, 20x more than that --- and it has the resources to do that --- I'd believe it more. As it stands, the specifics revealed by ProPublica make me less concerned about Intuit's influence.
For what it's worth: I'd like a return-free IRS.
That said, if we went to a flat tax, or a national sales tax, or something else that drastically simplifies the tax code, then the issue would be moot. And most of those simplifications would be supported by Conservatives. (Note, I mean real Conservatives, many of the politicians who say they are conservative really aren't.)
[1]http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/improve/return-...
The complexity exists almost entirely in tax expenditures -- deductions, exclusions, credits, etc., etc., etc.
I don't know what "real Conservatives" think, but in polling many tax expenditures do very well. For example, 68% of Republicans, 63% of Democrats, and 58% of Independents oppose it eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction. (http://www.scribd.com/doc/117298635/CBS-News-Poll-Fiscal-Cli... Q47)
I'm not sure what everyone else thinks, but any flat tax I'd support would have to do away with all of those things. And I'm pretty sure most of my conservative friends would agree.
In that poll you linked to, see the "Which Type of Plan Do You Prefer?" question 42. Republicans favored eliminating more deductions.
Also, that survey is really bad. In q44-51, they didn't mention cutting spending at all.
Change: "q51 (In order to reduce the budget deficit, would you favor or oppose) Reducing some government programs and services that benefit people like you?" to "q51 (In order to reduce the budget deficit, would you favor or oppose) Cutting spending on some government programs and services that benefit people like you?" I expect a lot more Republican responses would favor that idea.
And they should at least have mentioned reforming social security and medicare/aid.
It's really easy to support eliminating generic tax expenditures.
The rubber meets the road when you start listing out the highest cost ones: exclusion of fringe benefits from income; tax advantaged retirement accounts, contributions, and limited social security taxability; mortgage interest deduction and home sale capital gains exclusion, charitable deduction, deduction for state and local taxes, preferential rates for capital gain and dividend income, capital gain basis step up at death, child tax credit and child tax exemption.
>> "Reducing some government programs and services that benefit people like you?" vs "Cutting spending on some government programs and services that benefit people like you?"
What's the difference? Are you really going to tell me that these spending cuts are going to be pain free because it'll just come out of waste, fraud and abuse?
Edit in lieu of further nesting: fair enough.
If people have donated over $65 million to get Star Citizen developed, one would imagine the public could easily finance...broader causes. And considering $2.3 million over 5 years is enough to influence lawmakers to continually reject tax code reform, it seems getting something passed would be less costly and a one-time affair.
I almost like to imagine a political party or super pac with public causes (you name it) itemized its willing to support, with a donation page for each, taking that money and doing the very same thing corporations do, but effectively on behalf of citizens.
This isn't an obscure issue where a small amount of lobbying is going to push legislation in favor of a small interest group. It's literally one of the most scrutinized and contentious issues on the political table.
NB: the conservative opposition to tax free filing exists and isn't illogical. I for one do my own taxes each year, and the rage induced by thinking about the mortgage interest deduction is sufficient to keep me from voting for another cycle.
It's not only that they can use your data to build and sell a profile, there is a realistic chance that the data gets leaked.
I'm with you. Can't figure out how millions of people just give away every piece of information about themselves with hardly a second thought (financial data -> mint; phonebook -> whatsapp=facebook; mail -> gmail=google; etc.)
[0] https://github.com/wesabe
Well for one thing people are lazy and Mint devs actually take care of handling logins for all of those banks, credit cards companies, and credit unions.
I'm not entirely sure if there's any other alternative non web base software that can do this. I would assume those apis are different between all those companies.
Sure I can input my stuff manually but then again I'm lazy.
Fortunately, Intuit's also (currently) takes lots of care to ensure proper data-at-rest and in-flight custodial procedures, but you're still trusting someone to do things right.
At some point, it's better that you have a copy of your data too if all the third-party advertisers already have one.
My personal experience with Quicken and Mint is I never got any actionable measurable results from the effort. Yes I saw all the ads about how I'd get special offers to save $5 on my car insurance or it would make me save for retirement or whatever, but over many years of Quicken and a couple years of Mint it never amounted to anything valuable. Then it becomes an insurance and sunk cost game, well, I've tossed away all this time and effort to organize unnecessary data, I guess I need to keep going to "save" my sunk cost. Eventually I chucked them both. The minimal time to maintain adds up over time and cuts into actual analytical analysis (not to mention recreational time) and in return, as mentioned, I got nothing out of it. Not all aspirational products are worthless to all people, I'm sure there exists someone who got something measurably important out of their mint or quicken experience. Just not me or anyone I know.
It is kind of the diet industry is a good analogy to the personal budgeting industry. The dieting industry makes people feel they're doing something important when they pick up a book or try to live off nothing but grapefruit juice for three days; all that really happens in the end is the provider makes money.
Plus, it's free:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/search/Results.aspx?q=microso...
https://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/479281b2-90f9-42ca...
Note: I don't use Money and I have not done it.
My only complaint is that I'd rather not rely on a third party like dropbox for sync, and I'd like a Linux version.
You would think executives making these decisions will have some consequences :).
MD is written in Java, it's simple, it's supported, they come out with new versions, and you can upgrade if you want.
I am not at all affiliated with the company that makes Moneydance. Just a completely satisfied customer who didn't want to pay Intuit another penny, for the rest of my life.