2. Americans don't have the lowest tax rates in the developed world. Mexico, Ireland, Chile, Turkey, and South Korea all have lower tax rates[1]. And in some cases the governments provide more services with less money because they're not spending half their budget on occupying other countries.
[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxe...
This. The American military is perhaps the largest and most wasteful social program on the planet. Americans spend way too much time trying to find their way around this elephant in the room.
To raise the percentage rates, politicians have to vote to raise those rates. Private filing means that everyone is very aware of how much they’re paying in taxes. It’s not just an invoice they receive listing how much was withheld. They have to recalculate it. That makes them much more sensitive about voting for politicians who vote for higher taxes.
> 2. Americans don't have the lowest tax rates in the developed world. Mexico, Ireland, Chile, Turkey, and South Korea all have lower tax rates[1].
I don’t think people would consider Chile and Mexico to be developed countries. You’re right that Ireland and South Korea are lower (depending on the year, Ireland cut taxes significantly recently). But they’re together with the US in the bottom band.
> And in some cases the governments provide more services with less money because they're not spending half their budget on occupying other countries.
I think it’s true that other countries do more with less. But it has little to do with the military budget. US government spending as a percentage of GDP is 38%, meaning all levels of US government spend $7.3 trillion annually. The military budget is just 10% of that, or 3.2% of GDP. That’s high compared to Europe, but not a big difference compared to overall government spending. The US military budget is proportionally where the U.K. and France’s was in the late 1980s, back when those countries had robust welfare states: https://worthwhile.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451688169e2022ad3a0...
If the United States cut its military budget to the same proportional level as France, we’d have an extra $175 billion for other things. That’s not nothing, but to put that into perspective, we spend $970 billion a year on education (5% of GDP). We spend $1.1 trillion on healthcare and welfare for poor people. Cutting our military budget to European levels wouldn’t revolutionize our budget.
I'm not sure how you think private filing is related to manually filing your taxes. Yes, if taxes were just paying an invoice at the end of the year, that would make them less noticeable, but that's not a necessary component of private taxation. Adding up all your income and just calculating a simple percentage would create just as much awareness--probably more, because there's some clarity/transparency that is easier to understand.
In fact, I'd argue that a complex filing process puts a focus on where money is coming from, rather than where it is going, which is arguably much more important to make transparent to people.
> I don’t think people would consider Chile and Mexico to be developed countries.
Any basis you could have for not considering Chile and Mexico to be developed countries applies to large sections of the US (incidentally, they tend to be the parts of the US with the lowest taxes). There's more poverty in the parts of Alabama and West Virginia that I've visited than the parts of Ecuador I've visited.
> You’re right that Ireland and South Korea are lower (depending on the year, Ireland cut taxes significantly recently). But they’re together with the US in the bottom band.
So the rest of your argument doesn't work, since it was based on your claim that we have the lowest taxes.
People aren’t paying attention to tax bills that are getting voted on. But when they do their taxes, they’re forced to actually work out how much they’re paying the government. A bill or invoice they get in the mail wouldn’t have the same effect.
As to the US system being unjustifiable, I think Europeans don’t really understand America. In an ideal world, I’d prefer a Swedish system with high taxes, lots of social services, etc. But Americans aren’t Swedes. They don’t trust their government, and they don’t really trust each other. A quarter of Americans polled favor their state seceding from the country (ranging from 20-34% depending on region). By comparison, only 15% of people in the Basque region of Spain want independence.
I live in Maryland, which is about the same population as Denmark and only moderately smaller than Sweden. It’s a “blue state.” Our capital is Baltimore. Schools in Baltimore spend 40% more per student than schools in Sweden, in a city where you can get a beautiful townhouse for maybe 1/4 of what it would cost in Stockholm. The schools should be amazing, right? No. They’re awful, with terrible test score and enormous gang violence. The city government is corrupt. Not in the way you probably think the US as a whole is corrupt (controlled by wealthy elite), but the sort of reciprocity that typifies developing countries. The former mayor has been convinced of felonies, and in February will probably receive a sentence of 5-10 years in prison.
So despite being a strongly blue state, we elected a Republican Governor by an overwhelming majority that promised to control spending, cancel public projects like transit lines, etc. Because we don’t trust (can’t trust) our government to use our tax dollars effectively.
So yes, there is support in America for things that make people think hard about how much they pay the government: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcEhl5HfGMM. And it’s not irrational or crazy. Our situation is very different than what you face in Sweden.
Except they’re not working it out. They just have TurboTax do it then see they get a few thousand dollars for $35+ and a few minutes of work. Most people don’t understand that a tax return is money that was already theirs; They just see it as an extra paycheck.
I've never heard anyone promoting the idea of keeping taxes complicated to avoid higher taxes.
There's nothing inherent in complicated taxes that stops the government from raising rates.
Conservatives have long wanted the flat tax (file taxes on the back of a postcard) and lower taxes, so simpler lower taxes.
I think the reason it became so complicated was because businesses lobbied for special rules and tax breaks that made things complicated in the first place. Businesses are now setup to take advantage of these loopholes (Amazon passing $0 in taxes, etc.).
TurboTax was built as a result of complicated taxes and they lobby heavily against a simplified tax code.
It's not some cabal of citizens wanting to keep taxes complicated, it's the industries that benefit from the current tax code that wants to keep it this way.
Your theory is wrong.
Even if it could be done simpler, TurboTax and other tax prep companies will lobby against it.
You'd be hard pressed to find any government financial policy that isn't tied to business interests. The tax code is no exception.
Because they don’t want to make it easy for the government to impose lots of taxes. Americans have the lowest taxes in the developed world. Not especially for rich people, but for everyone else: https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/inline-images/I....
This isn’t the work of some secretive cabal of billionaires. Rich people hire accountants to do their taxes anyway. The absence or existence of free tax filing doesn’t affect them at all. But a platform of “we’re going to make taxes painful so the government is afraid to raise taxes” gets a lot of votes. (In my view, is nothing bad about people being confronted once a year with the cost of the government to themselves. I just looked at my taxes for 2018 and concluded I’m taxed too little and would rather pay more for a government that offers more services. But people should be making that decision with eyes wide open.)