Apparently the lobbying by Intuit is actually fairly minor compared to the opposition by Republicans. Some group of Republican legislators came together and agreed to oppose all tax increases, and also agreed to oppose many types of tax simplification. The thinking being that the more painful filing your taxes is, the more people will have a negative perception of taxes in general and be opposed to tax increases.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...

    > Flat tax doesn't even simplify anything.

BEGIN QUOTE

Fewer brackets are simpler to administer, but one bracket is simplest of all. Under a pure flat tax, the taxman takes the same cut from the last dollar you earn that he took from the first. The appeal to high earners is obvious. But the administrative elegance of such a system is not so immediately apparent. Because every dollar is taxed at the same rate, it does not matter to the tax collector how many dollars are going to whom. Thus, in principle, the taxman could simply withhold 20% of a company's payroll, without needing to know who was paid what. Add a second rate of tax, however, or a personal exemption, and the tax collector must find out how much money is going into each pay packet before he can be sure of collecting the right amount from the right person. In America, for example, the tax collector needs to tax the wage packets of 130m or more employees, rather than simply taxing the payrolls of 8m or so enterprises.

END QUOTE

The mistake you're making is assuming that the tax system can only be simplified on the individual level, but as the quote above demonstrates this isn't true.

Certain changes to the tax code do entirely away with the need for the government to exhaustively audit large parts of the economy.

Another quote from the article demonstrating such a case:

BEGIN QUOTE

In Canada, Australia and the European Union, for example, staple foods, but not restaurant meals, are exempted from value-added tax. [Therefore] hot roast chicken is taxed, but cold roast chicken is not. “Does anyone expect tax administrators and business owners to have thermometers on hand when they do their tax calculations?”

END QUOTE

In this example, by progressively taxing food you're creating the accounting problem that the government theoretically has to track economic activity down to the level of whether a chicken was warm or not when it was sold.

Simplifying the tax code does away with needing to solve that problem entirely, and eliminates some of the current incentives for tax avoidance and other fraud.

1. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2005/04/14/the-case...

No, because the idea behind a flat tax is to eliminate most or all of those deductions, the same way they've already been eliminated for people who pay AMT instead of normal income tax.

E.g. the case of the warm and cold chicken being taxed at different rates, as described in the linked Economist article.

It's common in places with such a distinction in the tax code for some stores to sell packaged cold food clearly intended to be eaten on the go, and then to conveniently offer a customer-operated microwave on-site partly as a way to avoid paying a tax that distinguishes between food sold as groceries v.s. take-away food.

I'm not advocating for flat taxes, but it is correct to say that such proposals in general do away with such emergent absurdities, and decrease the need for government bureaucracy.

The complexity of the formula generating the lookup table doesn't affect the users of the lookup table, so I disagree: number of brackets has no meaningful effect on complexity of manual preparation.

Removing deductions has nothing to do with the tax curve. You could do that with the current curve and tweak it accordingly.

In theory, but (serious) advocates of the flat tax generally are proposing both.

In New Zealand, for example, all prominent advocates of flat taxes are also proponents of not following Australia or the UK's example of having GST/VAT exemptions for some categories of goods.

Alternately, you could even have a progressive, flat tax with a standard deduction of $150,000 and like a 40% rate. I’m surprised the Democrats haven’t proposed that just as a publicity stunt.

So high earners get a larger tax reduction from deductions than low earners. There's not really a way to do that with a 0% bracket (and in fact we have both a 0% bracket and deductions).

See what Milton Friedman had to say about tax code complexity. TLDR: it gives politicians the ability to curry favor or punish and it’s the source of their real power. The power to tax is the power to destroy. A flat tax with a single standard deduction effectively declaws the government from being able to pick winners and losers based on from whom the campaign donations come.

That's a decently idealistic viewpoint, but "complicated" doesn't necessarily mean "broken". For example, pretty much all Unix-style operating systems have not only a ton of now-unnecessary code to handle text I/O from 1960's teletype machines, but they even come with a "terminal emulator" that literally emulates the behavior of a 1960's teletype machine. That's how the command line works. You would never design it that way from the start, it's complicated, it's crufty, and it's vaguely horrifying, and yet it works and solves virtually all of the real problems that real people would have with that system. Just like letting the IRS fill out the first draft of your tax return.

No, it's not.

> People that oppose flat taxes do so because they want other people to pay more. People that oppose flat taxes do so because they want other people to pay more. It’s that simple.

Some of the richest people oppose the flat tax. And they do so because they want people poorer than themselves to pay less than they would in a flat tax scheme funding the same services.

> See what Milton Friedman had to say about tax code complexity. TLDR: it gives politicians the ability to curry favor or punish and it’s the source of their real power.

Maybe Friedman said that, but it's wrong; the monopoly on violence does that, and the tax system isn't particularly special among the avenues by which the power that monopoly grants can be applied.

This is exactly the reason I do my taxes by hand on paper every year.

They did the same thing in Canada too btw.

So how is it that lobbying alone is enough to persuade lawmakers to take the side of Intuit et al.? And which lawmakers are so easily "bought" at the detriment of the public? I'm just as pessimistic as anyone when it comes to the corruption of our government, but this seems like a pretty black and white issue. There must be more to it...

Also, the complex nature of the US tax code means that the people who've put effort into gaming the system and the dishonest also stand to lose if move to a more reasonable system.

So it's really not just about the campaign contributions but actual substantial interest groups.

Maybe it would have been clearer if they said "position" instead?

Almost everyone (from what I understand) agrees, so it's a pretty clear case where we should be able to call out those lawmakers and say "you're obviously only doing this for the money/job security - you can't even pretend to be against it on principle."

(1) ignore it completely if it's not getting sufficient media coverage to cause outrage or (2) control the coverage by making it seem as if the public is divided, typically using various forms of poor (but effective) arguments, statistically invalid polling, and research that only gets published if it produces the desired result

I'd say this falls into the first category.

I used to think it was Americans for Tax Reform, now I think Tax Policy Center is the closest thing, but while Bankman has worked a lot with them in the past, in this article they seem at least ambivalent if not opposed to it.

Any other suggestions of which nonprofit lobbying organizations can be used to offset the impact of Americans for Tax Reform, Intuit, and other organizations who favor tax complexification?

The lobbying is a big part, but the other part is anti-tax ideologues in Congress want to keep the tax process as painful as possible so that people are as angry as possible about taxes, to maximize support for and engagement on anti-tax policies.

Also note that the "pure flat tax" idea earlier in this discussion and the "universal basic income" idea discussed elsewhere on this website have the same problem: the promised simplification comes from eliminating a bunch of special programs, exemptions, benefits etc., which is impossible.

Intuit and friends are a red herring: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/grover-norquist/grover-norqui...

Also, IMHO, few people have messed up US tax policy like Grover Norquist. Even if you don't agree with that particular humble opinion, he is, at the very least, a figure with his own agenda to push. He's far from an unbiased source.

My take on this remains what it's been for decades (offensive words, but I'm not sure what would fit better) :

"I'm not surprised that politicians are whores. I'm horribly disappointed that they're cheap sleazy whores."

https://www.npr.org/2017/03/29/521954033/stanford-professor-...

And California may lean blue on the federal level, but it is a very anti-tax state (Prop 13, etc.).

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is one of the most powerful political groups in the state and has been doing the same schtick as Norquist (though, when Jarvis was alive, under a different name), since Norquist was still in college.

It's not pure blue, now, either, and more to the point, the Democrats in the California electorate are not a hive mind of stereotypes.

> But the effort the parent described is from 2004, so what matters are the politics of modern CA.

The Norquist-before-Norquist Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is one of the most powerful political forces in modern California, too.

(Also, in 2004, California was less bright blue than modern CA; it had just recalled the Democratic governor and elected a Republican replacement, after all.)

Is this true or an urban legend?

This is one of the reasons i provide to Intuit recruiters when they try and get me to interview for them. I am not working for the company actively working against my best interests.

We in the tech community don't always have the luxury to work for a company who we absolutely love and respect, but I draw the line when it comes to companies that actively engage in this type of concerted effort against citizens.

In 2016 Intuit's revenue was something like $4.7 billion. And they spent $2 million lobbying against bills that threaten the fundamental nature of their business?

That seems absurdly low to me.

It looks like this information is published by the senate under the "Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995"

https://soprweb.senate.gov/index.cfm?event=getFilingDetails&...

opensecrets.org has a more easily-browsed index linking to the senate reports: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/lobby.php?id=D000022016