(For the same reason, the $5 million in NRA lobbying each year is not why we don't pass laws limiting access to semi-automatic weapons for "disturbed adolescents." It's voters like me who are morally opposed to the government keeping a list of who can and cannot exercise their 2nd amendment rights. The lobbying is just so the NRA can remind politicians how many of us there are.)
BTW--"sensible gun reform" has majority support.
For example, Grover Norquist has no personal stake in keeping tax filing complicated (he doesn’t own stock in Intuit or H&R Block as far as I know). But he spends a lot of time on the issue for ideological reasons. You’re telling me that there’s not a billionaire Democrat who could throw $5 million a year at the tax issue for funsies? Or public unions who would benefit from simpler tax filing allowing taxes to be raised more easily? If it was just a matter of outspending Intuit and H&R Block, someone would do it. But I could give you $10 million a year (double what the tax companies spend) for this issue, and you would not be able to lobby tax simplification into law.
Grover Norquist absolutely has an interest in keeping taxes complex, it’s his entire basis for influence and power. His fight is about lowering taxes anyways, not complexity.
Here’s the flip side to your stance. If lobbying has no influence, why do privately held businesses spend so much on it each year? Wouldn’t these rational actors stop wasting money if there was no ROI?
You’re missing the point of the Grover Norquist example. Why is tax filing something Grover Norquist cares about? He’s rich—this doesn’t affect him directly. And he doesn’t make any money off tax preparation. He campaigns against tax filing simplification because it taps into a very large anti-tax movement that he’s part of. It is that movement that keeps tax filing complicated. Intuit and H&R Block don’t create that movement through lobbying; they lobby to tie their issue into the larger movement.
As to the amount of lobbying: private companies don’t spend much money on lobbying every year. Total US lobbying expenditures is $3.5 billion, out of a $20 trillion economy (and a $4 trillion federal budget). (And that’s not just companies, but includes public interest organizations.) If lobbying had direct, non-speculative impacts on legislation, companies would do a lot more of it. Look at the tax filing example. H&R Block makes more than $3 billion in revenue each year. If lobbying had direct results, they wouldn’t be able to protect that cash cow with less than $3 million a year in lobbying. A competitor would come in and outbid them for legislation. (Indeed, corporation versus corporation lobbying is probably the most typical kind. E.g. all the money Google spends on copyright lobbying is best seen as a proxy war with Hollywood over whether copyrights should be weak, which favors distributors like Google, or strong, which favors Hollywood.)
Of course lobbying is important enough that companies do it. But it’s not transactional like people make it out to be. Lobbying involves hiring professionals to make presentations to staffers about specific issues, tying them into general platforms that politicians already believe. Tax filing is a great example. Intuit and H&R Block aren’t going in and spending $5 million to convince people who love taxes to oppose automatic tax filing. They’re using that money to lobby legislators who already want Americans to be outraged each year in April 15. They connect their specific issue to the larger platform the politician already supports. “Simpler tax filing is the first step to Danish style 60% tax rates.” Then, they educate the legislator about relevant pending legislation. “Elizabeth Warren has introduced an automatic tax filing bill.” And they arm the legislator with arguments and white papers they need to oppose the lesilation. “Making deductions opt-in will result in a $45 billion effective tax increase on seniors, who will be to scared to challenge the ‘bill’ sent by the IRS.”
You still haven’t provided any evidence. Your comments in this thread are mostly ideological arguments.
From the article about them directly lobbying against bills on this issue:
==The disclosures show that Intuit as recently as 2011 lobbied on two bills, both of which died, that would have allowed many taxpayers to file pre-filled returns for free. The company also lobbied on bills in 2007 and 2011 that would have barred the Treasury Department, which includes the IRS, from initiating return-free filing.==
There will never be a direct link made because no politician will say, “I am voting against this bill because Intuit took me to a nice dinner and contributed $100k to my re-election campaign.” We do have evidence that constituents want taxes simplified, bills have been presented to fix this problem, companies lobbied against the bills, and the bills died. What’s your theory?
No party has as much direct interest in this issue as tax preparers. That they haven’t been outspent is not itself evidence of anything.
I do agree it is interesting that the GOP campaigned that way, incidentally. Regardless of what degree of support for complicated taxes there may or may not have been, support for simplified taxes in the large, populist wing of the Republican Party plus presumably broad support in the Democratic Party should mean more changes to tax collection soon.
It's not that there can't be such people, it's that there hasn't been any credible evidence provided to prove there actually are such people. That both sides of the political spectrum use the same language is pretty strong evidence that there is broad support ideologically for a simpler tax code.
Bringing up Grover Norquist seems like a red herring, as he is himself a lobbyist. His organization, Americans for Tax Reform, describes itself as a group that "believes in a system in which taxes are simpler, flatter, more visible, and lower than they are today." [1] Yet, they are used by rayiner as an example of an organization ideologically opposed to simpler taxes and tax filing. If anything, we should be adding ATR's own $5 million of annual spending to the total lobbying dollars being spent against a simpler system.
==should mean more changes to tax collection soon.==
This is the central point. The tax code was just completely overhauled and it included almost zero simplification, even though it's main proponents used that exact messaging in their sales pitch.
The article suggests that the lack of action is, at least in part, because of lobbying. It provides the evidence of lobby spending related to this topic and the ultimate death of those bills. The also have a quote from Former California Republican legislator Tom Campbell, he says he "never saw as clear a case of lobbying power putting private interests first over public benefit."
[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Americans_for_Tax_Refo...
bribery is the only possible explanation for congress refusing to do what their constituents plainly want.
It's the same argument ad nauseum about every political issue since before the civil war. The US is unique, the US electorate have strong and immutable views, the US cannot learn from anyone else. Time and time again, educated people dismiss the possibility of change, dismiss the possibility of persuasion and compromise and reconciliation, dismiss the possibility of shifting the Overton window and changing the zeitgeist. That isn't common sense, it's political nihilism. The consequences of that nihilistic ideology are writ large on the American political landscape and they are proving to be disastrous.