Headline is a bit misleading: The IRS does not currently offer free online tax filing, and bipartisan Congressional leaders are seeking to codify this status quo.
> Sec. 1102. IRS Free File Program. The IRS currently works with electronic tax preparation services to provide free tax preparation software and electronically fillable forms. This program is known as the IRS Free File program. Generally, there is no fee for taxpayers using the Free File program provided they meet certain income thresholds. This provision codifies the existing Free File program and requires the IRS to continue to work with private stakeholders to maintain, improve, and expand the program. The provision also requires Free File program members to continue to provide basic fillable forms to all taxpayers. This provision is estimated to have no revenue impact over the 10-year budget window.
There's an income requirements and, at least in practice, you cannot be file 1099-MISCs which means you cannot be 'self employed' which is becoming more and more common (insert buzzphrase here) independent of actual income.
Unfortunately, the people most effected by this bill are likely too busy working to afford the time to contact their representatives.
I am very confused - last night I filed my taxes in an hour flat on freefillableforms or whatever that terribly named piece of software is. I thought this was a service provided by the IRS?
I think freefillableforms.com -- maintained by the Free File Alliance -- is an example of what the article complains about:
> The Free File Alliance, a private industry group, says 70% of American taxpayers are eligible to file for free. Those taxpayers, who must make less than $66,000, have access to free tax software provided by the companies. But just 3% of eligible U.S. taxpayers actually use the free program each year. Critics of the program say that companies use it as a cross-marketing tool to upsell paid products, that they have deliberately underpromoted the free option and that it leaves consumer data open to privacy breaches.
I've never used it so I wouldn't know if it's chockful of upsell adverts. It's certainly very hard (I couldn't do it, at least not in the past 5 minutes) to find a reference to the Free File Alliance on freefillableforms.com. But this is what is buried on IRS.gov:
> Free File offers a multi-year agreement between IRS and the Free File Alliance to provide free service(s) to more taxpayers. Previously, free offerings were not consistently available and were subject to modification or discontinuation from year-to-year. With Free File, taxpayers have easy access to IRS.gov, which offers a list of all free offerings on a single web page. Under our agreement, Free File Alliance companies offer both free preparation and free e-filing services. There is no cost to qualifying taxpayers.
> Note: We do not endorse any individual Free File Alliance company. While the IRS manages the content of the Free File pages accessible on IRS.gov, it does not retain any taxpayer information entered on the Free File site.
Free File Fillable Forms are pretty easy to use for anyone, regardless of income. It doesn't hold your hand and walk you through it, but assuming you can read English at a 4th grade level, I feel like you should be able to do it. Not that I think it should be even this complicated to do taxes, but it's not a terrible option.
It's still maintained by the Free File Alliance. So you're giving your data to a third party that's not the government. I use it, but I would rather I didn't have to share my financial information with third parties to do so.
No matter what, you will always be using software and systems controlled by other entities. From you web browser, to the operating system, the data transport links, routers and switches in between, and when the data gets to the destination the software is typically written and maintained by commercial contractors hired by the government.
Right, but I would argue that this is more explicitly "putting my data on someone else's server." If it was a government server, well, it's there already anyway.
I used CreditKarma and it took 10-15 minutes... afaik they didn't charge a fee either. This is the second year I have used them. I would prefer a Government solution if it was good, but there are plenty of very low cost/free alternatives out there already so oh well.
Ideally the government solution doesn't take any time at all. The IRS knows about the w2, 1099, whatever forms you are going to get, you will be audited if you don't file because they see that you didn't do anything about that form, so why do we even have to file? The IRS could do this in the background and either mail you a check or ask for a bill. Done. Filing yourself is completely unnecessary and only serves to prop up a useless parasitic industry.
To be clear the Intuit’s of the world are not acting altruistically, however they’ve created an odd alliance with anti-tax advocates who 1. Think that any government provided system will favor the government over tax-payers and make it easier to sneak in stealth tax changes and 2. The anti-tax lobby cynically (and correctly) understands that in order to keep taxes unpopular, making them painful is useful.
> I don't think we exist in a world where this is possible.
The majority of people are pretty ignorant. Look at all the news articles from early in 2019 talking about the size of tax refunds, and people thinking they didn’t get a tax cut because their refund this year was smaller than the one they got last year. In reality, almost everyone got a tax cut (>90% of taxpayers) but that doesn’t necessarily mean a larger refund.
Theoretically, filling out the tax forms would help people understand their tax liability. In practice I think a lot of people just tune out numbers beyond the size of their refund.
Not everyone got a tax cut and the cuts went primarily to businesses and the ultra wealthy. The President also tried to make the cuts look bigger by changing withholding requirements. It doesn't invalidate that most people are ignorant, most people don't even pay any taxes, but if you're moderately well off, have more than one home, and live in a state that actually has a functional state government that provides services to their people, there's a larger possibility that you saw an increase in taxes. No other first world country does taxes the way we do because the IRS already knows how much most people owe.
> Not everyone got a tax cut and the cuts went primarily to businesses and the ultra wealthy. The President also tried to make the cuts look bigger by changing withholding requirements.
I don't think the first claim is representative, and I don't think the second claim is true? Most people did get tax cuts; even if the bulk of the value went to businesses that's not in dispute. And despite concerns in 2017 that it could happen, there's no evidence that withholdings were artificially over-reduced. People who were already withholding the right amount were basically unaffected, while the people shifted from overpaying to underpaying constitute more symmetrical error. (Which does have some downsides for collection.) Even the Government Accountability Office views this as a purely logistical event.
More cynically, conventional wisdom says that popular perception of tax cuts is based almost entirely on the fact/size of the return received. Increased take home pay was talked up, but reducing the number of people receiving rebates is hardly a productive trick to score votes.
>almost everyone got a tax cut (>90% of taxpayers)
>>Not everyone got a tax cut
>>but if you're moderately well off, have more than one home, and live in a state that actually has a functional state government that provides services to their people
Would you say the percent of the population that fits that criteria is maybe ... 10%? I dont see why you would rebut "90% of people got a tax cut" with "well people who own multiple homes didnt."
Poor phrasing on my part - I’m not implying they would insert new taxes on the sly, but rather that in areas where tax payers have some discretion, the government software would default to the least favorable treatment for the tax payer, the effect being a higher net tax...
What would stop people from consulting to get more favorable taxes? Very few people need tax optimization[1], and government default doesn't preclude it - maybe Intuit could offer this as a service instead. In any case, I don't think the net tax would be higher than the current one that includes paying hundreds for TurboTax or a tax accountant (multiplied by all filers).
1. A guess. The majority think of rebate as "money from the government", which partially explains why tax-preparation costs as much as it does.
Your premise is incorrect. Under 20% of people file a 1040ez, the simplest tax form. (Which doesn’t allow you to claim basic deductions like student loan interest.) That means the vast majority of filers see some benefit from “tax optimization.” If your computerized system did just the 1040ez calculation, for example, that’d be a huge effective increase in taxes.
I can imagine it happening. The US tax code is so complicated that most tax payers don't really understand it. Heck, most tax payers don't understand how marginal tax rates work or why having a large refund isn't actually a good thing. I can absolutely believe that a majority of people would accept a negative change to the tax code due to an inability to understand it, choosing to just accept whatever they're being told to make it all go away until next year.
Most tax payers can't multiply two fractions. It could be as simple as filling in 3 fields on a form, they'll still march down to Jackson Hewitt and pay someone hundreds of dollars to do it for them.
Either make it so stupid easy a nearly illiterate child could do it, make it unnecessary (just have the IRS file for us), or massively improve the terrible state of the education system in the USA.
2. The anti-tax lobby cynically (and correctly) understands that in order to keep taxes unpopular, making them painful is useful.
If that's an example of their swift thinking, I'll be sure to vote against anyone that carries even a whiff of their ilk. Because if such a candidate could not see a distinction between taxes and the process of paying them, we're probably not going to get along intellectually, let alone politically.
A NOAA employee told me about the time their boss caught holy hell from a Senator because the NWS had the gall to update a particular weather product they offered by adding color to the map. Evidently someone had a business essentially downloading the free NOAA data and improving it by coloring the maps and selling that as a product. When NOAA made it free, they called their Senator in anger. And said Senator slapped NOAA's wrist.
Seems like the same school of thought in a much bigger market.
Michael Lewis wrote about the NOAA and this exact type of thing in his last book. In essence the NOAA spends lots of tax payer money to collect weather data but can’t do much with it other than give it away exclusively to a handful of entities that can repackage and sell it.
The eventual dystopian end state could be where the NOAA can’t alert people to tornados and only those subscribing to a weather service would be alerted to get to safety.
You can get an emergency radio capable of receiving VHF NOAA weather alerts. There is typically at least one of the frequencies within range where ever you are. You can subscribe to weather alerts through RSS on their site as well.
> You can get an emergency radio capable of receiving VHF NOAA weather alerts.
Apparently this was grandfathered in a long time ago. NOAA is only allowed to send weather reports by radio and on specific frequencies. Doing the same with the internet, why that would be communism!
Yes! The Michael Lewis book is called _The Fifth Risk_, and it's an amazing read. It's a series of contrasting stories: earnest government workers who have dedicated their careers to protecting all of us from threats like nuclear proliferation, on the one hand, and on the other politicians and narrowly interested lobbyists who view government as either a threat to their self-interest or an opportunity to tilt the economic playing field.
> Take Trump's choice to head National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Commerce Department agency that, among other responsibilities, oversees the National Weather Service. For that critical position, Trump has chosen Barry Myers, who is CEO of the private forecasting service AccuWeather. As Lewis points out, AccuWeather repackages the weather service's own data and sells it to private concerns for a profit. Myers at one time argued that "the government should get out of the forecasting business." In other words, you want to know if it's going to rain tomorrow? Or which way that hurricane is tracking? Well, buy our app, or subscribe to our forecasts. Myers has yet to be confirmed.
Free market dogma is a scam: an intellectual framework invented to rationalize a position.
There's a long history of people doing these things such as with monarchist theory or eugenics for colonialism and slavery. People have theories and frameworks to justify misogyny, child abuse and being harsh to homeless people.
In this case it's an ability to do whatever you want to make money without any oversight, laws, restrictions, or limitations. Being against unethical things such as sweatshops, lying to consumers, or vulture capitalism is itself unethical because it "interferes with the market" oh dear!
It's a symmetrical theoretical framework with beautiful equations to rationalize an otherwise indefensible power structure and insulate reprehensible criminal behavior as essentially the Unquestionable Divine Will.
When anyone justifies things through purity or perfection arguments they're likely pulling a fast one on you. In fact it's this fast one. This exact technique.
I definitely agree that the intentions of the ruling elite will be formalized into nice-sounding theories, irrespective of their faithfulness to reality or their utility outside of supporting the system of rule. Marxism for example
and you can replace ruling elite, with people who want to be that. Then you get notions like identity politics, feminism, cultural Marxism, misandry, racism.
There's an interesting second order effect here as well, that drives the narrative aggression and dissent shaming today. Democracies need to create as many of these competing theories as they can to keep people locked in constant conflict and division.
How can it be that ideologies such as 'racism' and 'identity politics' are only born from people who want to be the elite? (If this is indeed what you are saying) Was not America's founding based on identity politics and racism by white Christian people? How is the genocide of indigenous people and enslavement of black people not racism and identity politics?
Besides that, I don't think racism and feminism stems from 'wanting' to be elite. People who experience racism just don't want to be killed and threatened, women just want the same opportunities and to be able to feel safe and not be harassed randomly.
Racism can also stem from the elite, as a rationalization for why they are in power. Racism can then, in turn, show up in the underpriveleged woeking / subservient class, as another manifestation of their hate for the elite. It's not a one-way street- the pain just keeps on giving.
I'm glad you're curious to know more. The situations you refer to seem very threatening so I'm going to try to cover all bases.
The intentions of the ruling elite are formalized into nice-sounding theories that people get easily addicted to.
Racism is a bit more subtle than feminism, in that, "racism", as in discriminating against people of a different race, is a real thing, and it's wired in all of us. It should probably be better called "groupism" or "majorityism". All of us, in whatever sized group, have some mental concept of group identity, us vs them, insider vs outsider. That's just human nature. It's not evil, it's even adaptive. But it is NOT the driver of things like genocide and slavery.
These things are always driven by resources seeking, powerful players competing for resources. Black people sold black people to white people to be slave labor to farm tobacco and sugar.
America wasn't founded by White Christian supremacists, on a crusade against black people. It was founded by economic subjects of the British empire mad about money, and rebelling the attempts by the Empire elites to manipulate them. The civil war wasn't about our built in racism, or about how whites had gotten used to black slaves, it was about the power of a unified country, and preventing secession. Narratives had to be spun to mobilize people's passions to get them to kill for the elites who wanted to get power.
African genocidal wars are not racial. Hitler was not a racist. All of these mobilizations of injustice need a way to rationalize the economic or political driver. So narratives are promoted that hack our wired-in, benign biases and exploit them. Just like social media giants hack our reward systems to fill their pockets, robber-barons and warlords of previous eras hacked our adaptive, genetic heritage of reward and fear circuitry to mobilize large numbers of us to go kill other large numbers of us, by spinning narratives of bogeymen, evil outsiders, etc.
Then, with the narrative created, "Racism" (capital R), is blamed, rather than the actual elite-driven cause. Thus empowered, "Racism" can become a term of abuse, and people are convinced their inherent nature is at fault, when actually these massive injustices were driven by power seeking elites, and enabled by the clever abuse and exploitation of their human nature by these powerful bad actors.
Identity politics is getting more mileage out of the same outsiders bias, by defining legions of new groups, convincing people that membership of that group is tied to self, splashing in some extra strong circuitry if needed (sexuality), and getting groups to fight each other.
It's the same old trick of codifying intentions into nice-sounding theories to get people to go do stuff. It's propaganda, advertising. It's cattle herding with humans.
Wanting to be elite is just making the point how many of these new narratives are adopted by people as substitute "paths to power". These narratives actively substitute people's intentions to build a better life, and hijack their reward circuitry to get them addicted to fake payoffs such as blaming others, not taking responsibility for creating what they want, fake self-righteousness, and cargo-cult like belief that the "movement" will bring them the results. Obviously, if you want to stop people advancing in your society, you want to them be doing things that will never get them anywhere. It's an ingenious and insidious way to disempower people, by directing their actions toward useless, zero result ends, rather than having them try to actually create change or results themselves.
Elites promote these narratives for two reasons: economics and control. The more afraid, angry and triggered we are, the more we consume, and the more easily manipulated and controlled we are. The flip side is, if people actually got happy, and became aware of their personal power, they would definitely orga...
is there anybody, really anyone, who doesn't want to be the "elite"?
every human wants self-determination, the power shape their own future, to be in control of their fate.
yet not every one of them are or become racist.
furthermore, there are theories (eg feminism) that are built on fairness (as in A Theory of Justice by Rawls), and there are those that are very much not (eg racism).
the others are simply too vague to simply deal with.
I know these notions can be scary, but I don't believe there's any good in pandering to people's weaknesses and wrapping it up in a theory pretending to be good.
Feminism is based on convincing women they are perpetual victims, that everything wrong in a woman's life is men's fault, that their feminine nature and sexual differences are weakness, and the only way to get self determination is to emulate men (who are evil), and play the fake victim by blaming men and demanding they are given benefit's they didn't earn. It's a toxic theory that disempowers females by discouraging them away from the power of choice and personal responsibility and trying to get them hooked on the addictive fake pay-off of blaming others and playing the fake victim. It's also full of contradictions that no doubt drive neurotic and irrational thinking if you try to really "believe" it. It's a variation of the classic "creation of grievances in order to exploit them" trick. It's not about advancing equality, or women's rights. It's a political theory, promoted and propagated by elites, to divide us into groups, weaken us by attacking something very strong (the human relationship bond, the family bond, the polar sexual bond), and make us more easy to control by being locked in a state of constant triggered conflict and division. To turn us into more political animals, less close to and less trusting of each other, and more dependent on and closer to "the state" or "the cause". It's so effectively propagated because the central notion "that you are not responsible for your life, that you can blame someone else, and that's actually a good thing", is so addictively rewarding, it's a very compelling "fake solution" to all sorts of problems, and it's very hard to unhook yourself once you are taking this.
Any theory that actually aimed to advance equality among people, and the rights for one gender, should advance the rights for both, and cherish both, and not be called "fem"- or "masc"- something, but "humanism" (already taken by a philosophy), or "peopleism" or "personism" (my favorite). Personism would promote equality in the ability of people to make choices and take personal responsibility for their situations, would discourage playing the fake victim, would encourage active listening, empathy and communication about emotions, would promote emotional vulnerability as strength, and would valorise gender archetypes from both sexes (the male and female god/goddess energies) as desirable ideals of strength and power. It would empower people, unify them and not divide them or make them useful idiots and pawns more easily controlled by elites.
I think you confuse being "elite" with self-determination, and power. Ordinary people can have that too. We can all grab it for ourselves, we don't need a "movement" to "give" us those things (in fact, having it 'given' would be contradictory).
By elite I mean the people who treat the rest of us like cattle and useful idiots, to control with mass psychology, and who are actively designing and promoting social / cultural divisions to weaken the rest of us.
I expand upon racism in this context in my comment on spinach's.
You can't have a free market competition of government services. It's not free market competition when its companies competing over _providing_ a service mandated by law. That can never happen. Just as private prisons can't be free market (providing a service mandated by government law) you can't provide tax services in a free market environment because it's required by law.
This is deeply frustrating. I can not tell you how many people I see paying $200-300 for some random "tax preparer" set up in a corner mall or the front of a WalMart simply because they do not understand there are a number of free resources that would prepare their 1040EZ for them at their income/complexity level.
These same people get back a $1500 "return" so they think they are getting a good deal. Its pure greed and theft from some of the most needy members of our society. Absolute shame on everyone involved in this process.
In a libertarian society, a government using tax money to provide services counts as nation state sanctioned violence, but a private company doing the same for profit is called entrepreneurship.
EDIT: Keep it coming! Every downvote proves I'm right.
What exactly were you trying to say? I mean, you're not wrong. Taxes are nation-state sanctioned violence, and private companies providing services in exchange for voluntary payments is correctly referred to as entrepreneurship. These are qualitatively different situations; one involves force and the other does not.
The debate is not about the services. They may not be needed by everyone, or in the exact form the government provides, but there would still be at least some demand for them in the market if they weren't provided by the government. The question is whether these services are funded voluntarily or by force, by those who want them or by others who just happen to have the necessary resources.
Where's the teeth in getting companies to offer a decent Free File option if you removed the threat that got them to create said programs in the first place?
> The Free File Alliance, a private industry group, says 70% of American taxpayers are eligible to file for free. Those taxpayers, who must make less than $66,000, have access to free tax software provided by the companies. But just 3% of eligible U.S. taxpayers actually use the free program each year. Critics of the program say that companies use it as a cross-marketing tool to upsell paid products, that they have deliberately underpromoted the free option and that it leaves consumer data open to privacy breaches.
During the years I was eligible for this program, I used TurboTax for free through it and it worked fine. It was a basic version that didn’t support complex transactions such as capital gains but for most people making under 66k it would have worked fine.
Very interesting to see only 3% use it. It would probably work well for a lot more of those 70%.
The paper forms are also easy enough to do manually, but can’t be e-filed and so the refund comes slower.
This statistic is misleading. Throughout the filing process consumers are bombarded with opportunities to upgrade to a paid tier. They make paying more the default option and demote the controls to continue using the free version to have secondary or cancel-like styling. I had to constantly back out and go back to the free version, because I accidentally opted into a paid tier.
Another reason might be that "automatically" filling in your details from uploaded / linked documents is often a paid feature. I uploaded a doc it asked for, it showed me the info, then when I opted for the free tier it cleared the data and made me type it in myself.
Not quite true! I was planning to complain that Free File Fillable Forms, the only way to e-file for free regardless of income, had been taken away a couple years ago.
It's very basic -- it's literally just a way to fill out and submit the paper forms electronically (though it does the "add lines 35 and 36"-type arithmetic for you.) But it's an option for you procrastinators who earned more than $66K last year.
Relatedly, Massachusetts used to run a free online "TurboTax" program for all. To file your taxes you went to a government website and answered the questions. Unfortunately, that program was canceled a year ago when they upgraded systems, and now the only way to e-file is via a paid preparer.
I just filed my taxes in 10 seconds using the tax authority's smartphone app. It had pre-filled all my deductions such as interest using info reported from my employer and banks.
Apart from bribes from those who make tax software (which should be pretty easy to expose) I can't understand why congress wouldn't want to make paying taxes simple and efficient?
Tax prep lobbyist make a lot of campaign contributions and somehow that bribery is 100% legal. Also, there is not a small number of Republicans who think taxes should be hard and confusing to make people hate taxes. They think it would them pass they're super low-tax/no-tax agenda.
There is a podcast episode of "Planet Money" that goes into the history of this [1]. Pretty much it goes: If taxes were easy, people would hate them less, and not fight to abolish them - Grover Norquist.
Oh man, I've had government provided automatic filings for ages now (Finland). US is really odd how it emphasizes the benefit of the middleman over the benefit of the individual citizen (it seems). Or have I completely misunderstood what's going on here?
Corporate pressure is important but the fact that people in the tax preparation industry form a decently sized and committed voting block is even more important.
(in the US) I would trust the government provided tax-return software to provide the smallest refund possible. It will also take $50 billion and 3-4 years to develop, and it will be down from April 1st to May 7th due to overload on the system. Your confirmation emails won't come through, and the database will be hacked and all records leaked within the first 18 months of operation.
Some flash website sites from the government don't do much to address actual concerns.
Weak security: [1]
Cost overrun: [2]
Inability to design a highly available website From [3]:
> The basic architecture of the site, built by federal contractors overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, was flawed in design, poorly tested and ultimately not functional.
Then you can go ahead and use the option to check them for things they forgot. You can also probably use an option to file yourself, which might be the case if you have complicated taxes. The great majority of Americans, however, are pretty poor and qualify for few tax breaks that cannot be done automatically. All they need to do to encourage the automatic filing would be to consistently prove to be accurate.
The database will be hacked and all records leaked within the fist 18 months of operation
You know, the same information they need for most people's taxes is already in the IRS database.
I'd also like to say that I've had automatic filing for my Norwegian taxes since moving here to Norway, and always have to file American taxes manually. The emails get sent to a secure email system which you can check. Letters get lost and stolen as well, by the way. The system doesn't have to go down either - I don't even have to interact. I just get the email telling me I can check taxes, but it is not required that I do. (Safer to do so in case of owing). They tell me I'll get my money in a 3-month timeframe. It goes to the same place paychecks go to, though I imagine if anyone gets checks they take longer, as do the people that manually file.
I'm also pretty sure that the reason it would be expensive is that the government isn't exactly known to keep the IRS fairly current and the government isn't really set up to handle the digital age well. But then again, the records are already there. They already plan on getting refunds. And easier filing means more people do tax returns... and it catches more people that owe. Oh, and you won't need as many people working at the call centers because fewer people will need to actually calculate their taxes. I'm gonna guess it would be a net benefit and profit within a very short amount of time.
The main people that do badly with this sort of system are the tax filing companies along with, I'm guessing, some accountants.
We used to have a telefile option where you spent ten minutes on the phone punching in numbers off your W-2 forms and then you wrote down a confirmation number. It only worked if you had a really simple tax situation, but it was so easy. I assume it was killed by the same lobbyists.
I'll grant that voting works only sometimes. And when it does change things, it's often not everything we want changed, and definitively not fast enough. But it can change things. If it didn't, voter suppression would not exist[1]. (One of the ways of suppressing vote is promoting voter apathy, by the way).
The only sure guarantee is that not voting doesn't work.
> peaceably
Even something as seemingly mundane as voting carries a lot of risk of physical violence in some places. That's how voting was in the US in the 1870s[2], if you were black. It might sound like a far away past for certain US citizen, but I (an European) own a house older than that.
Yes, the US really values the middleman. There is something to be said for it, since middlemen can compete and innovate. In computer science, this is called indirection — it provides more flexibility and without it, you have one-size-fits-all solutions. In the real world, you have for example Uber/Amazon/Apple /Google/Facebook squeezing providers, due to their monopoly powers.
What happens in the real world is that the doctors aggregate (AMA, ADA) and then the patients aggregate (insurance companies) but it never quite gets to a complete single buyer/payer on both sides without government action.
There is also the argument for how many jobs will be lost in X industry if we replace it with a more efficient solution. Here is a recent video of a famous paleoconservative debating it with a famous neoconservative in the US: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YFMcq0Vzsb4
Usually the solution is social democracy - letting the private markets operate but having the government run a single payer system for the basic level of service so sellers compete and buyer’s don’t, and everyone is entitled to the basic level.
Single payer can achieve far lower prices, as can eliminating IP protection. But after a while this may have a deleterious effect on R&D (unless you eliminate the IP protection).
>US is really odd how it emphasizes the benefit of the middleman over the benefit of the individual citizen (it seems).
I wonder what extent this is decided by how we vote. As long as voters pick the politician who prioritizes the middle man and gets their campaign contribution is selected over the politician who prioritizes the public but whose opponent gets the middleman's campaign contribution we will continue to see this behavior. The moral of the story is to look at the voters' actions and not their words. They select candidates based on oftentimes harmful criteria.
Is the public really to blame for this? Is there an actual broad constituency that doesn't want this, or at least who trusts an interest group to represent them and who doesn't want this?
I don’t want this? We are very bad in America about hiding taxes, e.g. through unfunded mandates and mandatory cross subsidies. We don’t need to do anything more for people to have even less insight into what the government actually collects from their paycheck.
That seems more like an argument for a different interface than against the service entirely -- that would justify making it so that you still have to see and sign a form that shows how much you're paying against what earnings.
I think you're falsely equating (as do the Norquist types)
a) "the financial burden of the tax should be explicit" (which is fair) and
b) "the paperwork should be unnecessarily burdensome" (which is sadistic).
Can someone explain how rayiner's argument goes against the idea of IRS-prepared taxes itself rather than the UX of the implementation? It sounds like he’s just trying to be devil’s advocate (to put it nicely).
Why are Norquist types inclined to impose even more burden on what the tax burden actually is? Even if the IRS calculated your taxes, you'd still get the bill to pay it. That's already more than could be said for payroll withholding, which is the primary "unseen" tax.
I don't know! I actually strongly lean toward the Norquist "taxes suck and need to be lower" approach. But for me, that was about making sure people are aware of the rate and amount. Making it painful to file is just sadistic (as I might have suggested before).
Want and behavior aren't always aligned. Does anyone want to be unhealthy? Yet many people act in ways that makes them very unhealthy, some of whom have the ability to change it but choose not to.
How much does someone want something if they aren't willing to change their behavior to increase the chance of getting it?
Well, first of all, lobbying for good laws is a public goods/collective action problem, so it may not be optimal to spend money on pursuing it even if you are the "go getter" type.
Second, I was just addressing the claim that politicians pass these laws in response to broad support, by questioning whether such broad support actually exists, even if it doesn't translate into lobbying (since the implicit model i that politicians will still care about it).
The question I have is whether a government provided automatic filing would actually be cheaper (or more effective) than say, Turbotax.
I see a couple of ways in which it might not be as favorable:
1. It costs more than $100 per tax payer per year to implement (about the cost of Turbotax). However the flat $100 or so that most people pay to Turbotax can be seen as a kind of regressive tax.
2. It is less effective at finding the biggest possible return.
>The question I have is whether a government provided automatic filing would actually be cheaper (or more effective) than say, Turbotax.
The question is valid, but the numbers do not add up. TT asks ~$50 for federal return. If everyone in US used the service, the cost would amount to over 16 billion dollars. That is more than the entire IRS budget[1] right now.
On the other hand, the IRS generally already does many of these calculations, since they receive many forms of income directly (W-2s from your employer, 1099-INT from your bank, etc).
The better question is how much it costs TT to operate returns, and how much of that $50 is profit-taking.
It's an order-of-magnitude estimation. Turbo Tax offers multiple products with different prices. Even if you plug in more exact numbers and use the cheapest product you get a hefty sum of 9 billion (150M individual returns * $60). IRS total budget is 11.5 billion and they do way more than just process returns.
There is no way an e-File system run by IRS would costs additional 9 billion dollars per year. They already do most of the calculation internally.
First, adding a host of third party’s increases the risk of data breaches for minimal benifit.
Anyway, the government needs to collect and verify all information anyway. So, the sum total of TurboTaxes value is creating screens to collect information. If they can do a better job than the government then let them charge for it. But, by banning the free option they are saying they don’t actually create value.
>the government needs to collect and verify all information anyway.
That's a great point. IRS already has most of the information and infrastructure to fill out your taxes. Third-party solutions have to build large chunks of the same thing from scratch.
> Anyway, the government needs to collect and verify all information anyway.
Eventually. Not necessarily by the time you file, and not necessarily on every return. Remember, the IRS only audits a small fraction of returns for accuracy. Auditing every return would be a much bigger job than they currently do.
I'm not saying they shouldn't, but it isn't as trivial as a lot of people here seem to think.
The IRS does basic verification on all returns. An audit is a more extensive check, but when somone makes a math error on a paper return they will end up getting a bill.
But TurboTax has many other incentives besides making tax filings more efficient, including reselling user data, targeted ads for their own products, they might even have reasons to nudge you towards certain options and dark-pattern others.
Doesn't the government already need to calculate what everyone has to pay so it knows when someone hasn't paid enough? The IRS probably already has the same systems being developed and maintained to keep track of everyones taxes, the system would need an user friendly public interface, but it wouldn't have to be developed from scratch.
The idea that some business gets to ban the government from offering a service and some people argue that it's good for eveyone is totally absurd to me.. from a country where I log in to our version of the IRS, where my salary information is pre-filled, I only need to add stuff if I had some other income.. and the system is totally free to use for everyone, and most people just spend about 5 minutes once a year to declare their taxes.
> Doesn't the government already need to calculate what everyone has to pay so it knows when someone hasn't paid enough?
It needs to be able to (eventually), but it doesn't. Setting up a system where this was possible requires some significant changes to the tax code, process, and the IRS itself. Of course, this shouldn't stop us from trying.
For ages, it's for how long exactly? 10-50 years of more or less "success" history is nothing. It doesn't prove it's save and works in a long run.
Also consider scaling. 5.5 mln in Finland, 22 American states have more than that.
Also, AFAIK, most people don't even need to file because HMRC handles the simple situations automatically (I've never had to do a return, for example.)
I live in Germany, which is said to have one of the most complicated tax systems known to man. If I had one (realistic) wish for a German government, it would be to do it like Finland.
Sadly there is a whole branch of people working on this, without any interest to make it easier..
Norway is very simple too. Most people can just do nothing at all. The way it works is that the tax authority creates a proposed tax record and notifies you by SMS or email or both or even by letter if you ask for it. If you agree that it is correct you don't need to do anything at all, otherwise you log in to the web site and adjust whatever needs adjusting in a bunch of simple forms.
The tax authorities also have a duty to calculate the taxes in the way that benefits you most.
In Portugal, of all places, it’s just a web form. This year it took me a grand total of 3 minutes to review all info and less than 10 clicks after logging in.
Just a few weeks ago, I logged into Elster, opened the pre-filled tax return (Belegabruf) and sent it. Instead, I could have filled the short and simple Vereinfachte Steuererklärung by hand which covers all common cases.
Most workers don't need to do anything to get their overpaid tax back thanks to the Lohnsteuerjahresausgleich.
Aldi (or Lidl) every year sell a Tax Prep software for 5 euros. Our in-laws buy a copy, install it, then pass it on to us (same key works on multiple PCs). The software's UI could use some...clarity in certain places but it is incredibly full-featured.
We've been happily using it to file our German taxes for years.
>Is this similar to PAYE or do you actually have to submit a tax return but it's pre-filled for you?
As long as your PAYE is like Ireland's (ROI) PAYE, then the American's system is far-removed from it.
Even though their tax revenue office gets the reports from businesses for how much they were paid and how much taxes they paid, the Americans still need to fill out a tax form - every year - to repeat the same information (it's an added benefit for the prison system, in that mistakes on tax forms can equate to jail time). They get a form from their employer (which their tax office also has), that contains all of this information.
>In the UK, most people don't have to submit a tax return at all. Not sure the actual cost of this, but the convenience is unparalleled.
Aye, it's the same in Ireland (ROI). You can just call-up or email Revenue and they check if you've overpaid, by how much, and they just send you the money. No forms. No bullshit. No threats of jail time. It's pretty deadly[0].
You want nothing to do with the Yanks' tax system, trust me.
> Even though their tax revenue office gets the reports from businesses for how much they were paid and how much taxes they paid, the Americans still need to fill out a tax form - every year - to repeat the same information (it's an added benefit for the prison system, in that mistakes on tax forms can equate to jail time). They get a form from their employer (which their tax office also has), that contains all of this information.
You seem quite ignorant of the U.S. tax system. There are no criminal penalties for mistakes on your tax form. (the IRS doesn't even have prosecution authority--all it can do is collect evidence of a crime, and refer the case to the Department of Justice.)
And your tax return doesn't just "repeat the same information" as your W-2s. For example, the W-2 reports income on an individual basis, while married couples file a return as a single unit. The amount of tax owed will generally be different for married couples versus the amount of tax withheld. (And there is no federal government database of marriages the IRS can use to match up things on the back end.) The IRS also has no idea how many children you have living with you, and can't give you the appropriate credits for that.
Technically, the social security administration gives out social security numbers. But that aside, more than 40% of children don't live with both biological birth parents: https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-than-60-of-u-s-kids-live-wit.... So your automated calculation will get it wrong almost half the time.
> All of those tax credits you mention are given by our respective tax agencies when we become employed and/or we change status with the tax agency and/or we obtain a new job (depending on how you avail of tax credits).
There are many tax credits in the U.S. that aren't tied to changes in job status. Every year, I have to dig up receipts for what we spent on daycare, what we spent out of our HSA accounts, etc. The government doesn't track any of that.
> Odd, I thought you faced the penalty of perjury[0]?
Perjury requires willful (i.e. knowing and purposeful) false statements in your tax return. I guarantee you that if you make false statements using Ireland's online system for claiming tax credits, you're under penalty of perjury as well.
>Every year, I have to dig up receipts for what we spent on daycare, what we spent out of our HSA accounts, etc. The government doesn't track any of that.
Aside from the daycare costs (as an aside, creche in Ireland is quite decent[0]), isn't all of that is still reported to the IRS? Your HSA isn't sitting in some dark corner that the government doesn't know about, ever since the Patriot Act, yeah?
I'm fairly certain it is reported to the IRS because Americans find getting bank accounts overseas quite cumbersome because your government strong-arms agreements that demand that Americans' overseas bank accounts are reported to the IRS. Surely, more domestic reporting shouldn't come as a surprise or shock.
>I guarantee you that if you make false statements using Ireland's online system for claiming tax credits, you're under penalty of perjury as well.
What do I get for a broken guarantee[1]? :)
This batering back and forth really only arrives at the conclusion that I originally posited:
Those of us in the PAYE system[s] would abhor having to do things the American way and this wasn't meant as an affront (and I apologise if anyone may have taken it that way).
Our tax agencies are responsible for keeping track of these things and the only things we're responsible for is reporting status changes and/or providing receipts for other proofs of burden (such as Independent Contractors who file as Directors of Umbrella Corporations and need to write-off business expenses).
The IRS does not in the ordinary course receive informational returns about people's bank accounts. They do receive informational returns about interest generated by bank accounts (and other places), but they don't get e.g. transaction lists by default. Google "1099-INT example" to see one of these informational returns. They're minimalistic and they are minimalistic precisely because a large portion of the US polity hates the notion that the IRS would have arbitrary read access to people's financial lives.
You can reasonably assume that the IRS can use subpoena power to compel a US financial institution or foreign financial institution to surrender records to it. This is an oppositional process and they use it relatively rarely next to the total universe of taxpayers and accounts, generally only after they already have evidence of hinkiness and want to quantify unsurveilled amounts and/or locate assets.
These are not secret facts about the world; the operations of the IRS are exhaustively public (trust me, I have weird hobbies). People on a programmer-dense message board should have more weight for "While I understand that X would be accomplishable via an API if it existed, it is possible that that API does not factually exist" than they often do.
Also, the number of times someone in the financial industry typed in git commit -m "tldr Patriot Act compliance" is orders of magnitude below the number that HN comments routinely predict.
I would love automatic filing in France. The process isn't that complicated, as long as it's just a single income. I dread the day where I'll sell my shares or qualify for a tax-return, because it's not going to be fun.
It's because historically our society has treated businesses, their leaders, and the free market as churches, priests, and God, respectively. They've brought us much wealth and power, but putting restraints on them or getting in their way at all are cardinal sins in American politics. Politicians can take bribes and then package the resulting deregulation with euphemisms like "small government" and "supporting the free market". The most brilliant part is how they serve huge corporations, but then sell their actions as supporting all (read: small, too) businesses, even when they don't.
seems like the antithesis of small government to have it explicitly bar itself from providing free services helping its citizens pay for said government. the latter should be as seamless as possible given that failure to comply results in adverse government intervention.
Out of curiosity, do you have insight on how this evolved? Did the government go from requiring paper to offering an electronic equivalent?
In the US, the IRS supported an e-file system that basically allowed electronic versions of forms to be submitted, but it was arcane enough that a cottage industry developed to assist users in prepping documents for e-file.
How does Finland support tax preparation services; what sort of facilities do they offer for people filing on behalf of others?
Even if the US went to an IRS-pre-filled return, there would still be room for third-party tax software that improved on the user experience, so I think if the IRS supported direct filing of taxes it would also be good to preserve the ability for software or designated parties to submit information on the taxpayer's behalf.
"Out of curiosity, do you have insight on how this evolved? Did the government go from requiring paper to offering an electronic equivalent?"
The taxation has been pretty automated for a long time.
As a regular taxpayer nowadays I just get a paper form that describes the precalculated taxes, and if they are fine, I don't have to return anything. There are some pre-deducted things, and if I have anything add to that,
I'll then just either fill in the paper form or the electronic equivalent.
So yes, there was a basic "semi automated" scheme that has been steadily improving and now the tax authority has just added a web based interface for feeding data into it.
About filling the taxes on behalf of someone else -
There really is no need for tax preparation services unless you are business entity (in which case you likely already have your own accountant doing it) or the wealth is considerable enough to merit actual tax planning. Otherwise the tax code is so straightforward and simple that anyone can do it. If there are some questions, you can always contact the tax services and they will usually offer helpful and professional advice on how to proceed.
So there is no market for that kind of thing in the large. The "defaults" provided by government help in this regard as well.
I kinda understand the adverserial positioning of "people vs. the government" in the US - it just sounds to an outsider the main reason not to make things easier is because that would eradicate business from turbo tax. Kinda like the government mandated you need to own a useless dead parrot, that you can only buy from Parrot Co, that needs to be kept in the refridgerator in an exact position mandated by the law.
> Out of curiosity, do you have insight on how this evolved? Did the government go from requiring paper to offering an electronic equivalent?
The "tax return suggestion" was introduced in 1996. So it predates all electronic filing.
Filling tax returns via a web service became available in 2008.
The first (non-web) electronic tax filings were made in 1997, but those were for corporate returns. Not sure when it became available for income tax returns (that use case is rare here).
On the other hands, Americans are much less likely to commit tax fraud than other countries, so perhaps the netherlands should encourage more people to report their sheltered assets?
Same thing here in Norway.
We get the tax return forms pre-filled and if we want to make changes it can be done on a government web page easily.
Capital gains, most deductions and assets/loans are also registered automatically.
If you have no changes then you don't need to do anything at all.
What's preventing a OSS solution to this? What I can think of off the top of my head:
* Lack of e-file permission
* Lack of any kind of legal recourse or audit protection for the user
* Constantly changing tax system
After a casual search on GitHub I see a few calculator projects but nothing serious.
I'd be down to help make a free competitor to Intuit. I see no reason to use a non-static site unless it's to keep previous years data, but that's iffy and sounds like it requires a whole other legal consideration.
I think the biggest reasons are 1) the vast amount of subject matter expertise required, especially with each state having its own rules, and 2) pretty much any risk at all of having an incorrect return because of buggy prep software is enough to deter most people from using it.
The problem is that the system requires constant maintenance every time some tax law changes in any state, and great maintenance is something that only the most well funded OSS projects get. And you need participation from lawyers and accountants, not just software developers.
As the article notes, there are already free solutions for people with basic income situations (W-2, some bank interest, no stock sales) making under $66k. Personally, I don't mind paying $100 to turbotax for the peace of mind of knowing that at the very least, they have a staff of tax experts looking over the details of their filing process.
Now, if the IRS came along with an official app that showed me what information they already had and I just needed to make some small adjustments from there (assuming my tax situation isn't complicated), then yeah, I'd use that. And it's a bit crazy that we don't have that. But unlike many countries, we are taxed at both the federal and state levels, which makes the process much more complicated. And to complicate things further, the two interact: I can deduct some of my state taxes from my federal taxes (though less than before). And don't even get me started with the complications of a move from state to state.
EDIT: thinking about this a bit more. What really annoys me about the current system isn't necessarily that I pay to file my taxes. It's that it's so easy to miss things. Maybe i have a bank account that earned $12 in interest and I earned $20 from money that I put into lendingclub.com two years ago. It's annoying that the government has this information, but on the other hand, it's very easy for me to not see (or forget about) the email/snail-mail that I got about this income and then forget to declare it on my taxes. Yes, I know that the IRS isn't sending me to jail for forgetting to pay $5 in taxes, but in general, the process would be much less stressful if I had some kind of centralized reminder of all the income I made.
The problem is that these two interact. You get a deduction on your federal return for your state taxes. There are those who want to eliminate this (and the 2018 changes significantly reduced this deduction), but doing so is--IMHO--unfair to those living in high tax states.
Those are the first three. If you want to offer state income taxes, that means you’ll need to also implement those rules. There are also a ton of legal restrictions on handling data, that if done wrong send you to jail.
Even worse -- Since State and Local income taxes are (partially) deductible on your Federal taxes -- you need to implement those rules no matter if you plan on filing State and Local returns.
edit
Actually now that I think about it, since the standard deduction is increased, you could catch the majority of simple returns by just assuming the standard deduction and including a few disclaimers about the option to itemize.
The federal deduction for state and local taxes doesn't require knowledge of local rules, just the amounts paid. If you overpay in tax year X and get a refund in tax year Y when filing your local tax return, that's covered in federal tax year Y.
One of the biggest benefit of government provided returns is they already have a bunch of information on you so it can come pre-filled. And for a lot of people all they need to do is sign and send back.
I think that the work-around for this problem is an online tax filing service like that offered by Credit Karma, which like their credit score reporting service is supported by ad revenue rather than by charging a fee for the service.
This is totally backwards. Here the local gov't is encouraging people to use their electronic services so that they don't have to deal with endless stacks of paper forms.
I could not think that this would be a bipartisan bill. At least Credit Karma is still around, offering free tax filings (no affiliation, just a super-happy user).
We can thank Grover Norquist and many other conservatives who want to make tax filing as unpleasant as possible so the very concept of paying taxes is vilified and the idea of government services are poisoned by association.
This is one of the more explicit examples where complexity is stealth-deliberately is promoted.
Tyler Cowen (and in his own way, david graeber) made a point that really stuck with me. Badly paraphrased:
The introduction of PCs & software to the office, has not increased office worker productivity at all. It's very hard to define or measure white collar productivity, but to the extent that it can be measured... it hasn't improved. From another angle, university administrations, tax collectors, accountants, legal departments, international customs agencies, etc. have as many or more people and don't seem to be producing a whole lot more.
To paraphrase Graeber's more beligerent take on it: Getting more efficient at paperwork just produces more & more complicated paperwork.
NPR's Planet Money just re-ran an episode[1] related to this. In 2005, California ran a pilot program where they sent simple, pre-filled tax forms[2] to a sample of the population. 98% of people liked them and would use them again. In 2006 it would have become standard for California, but failed in the legislature by a single vote. Opposition was from two factions: lobbying by Intuit, and Grover Norquist claiming that it violated a pledge for no new taxes. Fascinating stuff.
Later, California's Franchise Tax Board, went ahead and made it an option anyway, but hardly anyone knew about it. It was since been superseded by California's free online option: CalFile[3]. Of course, it's not that helpful if you have to go through the whole federal process anyway. But it serves as an example that it could work fine here in the states like the rest of the world if Congress would be willing to go for it instead of bowing to Intuit and Grover Norquist.
I have worked with an independent tax preparer for the last few years. In January, I walk over to a nearby restaurant where we meet, I hand over tax documents, she makes sure it's all there and asks some brief questions. A week or two later, she sends the completed state & federal forms along with the appropriate authorizations which will allow her to file on my behalf. I pay $200 for this service and consider it far more pleasant than dealing with TurboTax's incessant questioning.
I also hired an independent tax preparer, to avoid paying Intuit. They did a good job. I was disappointed when I received their payment form and found it was hosted on Intuit. I had paid Intuit by proxy. :(
I used TurboTax this year, and honestly I was underwhelmed, especially when it came to the state forms. It didn’t really seem like it did much, and the California form experience were full of obvious bugs. Questions with no context. (“Enter city 2”) Questions being given out of order. PDFs being viewed through a mail slot. PDF forms where the entry blanks and the entries would scroll at different t rates, so you couldn’t read the form. It was super frustrating. The whole thing felt like a cheap unskilled body shop of a program, and made me want to just use a pen.
I have to file mildly complicated taxes due to getting my income from a partnership, and even that I can do in a couple hours by following the 1040 instructions, and the filling out any ancillary schedules that are required.
If you have straightforward W2 income, taking the standard deduction, and a reasonable number of retirement or investment accounts, it should take you an hour to fill out the form following the instructions. Maybe plan on a couple hours the first year, while you get used to it, but it's no so bad.
I have used Credit Karma Tax since it came out (I think this year was 3 years) and it has been a great product and is free for both federal and state filings. Doesn't support some more complex scenarios, notably partial year and multi-state returns (you can still file your Federal return with it, though).
Edited to add additional details as to what isn't supported.
I have not done taxes on both for the same year and compared the two. I have used TurboTax, as well as a variety of other online tax filing solutions, in the past. TurboTax might be better polished and provides better explanations, Credit Karma tax gets better every year, and I find the downsides to be a good trade off for not supporting Intuit.
I did my taxes in both last year (started in TurboTax and learned about their abuses - a coworker suggested Credit karma) and found the numbers to be identical. My taxes are relatively complex, more than most people. I'm very happy with the service for the second year in a row.
I admit that they don't have quite the community links that TurboTax does, and there are some situations they won't handle (for instance, income from 2+ states)
Right, I plan to move to another state in the next year or three, so I am hoping they add that ability next year- they have added new features every year, and it seems like multi-state filing would be the next biggest need on the list. You can still file your federal taxes with them, but filing state taxes separately is a pain!
Read the 1040 instructions, and follow them. This works if you don't have a complicated situation, such as business income or if you need to calculate penalties for shortfalls on quarterly filings. Have a CPA do your taxes periodically, then use last year's taxes as a guide for the current year.
Typically what I do is write a small program that asks the questions in the 1040 form, then gives me a print out of what goes in each field.
For my case, I have one source of income (employer), a couple times I've sold stock, and I have a mortgage, am single, but support my SO and her 4-year old grandkid. I've done my own taxes for the last 20 years, and only a couple times took it to a professional (once to H&R block when I sold stocks, and last year to a CPA). Both times the tax forms were exactly what I figured out on my own.
I used to have this idea of a AI chat bot that would ask common questions such as name, address, dependencies, etc... and return a filled 1040 PDF. Turned out I spent more time writing codes to handle the PDF than focusing on the chat bot functionality...
I swore off TurboTax after finding out about the tax lobby stuff and filed with TaxAct this year. I can't say for sure that they don't lobby but if they do they don't do so as loudly as Intuit.
Tax Act. And as far as "best in class" goes, I find Tax Act to be far less infuriating that that steaming pile of shite Intuit puts out. I would almost go so far as to say it's decent software.
As for the lobbying, I have some vague memory of jumping to Tax Act because of someone pointing out that they don't lobby. A cursory bit of searching didn't raise any red flags at the time.
The names of these lobbying groups are downright Orwellian. Coalition for Taxpayer Rights. Internet Freedom Coalition. Freedom Online Coalition. All these groups are diametrically opposed to the principles in their own names.
If your taxes aren't complicated (i.e. you use the standard deduction), there's a service called "Free Fillable Forms" through the IRS that allows you to fill out your tax forms online and e-file them for free. Many states have an equivalent system as well.
Last year I went to an independent preparer, which cost me around $160 and took an hour. This year I wanted to save some money so I decided to try filing myself and it was pleasantly straightforward, only taking two hours. The only tedious part was copying over the info from the W2 for both federal and state.
Free fillable forms allows more than just simple cases — it will handle all paperwork regarding your personal income tax. Highly, highly recommend using. It’s more manual (follow the 1040i instructions document), but you’ll learn a lot about how deductions work, what you can claim, and what is best for you in following years.
The only case it doesn’t handle for me is Partnership taxes — just the stuff due April 15.
I was waiting to finish my taxes for state and federal before replying to this.
Turbotax was 100% free for both with automatic imports of my forms. As long as you avoid upgrading to unnecessary services beyond their basic service, you can file for free and save PDFs of both returns when you're finished.
This. I use this every year and it simply is an online interface of fillable forms provided by the IRS with a “Do the Math” button (actual button text). It works as intended, files for you, and is free.
Do your taxes by hand/with free fillable forms (name of the online service), you’ll learn a lot. Just follow the 1040 instructions (it goes line by line through the form) and any related forms it tells you to do.
I use taxhawk.com and would absolutely recommend it, I think the UI is fantastic (and without a fantastic UI, I'd just continue to do taxes with paper and pen). I've been using it since 2011.
I have heard good things about freetaxusa.com as well.
Both are very reasonably priced, only $15 for state - federal is free. Since I have business income TurboTax wants over $100 to do my taxes.
Thank you, you just saved me $164.98 (turbotax self-employed) - $14.99 (taxhawk)! A lot of money given that it's for my kid's $620 income :) And honestly, the taxhawk experience was better, with less cutesy messages and fewer screens. Not to mention the annoying turbotax upsells.
Just one thing to complain - it didn't discover that I over-contributed to Roth and need to return a bit to prevent a penalty.
Yay! Glad I could help! Doing taxes in subsequent years is where it really shines, it remembers your previous year stuff so it goes much faster. It also shows you a side-by-side summary of this year vs last year which I find really helpful.
Perhaps you can let them know about the IRA thing for next year?
I might be getting old, but more and more I see “vote with your XXXXX” to be the litmus test for situations there is no decent solution left anymore.
It’s not even an advice in the end, just a reminder the customer lost the battle, and the only alternative is to leave the field with what’s left on their posession to go roam the desert.
Where government is concerned, you’re completely correct. However, voting with your dollars does work well for markets, e.g. grocery stores and the like.
This is something I hear a lot of (overwhelmingly) American people say, after which I am inevitably reminded of poor healthcare, food deserts and exploitative corporate practices. At this point those are all so entrenched in the "american experience", I don't understand how you can say unironically that "the market" is a fix for anything or does in any situation "work well".
It's a superpower, and it is in it's entirety an example that disproves that this is the case.
Those lobbyists will find ways how to force you into using their services. Not necessarily by eliminating all the different competing companies, but possibly through splitting the rewards through some kind of association, commission, self-regulator etc. If somebody is lobbying against you, fight them, don't just wave your hand, or you might lose your chance to "vote with your dollar" soon
Vote with your votes. And with direct action and protest. Your dollars are small and easily ignored. Political organizing works when it's political, because it forces change rather than pitting the minnows against the shark one on one.
Not sure why this is downvoted, but it's exactly right. When you tell someone in the bottom 50% of income earners to "vote with their dollars" you're telling them to piss into the ocean in the hopes of turning it yellow.
Particularly in the case of taxes, where the benefit one gets from having someone else prepare ones taxes is directly proportional to wealth. The people with the most ability to change this situation are the one's who are have the least skin in the game, because they're probably hiring an accountant anyway.
Umm... where do I start? ALL the tax prep companies lobby against free electronic filing. So if I want to vote with my wallet I have to go back to paper forms. Paper forms may be outlawed at some point in the future. Can you solve that issue?
We either need campaign finance reform or we need to accept our government is bought and paid for by big oil, coal, the NRA, the car manufacturers, etc.
I'm self employed and had to explain to my kids why taxes in the US were so complicated and took hours to do over the weekend.
There must be powerful forces at work because Republicans have touted a flat tax or a return the size of a postcard for decades but when they controlled all three branches of government couldn't get anywhere near enough votes to pass it.
It's truly an abysmal system and I hope my kids don't have to do a giant math problem every year when they're adults.
They did, technically. The Form 1040 this year is only half a page. However, many people need to attach at least one schedule, which is just the rest of the form broken up into multiple pages. It's less of a dramatic change and more of a weird format shuffling.
The republicans haven't bragged about it, but I'm guessing limiting SALT deductions to way below the standard deduction will drastically reduce the number of filers itemizing deductions. That leaves you with form 1040 which is roughly half a page front and back, not much bigger than a postcard. Certainly, if you have capital gains or other things, you'll need extra schedules, and maybe you need to send w-2s, so it's not necessarily their ideal, but it's actually a large change.
Not as of tax year 2018. SALT deduction is capped at $10k, standard deduction for married filing joint is $24k. I don't think you can get $14k worth of deductible mortgage interest, but I guess maybe. If you're filing single with a mortgage, it seems more likely to end up with itemized, still.
Do you think that this change will be a precursor to getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction altogether? By making it so that most people no longer benefit from it, there should be little opposition from throwing it out.
Seems like probably it's on the way out; they reduced the eligible mortgage balance from $1m to $750k too. Limiting it while rates are still lowish also reduces the amount of impact. I expect some of this is feeding back into housing prices by now, though; so maybe expect some push back.
> I don't think you can get $14k worth of deductible mortgage interest
Sure you can. Even with the new $750k cap, and if you assume a (very low; chances are it's higher by a factor of 1.5 or 2) rate of 2%, you can get to $15k.
If you assume a 4% rate, then you get to $14k with a $350k mortgage. In various coastal-metro markets that's basically an entry-level house.
The other common itemized deduction is charitable contributions. Unfortunately, I see lots of "average" data for those, when what would be most useful here is median data: the average is presumably heavily skewed by wealthier or higher-income taxpayers. But as an anecdote, I know multiple people who drop $20 in the collection plate every week when they go to church; that's ~$1k right there.
Thanks -- I hadn't done the math, and was mostly grumpy about my mortgage interest + SALT not being enough. No significant charitable donations this year, I bunched up with a DAF in tax year 2017 for several reasons.
Yeah, i only deducted housing, and state, ended up with around 18k in deductions, and my mortgage is signifacntly less than even ops numbers. Its people with double or triple the average housing prices who are hurting, because hcol areas are let out.
A flat tax will never happen: people want the tax code to have a bunch of deductions and rebates, and codifying those will always result in complexity.
> There must be powerful forces at work because Republicans have touted a flat tax or a return the size of a postcard for decades but when they controlled all three branches of government couldn't get anywhere near enough votes to pass it
They don't actually try to pass a flat tax because it is not feasible to actually do a flat tax in a country like they US with such a wide range of incomes. Even with a low rate, there will be people poor enough that paying the tax is a major hardship. So every even remotely serious "flat" tax proposal has some cutoff and only applies to income above that cutoff.
But then it is not actually a flat tax. It is a progressive tax with two brackets. Once you get there, it is really hard to come up with a convincing argument that two brackets is better than more brackets.
If the calculation wouldn't mystify most taxpayers, what would probably be the most sound theoretically would be a continuous bracket structure.
The other reason they don't do it is that the flatness of the rate structure has pretty much nothing whatsoever to do with the complexity of a tax return. If you changed the rate structure from a progressive rate with several brackets to an actual flat rate, or a more realistic two bracket progressive system, that would shave about 1/4 of a page off the several thousand pages of the tax code and tax regulations.
The complexity of it is all in figuring out which income is taxable. Once you've got all the income classified into the various relevant tax categories, the actual calculations where you use the rate structure is trivial.
Every flat tax proposal comes with a Negative Income Tax portion to counter regressitivity. People misunderstand what flat tax proposals are all about.
With a tiered tax system, individuals need to be the ones who pay taxes because people who combine income from multiple sources need to pay differing amounts of taxes. With a flat tax system, all income is treated exactly the same so governments can switch to collecting income taxes from corporations. Corporations basically report the amount they spend on payroll every year and pay some percentage of that as a tax to the government. Then the government takes some portion of that money and remits it back to individuals as a negative income tax (essentially a UBI).
Flat tax changes the way money flows, instead of company -> individual -> government, it goes company -> government -> individual. It's both easier to tax corporations than individuals and easier to give money to citizens than take money from citizens. These two powerful benefits alone are meant to make up for the severe rigidity and lack of flexibility that flat tax systems intrinsically have. It's an open question whether these two things are enough to make up for all the flat tax flaws but I don't think there's an obvious right or wrong answer that we've discovered yet.
It's an open question whether anything would change between a company giving you $12/hr and a company giving you $8/hr and the government giving you (the equivalent of) $4/hr as a monthly lump sum.
Income from non-salary sources aren't generally covered by flat tax proposals because they're so complex and the existing tax system would still exist to deal with them. However, for the vast majority of citizens, salary is their only source of income and their experience with the government becomes "how much can I convince the government to give to me" rather than "how do I try to avoid the government from taking from me".
Clearly, it can vary a lot what people consider free. And therefore, this statement isn't true in general. The US does indeed have a lot of things I would consider freedoms, yes. But in Germany, for instance, I feel it is a great freedom to not have to worry about most healthcare issues, regardless of their income. A freedom (in my perspective) I wouldn't have in the US. There are other issues that fall into that category as well (free to not really have to worry about school shootings, free to not have to worry about people (including kids) to find a gun in the fields, free to not have to worry about insurance of people when having an accident, etc.).
That's a commonly made point, but to be a little pedantic you are definitely twisting the definition of the word 'freedom'. Those are benefits to be sure, and they may certainly be better than the US's, but not really 'freedoms'.
Why aren’t they “freedoms”? Increased financial security due to eliminating the possibility of medical bankruptcy increases an individuals’ options/choices in life, does it not?
Freedom doesn't mean the same thing as "convenient for me". In fact freedom can often be difficult. Each item listed has an opposition position, most notably freedom to own a gun.
Germany also has some of the most draconian anti-free speech laws of all first world nations, so I really don't think they're a good example to use as a pillar of freedom.
Yes, obviously anytime you get something for free that's a convenience. Someone has to pay for that though and that person is not experiencing freedom.
I don't know much about the German healthcare system but it's quite possible that you also don't have as many choices for healthcare as in the US due to increased governmental regulation.
I'd also add that healthcare is one of the least free aspects of US culture especially post-ACA. We are now mandated to have insurance, even if we don't want it.
> I don't know much about the German healthcare system but it's quite possible that you also don't have as many choices for healthcare as in the US due to increased governmental regulation.
You have strictly more choices. In the USA, chances are you cant afford healthcare and have none.
You can keep moving the goal posts but the fact is there is a lot of choice in the US. Not everyone can afford all choices but that’s an entirely different conversation.
I think no one has a problem with "elimination of medical bankruptcy for them". The problem seems to be that it also eliminates it for others. With "my money", which "the corrupt and inept government is going to misspend anyway".
I know I am exaggerating and misrepresenting a lot of people with this characterization.
To me the solution seems obvious: you don't need private companies to do the job of the government. You need a less corrupt government, capable of doing its job. With the middlemen you just move the corruption around.
Ah the popular "the US is too large and too diverse to function" excuse. Not that long ago the size and diversity was seen as a unique strength of the US. When did "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" become "societies only work when they are homogeneous"?
He didn't say that the US doesn't "work". Note that he put "freedoms" in quotes in reference to the parent comment that twisted the definition of freedom to include socialist programs. It's true those won't work in the US but as the original poster commented:
You are not, you just have constant propaganda to that effect and you believe it because most of you never leave your country. And that is not just me personal opinion. Going over a (incomplete) sample of freedom indices listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices we have:
Not saying “US NUMBAH ONE” but those indexes are just biased to whatever the index creators prefer. I could make one that heavily indexes gun rights, lack of hate speech laws, gross income per capita, or even military strength and suddenly we’re number one if not close to it. It would be just as valid a ranking. In other words those lists are largely rubbish. Never mind they rarely break things down by demographics, preferring to look the other way.
The problem with what you choose and how you weigh it is exactly why I listed more than one index. And btw: I did not skip over any index because it lists the US as number one, I only skipped indices that require registration to get the PDF and such. Literally NONE of the indices I found has the US as number one.
One rather insidious thing about H&R Block's online tax filing website is that, once the hapless user has chosen to have a real human "tax pro" review their tax return (for an additional fee), the user cannot un-choose it! The website does not offer you that choice.
Even worse, when the user calls the H&R Block help number, a computerized voice does offer the user the option to downgrade, but notes that it will have to delete all of the data the user entered!!!
No. It really is sleazy. I'm talking about a situation where the user is paying for the H&R service. This is a paying customer, not a free user.
This user then adds a tax pro review service but decides later that they do not want that add-on service. But now the user cannot remove that added-on service on the H&R website. The user calls in to an automated phone line which tells the user that, in order to downgrade, the system must clear out all of their data.
The number of people propsing a 3rd party take my data and advertise to me for the privlidge of paying money to the state need to rethink their position. No 3rd party sould even be useful, much less needed to satisfy your state and federal debts.
It's a little bizarre to me that the very act of paying an independent CPA to run through my taxes feels like a deliberate anti-regulatory capture decision, but there it is.
The government developing software to better interact directly with its agencies should be a mission of 18F and the individual agencies. Our Congress is thinking of doing the opposite.
Companies have no natural right to continue making money without competition from the government.
EDIT: Where does this ban the IRS from creating their own portal? It requires the IRS to continue the Free File Program, but does that explicitly bar the IRS from its own system?
As the article makes clear, this is not a unilateral ban on competing with tax prep software companies, but rather a deal (pre-existing but now codified into law) in which the companies agree to provide free tax prep software to low-income taxpayers and in exchange the federal government agrees not to create a competing product.
To me this sounds like a great deal for taxpayers. In exchange for not spending tons of taxpayer money on a project which may or may not turn out well, makers of existing high-quality products agree to voluntarily give free access to it to the majority of taxpayers.
The bill additionally codifies funding for the VITA program which provides free in-person preparation services for low-income taxpayers.
I think this is about as good as the situation can get without actually simplifying our tax code.
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[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 752 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392673
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13853150
https://waysandmeans.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/w...
> Sec. 1102. IRS Free File Program. The IRS currently works with electronic tax preparation services to provide free tax preparation software and electronically fillable forms. This program is known as the IRS Free File program. Generally, there is no fee for taxpayers using the Free File program provided they meet certain income thresholds. This provision codifies the existing Free File program and requires the IRS to continue to work with private stakeholders to maintain, improve, and expand the program. The provision also requires Free File program members to continue to provide basic fillable forms to all taxpayers. This provision is estimated to have no revenue impact over the 10-year budget window.
Unfortunately, the people most effected by this bill are likely too busy working to afford the time to contact their representatives.
> The Free File Alliance, a private industry group, says 70% of American taxpayers are eligible to file for free. Those taxpayers, who must make less than $66,000, have access to free tax software provided by the companies. But just 3% of eligible U.S. taxpayers actually use the free program each year. Critics of the program say that companies use it as a cross-marketing tool to upsell paid products, that they have deliberately underpromoted the free option and that it leaves consumer data open to privacy breaches.
I've never used it so I wouldn't know if it's chockful of upsell adverts. It's certainly very hard (I couldn't do it, at least not in the past 5 minutes) to find a reference to the Free File Alliance on freefillableforms.com. But this is what is buried on IRS.gov:
https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/about-the-free-file-all...
> Free File offers a multi-year agreement between IRS and the Free File Alliance to provide free service(s) to more taxpayers. Previously, free offerings were not consistently available and were subject to modification or discontinuation from year-to-year. With Free File, taxpayers have easy access to IRS.gov, which offers a list of all free offerings on a single web page. Under our agreement, Free File Alliance companies offer both free preparation and free e-filing services. There is no cost to qualifying taxpayers.
> Note: We do not endorse any individual Free File Alliance company. While the IRS manages the content of the Free File pages accessible on IRS.gov, it does not retain any taxpayer information entered on the Free File site.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
I've been happy, but this year I couldn't e-file my state return and Indiana claims my daughter's was figured wrong.
To be clear the Intuit’s of the world are not acting altruistically, however they’ve created an odd alliance with anti-tax advocates who 1. Think that any government provided system will favor the government over tax-payers and make it easier to sneak in stealth tax changes and 2. The anti-tax lobby cynically (and correctly) understands that in order to keep taxes unpopular, making them painful is useful.
I don't think we exist in a world where this is possible.
The majority of people are pretty ignorant. Look at all the news articles from early in 2019 talking about the size of tax refunds, and people thinking they didn’t get a tax cut because their refund this year was smaller than the one they got last year. In reality, almost everyone got a tax cut (>90% of taxpayers) but that doesn’t necessarily mean a larger refund.
Theoretically, filling out the tax forms would help people understand their tax liability. In practice I think a lot of people just tune out numbers beyond the size of their refund.
I don't think the first claim is representative, and I don't think the second claim is true? Most people did get tax cuts; even if the bulk of the value went to businesses that's not in dispute. And despite concerns in 2017 that it could happen, there's no evidence that withholdings were artificially over-reduced. People who were already withholding the right amount were basically unaffected, while the people shifted from overpaying to underpaying constitute more symmetrical error. (Which does have some downsides for collection.) Even the Government Accountability Office views this as a purely logistical event.
More cynically, conventional wisdom says that popular perception of tax cuts is based almost entirely on the fact/size of the return received. Increased take home pay was talked up, but reducing the number of people receiving rebates is hardly a productive trick to score votes.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/6/18214039/ir...
>>Not everyone got a tax cut
>>but if you're moderately well off, have more than one home, and live in a state that actually has a functional state government that provides services to their people
Would you say the percent of the population that fits that criteria is maybe ... 10%? I dont see why you would rebut "90% of people got a tax cut" with "well people who own multiple homes didnt."
1. A guess. The majority think of rebate as "money from the government", which partially explains why tax-preparation costs as much as it does.
1040ez is out, so that stat is gone unfortunately.
Either make it so stupid easy a nearly illiterate child could do it, make it unnecessary (just have the IRS file for us), or massively improve the terrible state of the education system in the USA.
The number is even higher if you count those who are unemployed or not working.
"Use us and we will help you avoid the government's stealth tax" would be a marketing field day for intuit and h&r block PR.
If that's an example of their swift thinking, I'll be sure to vote against anyone that carries even a whiff of their ilk. Because if such a candidate could not see a distinction between taxes and the process of paying them, we're probably not going to get along intellectually, let alone politically.
A NOAA employee told me about the time their boss caught holy hell from a Senator because the NWS had the gall to update a particular weather product they offered by adding color to the map. Evidently someone had a business essentially downloading the free NOAA data and improving it by coloring the maps and selling that as a product. When NOAA made it free, they called their Senator in anger. And said Senator slapped NOAA's wrist.
Seems like the same school of thought in a much bigger market.
The eventual dystopian end state could be where the NOAA can’t alert people to tornados and only those subscribing to a weather service would be alerted to get to safety.
https://alerts.weather.gov/
You can even pass lat/long points to the forecast page and it will pull up the closest weather station, even points in the ocean work.
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=43.4802&lon=-1...
Apparently this was grandfathered in a long time ago. NOAA is only allowed to send weather reports by radio and on specific frequencies. Doing the same with the internet, why that would be communism!
I'm right in Boston, and I can pickup transmissions from the Blue Hill Observatory with my cheap Baofeng.
https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/132400264...
From the NPR review of the book:
> Take Trump's choice to head National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Commerce Department agency that, among other responsibilities, oversees the National Weather Service. For that critical position, Trump has chosen Barry Myers, who is CEO of the private forecasting service AccuWeather. As Lewis points out, AccuWeather repackages the weather service's own data and sells it to private concerns for a profit. Myers at one time argued that "the government should get out of the forecasting business." In other words, you want to know if it's going to rain tomorrow? Or which way that hurricane is tracking? Well, buy our app, or subscribe to our forecasts. Myers has yet to be confirmed.
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/652563904/the-fifth-risk-pain...
In 2017, the current administration named the lobbyist and co-owner of Accuweather, who's fought the NWS as the head of the NOAA, the parent organization of the NWS: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...
The fox watches the henhouse when it comes to your weather. Your taxes will pay for Accuweather's profit at your expense.
There's a long history of people doing these things such as with monarchist theory or eugenics for colonialism and slavery. People have theories and frameworks to justify misogyny, child abuse and being harsh to homeless people.
In this case it's an ability to do whatever you want to make money without any oversight, laws, restrictions, or limitations. Being against unethical things such as sweatshops, lying to consumers, or vulture capitalism is itself unethical because it "interferes with the market" oh dear!
It's a symmetrical theoretical framework with beautiful equations to rationalize an otherwise indefensible power structure and insulate reprehensible criminal behavior as essentially the Unquestionable Divine Will.
When anyone justifies things through purity or perfection arguments they're likely pulling a fast one on you. In fact it's this fast one. This exact technique.
and you can replace ruling elite, with people who want to be that. Then you get notions like identity politics, feminism, cultural Marxism, misandry, racism.
There's an interesting second order effect here as well, that drives the narrative aggression and dissent shaming today. Democracies need to create as many of these competing theories as they can to keep people locked in constant conflict and division.
Besides that, I don't think racism and feminism stems from 'wanting' to be elite. People who experience racism just don't want to be killed and threatened, women just want the same opportunities and to be able to feel safe and not be harassed randomly.
The intentions of the ruling elite are formalized into nice-sounding theories that people get easily addicted to.
Racism is a bit more subtle than feminism, in that, "racism", as in discriminating against people of a different race, is a real thing, and it's wired in all of us. It should probably be better called "groupism" or "majorityism". All of us, in whatever sized group, have some mental concept of group identity, us vs them, insider vs outsider. That's just human nature. It's not evil, it's even adaptive. But it is NOT the driver of things like genocide and slavery.
These things are always driven by resources seeking, powerful players competing for resources. Black people sold black people to white people to be slave labor to farm tobacco and sugar.
America wasn't founded by White Christian supremacists, on a crusade against black people. It was founded by economic subjects of the British empire mad about money, and rebelling the attempts by the Empire elites to manipulate them. The civil war wasn't about our built in racism, or about how whites had gotten used to black slaves, it was about the power of a unified country, and preventing secession. Narratives had to be spun to mobilize people's passions to get them to kill for the elites who wanted to get power.
African genocidal wars are not racial. Hitler was not a racist. All of these mobilizations of injustice need a way to rationalize the economic or political driver. So narratives are promoted that hack our wired-in, benign biases and exploit them. Just like social media giants hack our reward systems to fill their pockets, robber-barons and warlords of previous eras hacked our adaptive, genetic heritage of reward and fear circuitry to mobilize large numbers of us to go kill other large numbers of us, by spinning narratives of bogeymen, evil outsiders, etc.
Then, with the narrative created, "Racism" (capital R), is blamed, rather than the actual elite-driven cause. Thus empowered, "Racism" can become a term of abuse, and people are convinced their inherent nature is at fault, when actually these massive injustices were driven by power seeking elites, and enabled by the clever abuse and exploitation of their human nature by these powerful bad actors.
Identity politics is getting more mileage out of the same outsiders bias, by defining legions of new groups, convincing people that membership of that group is tied to self, splashing in some extra strong circuitry if needed (sexuality), and getting groups to fight each other.
It's the same old trick of codifying intentions into nice-sounding theories to get people to go do stuff. It's propaganda, advertising. It's cattle herding with humans.
Wanting to be elite is just making the point how many of these new narratives are adopted by people as substitute "paths to power". These narratives actively substitute people's intentions to build a better life, and hijack their reward circuitry to get them addicted to fake payoffs such as blaming others, not taking responsibility for creating what they want, fake self-righteousness, and cargo-cult like belief that the "movement" will bring them the results. Obviously, if you want to stop people advancing in your society, you want to them be doing things that will never get them anywhere. It's an ingenious and insidious way to disempower people, by directing their actions toward useless, zero result ends, rather than having them try to actually create change or results themselves.
Elites promote these narratives for two reasons: economics and control. The more afraid, angry and triggered we are, the more we consume, and the more easily manipulated and controlled we are. The flip side is, if people actually got happy, and became aware of their personal power, they would definitely orga...
every human wants self-determination, the power shape their own future, to be in control of their fate.
yet not every one of them are or become racist.
furthermore, there are theories (eg feminism) that are built on fairness (as in A Theory of Justice by Rawls), and there are those that are very much not (eg racism).
the others are simply too vague to simply deal with.
Feminism is based on convincing women they are perpetual victims, that everything wrong in a woman's life is men's fault, that their feminine nature and sexual differences are weakness, and the only way to get self determination is to emulate men (who are evil), and play the fake victim by blaming men and demanding they are given benefit's they didn't earn. It's a toxic theory that disempowers females by discouraging them away from the power of choice and personal responsibility and trying to get them hooked on the addictive fake pay-off of blaming others and playing the fake victim. It's also full of contradictions that no doubt drive neurotic and irrational thinking if you try to really "believe" it. It's a variation of the classic "creation of grievances in order to exploit them" trick. It's not about advancing equality, or women's rights. It's a political theory, promoted and propagated by elites, to divide us into groups, weaken us by attacking something very strong (the human relationship bond, the family bond, the polar sexual bond), and make us more easy to control by being locked in a state of constant triggered conflict and division. To turn us into more political animals, less close to and less trusting of each other, and more dependent on and closer to "the state" or "the cause". It's so effectively propagated because the central notion "that you are not responsible for your life, that you can blame someone else, and that's actually a good thing", is so addictively rewarding, it's a very compelling "fake solution" to all sorts of problems, and it's very hard to unhook yourself once you are taking this.
Any theory that actually aimed to advance equality among people, and the rights for one gender, should advance the rights for both, and cherish both, and not be called "fem"- or "masc"- something, but "humanism" (already taken by a philosophy), or "peopleism" or "personism" (my favorite). Personism would promote equality in the ability of people to make choices and take personal responsibility for their situations, would discourage playing the fake victim, would encourage active listening, empathy and communication about emotions, would promote emotional vulnerability as strength, and would valorise gender archetypes from both sexes (the male and female god/goddess energies) as desirable ideals of strength and power. It would empower people, unify them and not divide them or make them useful idiots and pawns more easily controlled by elites.
I think you confuse being "elite" with self-determination, and power. Ordinary people can have that too. We can all grab it for ourselves, we don't need a "movement" to "give" us those things (in fact, having it 'given' would be contradictory).
By elite I mean the people who treat the rest of us like cattle and useful idiots, to control with mass psychology, and who are actively designing and promoting social / cultural divisions to weaken the rest of us.
I expand upon racism in this context in my comment on spinach's.
Is it just the importance and influence by being a senator? Or is there some direct control? Or via a threat to cut funding?
These same people get back a $1500 "return" so they think they are getting a good deal. Its pure greed and theft from some of the most needy members of our society. Absolute shame on everyone involved in this process.
EDIT: Keep it coming! Every downvote proves I'm right.
The debate is not about the services. They may not be needed by everyone, or in the exact form the government provides, but there would still be at least some demand for them in the market if they weren't provided by the government. The question is whether these services are funded voluntarily or by force, by those who want them or by others who just happen to have the necessary resources.
During the years I was eligible for this program, I used TurboTax for free through it and it worked fine. It was a basic version that didn’t support complex transactions such as capital gains but for most people making under 66k it would have worked fine.
Very interesting to see only 3% use it. It would probably work well for a lot more of those 70%.
The paper forms are also easy enough to do manually, but can’t be e-filed and so the refund comes slower.
Another reason might be that "automatically" filling in your details from uploaded / linked documents is often a paid feature. I uploaded a doc it asked for, it showed me the info, then when I opted for the free tier it cleared the data and made me type it in myself.
However, I noticed that it's back for the 2018 tax year. https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
It's very basic -- it's literally just a way to fill out and submit the paper forms electronically (though it does the "add lines 35 and 36"-type arithmetic for you.) But it's an option for you procrastinators who earned more than $66K last year.
Relatedly, Massachusetts used to run a free online "TurboTax" program for all. To file your taxes you went to a government website and answered the questions. Unfortunately, that program was canceled a year ago when they upgraded systems, and now the only way to e-file is via a paid preparer.
Apart from bribes from those who make tax software (which should be pretty easy to expose) I can't understand why congress wouldn't want to make paying taxes simple and efficient?
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...
https://federalist.18f.gov/
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/lobby.php?id=D000026667
Weak security: [1]
Cost overrun: [2]
Inability to design a highly available website From [3]: > The basic architecture of the site, built by federal contractors overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, was flawed in design, poorly tested and ultimately not functional.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/epic-... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/obamaca... [3] http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/24/traffic-didnt-crash-the...
The database will be hacked and all records leaked within the fist 18 months of operation
You know, the same information they need for most people's taxes is already in the IRS database.
I'd also like to say that I've had automatic filing for my Norwegian taxes since moving here to Norway, and always have to file American taxes manually. The emails get sent to a secure email system which you can check. Letters get lost and stolen as well, by the way. The system doesn't have to go down either - I don't even have to interact. I just get the email telling me I can check taxes, but it is not required that I do. (Safer to do so in case of owing). They tell me I'll get my money in a 3-month timeframe. It goes to the same place paychecks go to, though I imagine if anyone gets checks they take longer, as do the people that manually file.
I'm also pretty sure that the reason it would be expensive is that the government isn't exactly known to keep the IRS fairly current and the government isn't really set up to handle the digital age well. But then again, the records are already there. They already plan on getting refunds. And easier filing means more people do tax returns... and it catches more people that owe. Oh, and you won't need as many people working at the call centers because fewer people will need to actually calculate their taxes. I'm gonna guess it would be a net benefit and profit within a very short amount of time.
The main people that do badly with this sort of system are the tax filing companies along with, I'm guessing, some accountants.
I'll grant that voting works only sometimes. And when it does change things, it's often not everything we want changed, and definitively not fast enough. But it can change things. If it didn't, voter suppression would not exist[1]. (One of the ways of suppressing vote is promoting voter apathy, by the way).
The only sure guarantee is that not voting doesn't work.
> peaceably
Even something as seemingly mundane as voting carries a lot of risk of physical violence in some places. That's how voting was in the US in the 1870s[2], if you were black. It might sound like a far away past for certain US citizen, but I (an European) own a house older than that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disenfranchisement_after_the_R...
What happens in the real world is that the doctors aggregate (AMA, ADA) and then the patients aggregate (insurance companies) but it never quite gets to a complete single buyer/payer on both sides without government action.
There is also the argument for how many jobs will be lost in X industry if we replace it with a more efficient solution. Here is a recent video of a famous paleoconservative debating it with a famous neoconservative in the US: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YFMcq0Vzsb4
Usually the solution is social democracy - letting the private markets operate but having the government run a single payer system for the basic level of service so sellers compete and buyer’s don’t, and everyone is entitled to the basic level.
Single payer can achieve far lower prices, as can eliminating IP protection. But after a while this may have a deleterious effect on R&D (unless you eliminate the IP protection).
I wonder what extent this is decided by how we vote. As long as voters pick the politician who prioritizes the middle man and gets their campaign contribution is selected over the politician who prioritizes the public but whose opponent gets the middleman's campaign contribution we will continue to see this behavior. The moral of the story is to look at the voters' actions and not their words. They select candidates based on oftentimes harmful criteria.
I think you're falsely equating (as do the Norquist types)
a) "the financial burden of the tax should be explicit" (which is fair) and
b) "the paperwork should be unnecessarily burdensome" (which is sadistic).
How much does someone want something if they aren't willing to change their behavior to increase the chance of getting it?
Second, I was just addressing the claim that politicians pass these laws in response to broad support, by questioning whether such broad support actually exists, even if it doesn't translate into lobbying (since the implicit model i that politicians will still care about it).
I see a couple of ways in which it might not be as favorable:
1. It costs more than $100 per tax payer per year to implement (about the cost of Turbotax). However the flat $100 or so that most people pay to Turbotax can be seen as a kind of regressive tax.
2. It is less effective at finding the biggest possible return.
The question is valid, but the numbers do not add up. TT asks ~$50 for federal return. If everyone in US used the service, the cost would amount to over 16 billion dollars. That is more than the entire IRS budget[1] right now.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/statistics/irs-budget-and-workforce
The better question is how much it costs TT to operate returns, and how much of that $50 is profit-taking.
There is no way an e-File system run by IRS would costs additional 9 billion dollars per year. They already do most of the calculation internally.
Anyway, the government needs to collect and verify all information anyway. So, the sum total of TurboTaxes value is creating screens to collect information. If they can do a better job than the government then let them charge for it. But, by banning the free option they are saying they don’t actually create value.
That's a great point. IRS already has most of the information and infrastructure to fill out your taxes. Third-party solutions have to build large chunks of the same thing from scratch.
Eventually. Not necessarily by the time you file, and not necessarily on every return. Remember, the IRS only audits a small fraction of returns for accuracy. Auditing every return would be a much bigger job than they currently do.
I'm not saying they shouldn't, but it isn't as trivial as a lot of people here seem to think.
The idea that some business gets to ban the government from offering a service and some people argue that it's good for eveyone is totally absurd to me.. from a country where I log in to our version of the IRS, where my salary information is pre-filled, I only need to add stuff if I had some other income.. and the system is totally free to use for everyone, and most people just spend about 5 minutes once a year to declare their taxes.
It needs to be able to (eventually), but it doesn't. Setting up a system where this was possible requires some significant changes to the tax code, process, and the IRS itself. Of course, this shouldn't stop us from trying.
Sadly there is a whole branch of people working on this, without any interest to make it easier..
The tax authorities also have a duty to calculate the taxes in the way that benefits you most.
Most workers don't need to do anything to get their overpaid tax back thanks to the Lohnsteuerjahresausgleich.
They need to work on their marketing though.
We've been happily using it to file our German taxes for years.
In the UK, most people don't have to submit a tax return at all. Not sure the actual cost of this, but the convenience is unparalleled.
As long as your PAYE is like Ireland's (ROI) PAYE, then the American's system is far-removed from it.
Even though their tax revenue office gets the reports from businesses for how much they were paid and how much taxes they paid, the Americans still need to fill out a tax form - every year - to repeat the same information (it's an added benefit for the prison system, in that mistakes on tax forms can equate to jail time). They get a form from their employer (which their tax office also has), that contains all of this information.
>In the UK, most people don't have to submit a tax return at all. Not sure the actual cost of this, but the convenience is unparalleled.
Aye, it's the same in Ireland (ROI). You can just call-up or email Revenue and they check if you've overpaid, by how much, and they just send you the money. No forms. No bullshit. No threats of jail time. It's pretty deadly[0].
You want nothing to do with the Yanks' tax system, trust me.
[0] - https://www.whygo.com/ireland/irish-slang-deadly.html
You seem quite ignorant of the U.S. tax system. There are no criminal penalties for mistakes on your tax form. (the IRS doesn't even have prosecution authority--all it can do is collect evidence of a crime, and refer the case to the Department of Justice.)
And your tax return doesn't just "repeat the same information" as your W-2s. For example, the W-2 reports income on an individual basis, while married couples file a return as a single unit. The amount of tax owed will generally be different for married couples versus the amount of tax withheld. (And there is no federal government database of marriages the IRS can use to match up things on the back end.) The IRS also has no idea how many children you have living with you, and can't give you the appropriate credits for that.
Odd, I thought you faced the penalty of perjury[0]?
[0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2017/02/15/fudging-y...
> All of those tax credits you mention are given by our respective tax agencies when we become employed and/or we change status with the tax agency and/or we obtain a new job (depending on how you avail of tax credits).
There are many tax credits in the U.S. that aren't tied to changes in job status. Every year, I have to dig up receipts for what we spent on daycare, what we spent out of our HSA accounts, etc. The government doesn't track any of that.
> Odd, I thought you faced the penalty of perjury[0]?
Perjury requires willful (i.e. knowing and purposeful) false statements in your tax return. I guarantee you that if you make false statements using Ireland's online system for claiming tax credits, you're under penalty of perjury as well.
Aside from the daycare costs (as an aside, creche in Ireland is quite decent[0]), isn't all of that is still reported to the IRS? Your HSA isn't sitting in some dark corner that the government doesn't know about, ever since the Patriot Act, yeah?
I'm fairly certain it is reported to the IRS because Americans find getting bank accounts overseas quite cumbersome because your government strong-arms agreements that demand that Americans' overseas bank accounts are reported to the IRS. Surely, more domestic reporting shouldn't come as a surprise or shock.
>I guarantee you that if you make false statements using Ireland's online system for claiming tax credits, you're under penalty of perjury as well.
What do I get for a broken guarantee[1]? :)
This batering back and forth really only arrives at the conclusion that I originally posited:
Those of us in the PAYE system[s] would abhor having to do things the American way and this wasn't meant as an affront (and I apologise if anyone may have taken it that way).
Our tax agencies are responsible for keeping track of these things and the only things we're responsible for is reporting status changes and/or providing receipts for other proofs of burden (such as Independent Contractors who file as Directors of Umbrella Corporations and need to write-off business expenses).
[0] - https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/education/pre_school_e...
[1] - https://www.revenue.ie/en/personal-tax-credits-reliefs-and-e...
You can reasonably assume that the IRS can use subpoena power to compel a US financial institution or foreign financial institution to surrender records to it. This is an oppositional process and they use it relatively rarely next to the total universe of taxpayers and accounts, generally only after they already have evidence of hinkiness and want to quantify unsurveilled amounts and/or locate assets.
These are not secret facts about the world; the operations of the IRS are exhaustively public (trust me, I have weird hobbies). People on a programmer-dense message board should have more weight for "While I understand that X would be accomplishable via an API if it existed, it is possible that that API does not factually exist" than they often do.
Also, the number of times someone in the financial industry typed in git commit -m "tldr Patriot Act compliance" is orders of magnitude below the number that HN comments routinely predict.
Tax returns really do take a huge majority of repeat information and a tiny amount of additional metadata.
There's no reason for the vast majority of Americans this couldn't be automated.
Alphabet Taxes doesn’t sound too bad.
Keep that in mind when reading stories about the US government, and it all makes a lot more sense.
In the US, the IRS supported an e-file system that basically allowed electronic versions of forms to be submitted, but it was arcane enough that a cottage industry developed to assist users in prepping documents for e-file.
How does Finland support tax preparation services; what sort of facilities do they offer for people filing on behalf of others?
Even if the US went to an IRS-pre-filled return, there would still be room for third-party tax software that improved on the user experience, so I think if the IRS supported direct filing of taxes it would also be good to preserve the ability for software or designated parties to submit information on the taxpayer's behalf.
The taxation has been pretty automated for a long time.
As a regular taxpayer nowadays I just get a paper form that describes the precalculated taxes, and if they are fine, I don't have to return anything. There are some pre-deducted things, and if I have anything add to that, I'll then just either fill in the paper form or the electronic equivalent.
So yes, there was a basic "semi automated" scheme that has been steadily improving and now the tax authority has just added a web based interface for feeding data into it.
About filling the taxes on behalf of someone else -
There really is no need for tax preparation services unless you are business entity (in which case you likely already have your own accountant doing it) or the wealth is considerable enough to merit actual tax planning. Otherwise the tax code is so straightforward and simple that anyone can do it. If there are some questions, you can always contact the tax services and they will usually offer helpful and professional advice on how to proceed.
So there is no market for that kind of thing in the large. The "defaults" provided by government help in this regard as well.
I kinda understand the adverserial positioning of "people vs. the government" in the US - it just sounds to an outsider the main reason not to make things easier is because that would eradicate business from turbo tax. Kinda like the government mandated you need to own a useless dead parrot, that you can only buy from Parrot Co, that needs to be kept in the refridgerator in an exact position mandated by the law.
The "tax return suggestion" was introduced in 1996. So it predates all electronic filing.
Filling tax returns via a web service became available in 2008.
The first (non-web) electronic tax filings were made in 1997, but those were for corporate returns. Not sure when it became available for income tax returns (that use case is rare here).
Source: Finnish Tax Administration https://www.vero.fi/contentassets/09b6f07e61dd490ab0caabba8e... (Finnish PDF)
> How does Finland support tax preparation services; what sort of facilities do they offer for people filing on behalf of others?
Electronic tax filing using files is available: https://www.ilmoitin.fi/webtamo/sivut/Esittelysivu?kieli=en
You can use an online service to authorize another person to file your taxes: https://www.vero.fi/en/About-us/contact-us/efil/authorisatio...
The other person can then file using paper, file, or web.
I think you put it just right. Health and Education are the two areas this is bought up, but the taxes are a good example.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/why-ame...
If you have no changes then you don't need to do anything at all.
My tax filing is as easy as: Login, verify, click a button.
* Lack of e-file permission
* Lack of any kind of legal recourse or audit protection for the user
* Constantly changing tax system
After a casual search on GitHub I see a few calculator projects but nothing serious.
I'd be down to help make a free competitor to Intuit. I see no reason to use a non-static site unless it's to keep previous years data, but that's iffy and sounds like it requires a whole other legal consideration.
As the article notes, there are already free solutions for people with basic income situations (W-2, some bank interest, no stock sales) making under $66k. Personally, I don't mind paying $100 to turbotax for the peace of mind of knowing that at the very least, they have a staff of tax experts looking over the details of their filing process.
Now, if the IRS came along with an official app that showed me what information they already had and I just needed to make some small adjustments from there (assuming my tax situation isn't complicated), then yeah, I'd use that. And it's a bit crazy that we don't have that. But unlike many countries, we are taxed at both the federal and state levels, which makes the process much more complicated. And to complicate things further, the two interact: I can deduct some of my state taxes from my federal taxes (though less than before). And don't even get me started with the complications of a move from state to state.
EDIT: thinking about this a bit more. What really annoys me about the current system isn't necessarily that I pay to file my taxes. It's that it's so easy to miss things. Maybe i have a bank account that earned $12 in interest and I earned $20 from money that I put into lendingclub.com two years ago. It's annoying that the government has this information, but on the other hand, it's very easy for me to not see (or forget about) the email/snail-mail that I got about this income and then forget to declare it on my taxes. Yes, I know that the IRS isn't sending me to jail for forgetting to pay $5 in taxes, but in general, the process would be much less stressful if I had some kind of centralized reminder of all the income I made.
Pretty much all the major tax preparers do this, and they are pretty scummy.
edit
Actually now that I think about it, since the standard deduction is increased, you could catch the majority of simple returns by just assuming the standard deduction and including a few disclaimers about the option to itemize.
I see a lot of criticism of the idea, but there's more than one way to skin a cat.
Tyler Cowen (and in his own way, david graeber) made a point that really stuck with me. Badly paraphrased:
The introduction of PCs & software to the office, has not increased office worker productivity at all. It's very hard to define or measure white collar productivity, but to the extent that it can be measured... it hasn't improved. From another angle, university administrations, tax collectors, accountants, legal departments, international customs agencies, etc. have as many or more people and don't seem to be producing a whole lot more.
To paraphrase Graeber's more beligerent take on it: Getting more efficient at paperwork just produces more & more complicated paperwork.
Later, California's Franchise Tax Board, went ahead and made it an option anyway, but hardly anyone knew about it. It was since been superseded by California's free online option: CalFile[3]. Of course, it's not that helpful if you have to go through the whole federal process anyway. But it serves as an example that it could work fine here in the states like the rest of the world if Congress would be willing to go for it instead of bowing to Intuit and Grover Norquist.
1. https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyReturn
3. https://www.ftb.ca.gov/online/calfile/index.asp
I used TurboTax this year, and honestly I was underwhelmed, especially when it came to the state forms. It didn’t really seem like it did much, and the California form experience were full of obvious bugs. Questions with no context. (“Enter city 2”) Questions being given out of order. PDFs being viewed through a mail slot. PDF forms where the entry blanks and the entries would scroll at different t rates, so you couldn’t read the form. It was super frustrating. The whole thing felt like a cheap unskilled body shop of a program, and made me want to just use a pen.
It's basically as easy as filing out a W2 if you're a full-time salaried employee with no deductions, right?
I have to file mildly complicated taxes due to getting my income from a partnership, and even that I can do in a couple hours by following the 1040 instructions, and the filling out any ancillary schedules that are required.
If you have straightforward W2 income, taking the standard deduction, and a reasonable number of retirement or investment accounts, it should take you an hour to fill out the form following the instructions. Maybe plan on a couple hours the first year, while you get used to it, but it's no so bad.
Edited to add additional details as to what isn't supported.
I admit that they don't have quite the community links that TurboTax does, and there are some situations they won't handle (for instance, income from 2+ states)
EDIT: Ignore this comment, poster threw ID-10T exception
Typically what I do is write a small program that asks the questions in the 1040 form, then gives me a print out of what goes in each field.
For my case, I have one source of income (employer), a couple times I've sold stock, and I have a mortgage, am single, but support my SO and her 4-year old grandkid. I've done my own taxes for the last 20 years, and only a couple times took it to a professional (once to H&R block when I sold stocks, and last year to a CPA). Both times the tax forms were exactly what I figured out on my own.
Regardless, I would pay to have such a service.
As for the lobbying, I have some vague memory of jumping to Tax Act because of someone pointing out that they don't lobby. A cursory bit of searching didn't raise any red flags at the time.
https://www.americancoalitionfortaxpayerrights.org/
Interestingly while looking this group up I found this entire report prepared by Elizabeth Warren's staff about these types of industry groups:
https://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/Tax_Maze_Repor...
Last year I went to an independent preparer, which cost me around $160 and took an hour. This year I wanted to save some money so I decided to try filing myself and it was pleasantly straightforward, only taking two hours. The only tedious part was copying over the info from the W2 for both federal and state.
The only case it doesn’t handle for me is Partnership taxes — just the stuff due April 15.
Turbotax was 100% free for both with automatic imports of my forms. As long as you avoid upgrading to unnecessary services beyond their basic service, you can file for free and save PDFs of both returns when you're finished.
Do your taxes by hand/with free fillable forms (name of the online service), you’ll learn a lot. Just follow the 1040 instructions (it goes line by line through the form) and any related forms it tells you to do.
I have heard good things about freetaxusa.com as well.
Both are very reasonably priced, only $15 for state - federal is free. Since I have business income TurboTax wants over $100 to do my taxes.
From their About Us page:
>FreeTaxUSA is an online tax preparation website owned by TaxHawk, Inc.
Just one thing to complain - it didn't discover that I over-contributed to Roth and need to return a bit to prevent a penalty.
Perhaps you can let them know about the IRA thing for next year?
It’s not even an advice in the end, just a reminder the customer lost the battle, and the only alternative is to leave the field with what’s left on their posession to go roam the desert.
It's a superpower, and it is in it's entirety an example that disproves that this is the case.
"Voting with your dollars" is a fools argument designed to impart the feeling that the reader somehow has sway over a monopoly
Pretty sure there's always an option. Nihilism is the worst one.
That’s how we got to this situation in the first place.
We either need campaign finance reform or we need to accept our government is bought and paid for by big oil, coal, the NRA, the car manufacturers, etc.
sorry for the rant
There must be powerful forces at work because Republicans have touted a flat tax or a return the size of a postcard for decades but when they controlled all three branches of government couldn't get anywhere near enough votes to pass it.
It's truly an abysmal system and I hope my kids don't have to do a giant math problem every year when they're adults.
Sure you can. Even with the new $750k cap, and if you assume a (very low; chances are it's higher by a factor of 1.5 or 2) rate of 2%, you can get to $15k.
If you assume a 4% rate, then you get to $14k with a $350k mortgage. In various coastal-metro markets that's basically an entry-level house.
The other common itemized deduction is charitable contributions. Unfortunately, I see lots of "average" data for those, when what would be most useful here is median data: the average is presumably heavily skewed by wealthier or higher-income taxpayers. But as an anecdote, I know multiple people who drop $20 in the collection plate every week when they go to church; that's ~$1k right there.
Thanks -- I hadn't done the math, and was mostly grumpy about my mortgage interest + SALT not being enough. No significant charitable donations this year, I bunched up with a DAF in tax year 2017 for several reasons.
They don't actually try to pass a flat tax because it is not feasible to actually do a flat tax in a country like they US with such a wide range of incomes. Even with a low rate, there will be people poor enough that paying the tax is a major hardship. So every even remotely serious "flat" tax proposal has some cutoff and only applies to income above that cutoff.
But then it is not actually a flat tax. It is a progressive tax with two brackets. Once you get there, it is really hard to come up with a convincing argument that two brackets is better than more brackets.
If the calculation wouldn't mystify most taxpayers, what would probably be the most sound theoretically would be a continuous bracket structure.
The other reason they don't do it is that the flatness of the rate structure has pretty much nothing whatsoever to do with the complexity of a tax return. If you changed the rate structure from a progressive rate with several brackets to an actual flat rate, or a more realistic two bracket progressive system, that would shave about 1/4 of a page off the several thousand pages of the tax code and tax regulations.
The complexity of it is all in figuring out which income is taxable. Once you've got all the income classified into the various relevant tax categories, the actual calculations where you use the rate structure is trivial.
With a tiered tax system, individuals need to be the ones who pay taxes because people who combine income from multiple sources need to pay differing amounts of taxes. With a flat tax system, all income is treated exactly the same so governments can switch to collecting income taxes from corporations. Corporations basically report the amount they spend on payroll every year and pay some percentage of that as a tax to the government. Then the government takes some portion of that money and remits it back to individuals as a negative income tax (essentially a UBI).
Flat tax changes the way money flows, instead of company -> individual -> government, it goes company -> government -> individual. It's both easier to tax corporations than individuals and easier to give money to citizens than take money from citizens. These two powerful benefits alone are meant to make up for the severe rigidity and lack of flexibility that flat tax systems intrinsically have. It's an open question whether these two things are enough to make up for all the flat tax flaws but I don't think there's an obvious right or wrong answer that we've discovered yet.
Also what about income from investment?
Income from non-salary sources aren't generally covered by flat tax proposals because they're so complex and the existing tax system would still exist to deal with them. However, for the vast majority of citizens, salary is their only source of income and their experience with the government becomes "how much can I convince the government to give to me" rather than "how do I try to avoid the government from taking from me".
Germany also has some of the most draconian anti-free speech laws of all first world nations, so I really don't think they're a good example to use as a pillar of freedom.
I don't know much about the German healthcare system but it's quite possible that you also don't have as many choices for healthcare as in the US due to increased governmental regulation.
I'd also add that healthcare is one of the least free aspects of US culture especially post-ACA. We are now mandated to have insurance, even if we don't want it.
You have strictly more choices. In the USA, chances are you cant afford healthcare and have none.
I know I am exaggerating and misrepresenting a lot of people with this characterization.
To me the solution seems obvious: you don't need private companies to do the job of the government. You need a less corrupt government, capable of doing its job. With the middlemen you just move the corruption around.
> Don't feel sorry, we are fine.
Rank 6 on the Economic Freedom index https://www.fraserinstitute.org/economic-freedom/map?geozone...
Rank 17 on the Human Freedom index https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/human-fr...
Rank 45 on the Press Freedom Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
Rank 10 on the World Index of Moral Freedom http://www.fundalib.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/World-Ind...
Rank 53 in the Freedom of the World index https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world-2018-table-cou...
Rank 12 in the Index of Economic Freedom https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking/
That is not a bad score overall, but is a far cry from an unchallenged "we are the most free".
It’s a republic. There’s a meaningful difference.
One name is about the act of governing and the other is about the property of the governing body.
Even worse, when the user calls the H&R Block help number, a computerized voice does offer the user the option to downgrade, but notes that it will have to delete all of the data the user entered!!!
Talk about sleazy.
You build it for free.
This user then adds a tax pro review service but decides later that they do not want that add-on service. But now the user cannot remove that added-on service on the H&R website. The user calls in to an automated phone line which tells the user that, in order to downgrade, the system must clear out all of their data.
Don't attribute to maliciousness what can be attributed to incompetence.
It's not hard and no accountant had ever dabbed me more than they cost.
If you can code you can fill out a form. Every year I day in going to automate it but it's easier to just fill out the forms.
I'm looking forward to an audit for the free tax advice.
Be legit. Stop worrying. Keep living.
Companies have no natural right to continue making money without competition from the government.
EDIT: Where does this ban the IRS from creating their own portal? It requires the IRS to continue the Free File Program, but does that explicitly bar the IRS from its own system?
To me this sounds like a great deal for taxpayers. In exchange for not spending tons of taxpayer money on a project which may or may not turn out well, makers of existing high-quality products agree to voluntarily give free access to it to the majority of taxpayers.
The bill additionally codifies funding for the VITA program which provides free in-person preparation services for low-income taxpayers.
I think this is about as good as the situation can get without actually simplifying our tax code.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/07/when-ta...