Beyond that plank, it's important to note that these same politicians are often bought out by lobby money from the private institutions who stand to benefit. They stand aside and let people from private industry, like TurboTax or H&R Block, write the laws that make things harder on their constituents, and then turn to them and and go, "See, government is inefficient!" It's a complete racket!

https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

Right, the same government that couldn't get a healthcare website going is supposed to also power every single transaction from internal infrastructure. There are hidden costs that are much higher than 3% to giving the government full control over every transaction in society. It's a single point of failure with no redundancy or decentralization, a large attack vector, and a human rights nightmare. As a general rule, private institutions all too often do outperform public institutions. I'm pretty sure Space X has bipartisan support, for example.

I mean, government does GPS. Sends folks to space. You mention SpaceX, but let's not pretend NASA doesn't exist. Yeah, there was once that website that had a bad launch, but there's nothing inherent in government that wouldn't allow this to work well.

I do think ideally this could be done by NY or CA first. We should test out ideas in the states, where possible.

SpaceX successfully built a capsule to get people into space.

They built it to the specifications that NASA enforced upon them, which were paid for in blood.

And you don't have to look far in the SpaceX organization to see what risks the company is willing to take if an external authority isn't imposing regulation on them.

I think this mixes up low odds of success with risk, the latter rather being an expectation value than a probability (i.e. probability of success or failure times the value of the things at stake). Risk can be low even when the odds of success are not good just by nothing being really at stake.

Think about their rocket landing program: the probability of landing a rocket on a boat in the first attempt might have been low but the risk was almost negligible because the launches that SpaceX practiced landing on had been paid for by a customer already. Now, if SpaceX had bet the company on reusability by paying for all these rockets out of their own pocket instead and hoping they manage to get it right before cash runs out, then this could have been called risky.

GPS is a lot less stateful than real-time financial transaction processing. It takes time corrections from base stations and broadcasts a time signal. End users have no way of mutating state on the GPS satellite; they only listen.

I'm not saying it's easy to make a global positioning system, but it's easier than processing every transaction in the United States.

I was partially responsible for designing a system that could be used to eventually scale to handle processing every global credit and debit transaction.

GPS is harder.

disclaimer: I used to work at Visa.

Were you also partially responsible for designing a GNSS system? Otherwise it isn't clear how you can make any claim as to the difficulty of that, if you're using your experience on the former as your bona fides. I think the difficulty of payment processing isn't in the happy path, but in fraud/anomaly detection, merchant servicing/outreach, dispute resolution, all of which do not have a "set it and forget it" solution.

The platform had to encompass all of those payments infrastructure responsibilities. I'm quite aware of their relative difficulty.

Separately, I did not have to implement a GNSS system, but at the job I had immediately after Visa, I did have to work very, very closely with GNSS vendors who integrated with our AV middleware software (including having to write drivers for them), and in my current role I'm CEO of a company which produces a software platform that provides automated V&V of complex SISoS (including those integrated with and dependent on GNSS).

End to end payments systems are hard in the rats nest of legacy expectations and integration sense. End to end GPS deployment & management seems hard in the science and systems engineering sense.

Ah, yes, this government right: https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/gps.html

With about 70% of their revenue from the US Government in 2018? Those defense companies might as well be an extension of the government with the added "benefit" that it allows individuals to get wealthy off them.

Edit: Further to that and the comment pointing out where GPS was researched and developed, the Air Force still operates GPS block III and contracted these services out to Lockheed. So yeah, ultimately any success Lockheed has with GPS III is ultimately a success for the government..

That's kind of the point though; would this whole arrangement work any better if it was all directly under the DoD hierarchy? Vs. private contractors like this? I was not intending to be snarky in the original comment. I've lived in a system where a lot more of the economy was under the government in the org chart and it was not magically better than the American system.

I'm not sure what point you're making. Yes, the government uses private contractors, but they'd use contractors for this transaction system, too.

Ah, yes, that one that did the fundamental research which enabled it right: https://www.nrl.navy.mil/accomplishments/systems/gps

GPS is more akin to a public lightbulb than any kind of interactive service. The government seems to falter when it has to deal with 1:1 interactions with constituents, not when it is simply building something.

To be fair, that was the first time the federal government had attempted to build a modern web application. There's a great interview with President Obama, I believe in FastCompany, where he discusses the approach to building healthcare.gov -- the crux of the issue was with the mindset. When you build large physical infrastructure, you need large companies, but the same is not true of technical infrastructure. This mindset had lead to the use of the mega contractors, but it was ultimately a small team that built the version that worked. This revelation lead to the institution of the US Digital Service.

Among the things that failed in the design for healthcare.gov: the overall plan was to have each component built, to a specification, and then any two teams that were integrating components would test integration, and the whole thing would work.

Three pieces of the puzzle missing:

1) It appears there was no honest-to-God real end-to-end testing in the plan: no team to own it, no chain of responsibility if it didn't work. So cross-functional issues like total system performance were ownerless, and it is the nature of government contracting work to push blame away, not assert ownership where none is demanded by the contract.

2) Even in integration testing, responsibility was unclear when it failed. If the specification itself proved faulty, neither side of the protocol had ownership over fixing the problem; faulty specs led to pissing matches of blame-pushing instead of any party saying "Okay, the spec is now this, just fix it."

3) Since nobody had holistic ownership, no core infrastructure decisions were made. The whole project, under the hood, was a mismash of different databases, languages, messaging services, and protocols, owned by (and chosen by) each contractor with no thought paid to long-term maintenance of the app as a singular service. Each team had their own ad-hoc dashboards with no top-level view to allow anyone to understand why the end-to-end site experience was broken. There was nobody to own a concept equivalent to "Ops" or "Site reliability" who had authority to make judgement calls here; long-term maintenance was going to look like full understanding of dozens of similar systems doing similar tasks.

There are plenty of ways to structure a public service like this that isn't fully controlled by the government. USPS comes to mind, though it's obviously not perfect in terms of independence from government control.

I'd honestly love to see something like a credit union at a large enough scale to run it's own payment processing system. Something like that could get you a nice level of independence from government control and give you an organization more incentivized to care for it's members.

US space program was mostly privately developed, in any case.

Saying "look as SpaceX" isn't much of a "government failed" as much as "Boeing failed miserably and lobbied hard to cover their failures".

That said - the government can be a facilitator without being the operator, and it shouldn't be the operator in this case.

The Federal gov't is vast and is not uniformly ineffective. Even within departments tech performance can vary greatly.

> not uniformly ineffective

Ha, that's a good phrase to use in a performance review.

"On the whole, Bob is not uniformly ineffective ..."

"... and the upside is we gathered some interesting data on personnel performance"

FWIW the Canadian tax system is heading in this direction. With electronic filing programs most things get pre-filled now with data from Canada Revenue Agency based on the information they've received from your employer, your bank, your trading institutions, etc. Then it's more a matter of going through and verifying information and adding in any missing information (for example sale info from my stock units held in my employer's US brokerage) and looking any deductions that might apply (and the set of those is shrinking, which imho is a good thing)

Canadian here— there's definitely been a movement in recent years away from deductions in favour of direct payments throughout the year. Thinking especially of the child benefit and the carbon tax rebate, and the elimination of boutique credits like one that used to apply to the purchase of public transit passes (https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/programs/about-canad...).

I get that politicians like the psychology of people receiving a cheque or direct deposit vs a tax deduction ("it was my money all along"), but I think it is genuinely a positive step in terms of helping people at the low end of the economy who don't have the means to save receipts or jump through whatever other hoops are necessary to nickel and dime the government at tax time.

It is a good thing. Private tax accountants are a huge political lobby in the US, so it's a non-starter here.

The US barely got off the ground a free option for public e-filing, and we managed to botch it up by handing it to a private company to implement, which promptly turned around and made it absolutely as impossible to access as they were allowed to by law.

US - the cronyism dream.

One way or another, those free markets always turn out to be really expensive for customers and users.

I used to run a company in Lithuania and now am a simple employee in US.

It took me about 10 minutes for monthly tax filings and 30 minutes for the annual tax filing for my company and 4 employees. I did not have an accountant - I didn't need one.

It is a nightmare filing taxes in US, even paying $300 to Intuit. It takes about a week of my time... for something that is supposed to be automated. I also never manage to get the tax calculated correctly in advance, because no consumer facing tax company will bother with you before you get your annual statement(W2). I have a very variable income - RSU's and other optional income... so I get hit by underpayment fee from IRS.... and don't get me started on the fact that every state has their own tax authority...

It's extremely naive to think that only Republicans are responsible for that.

The Democratic Party is a long-standing "bankers party" and "corporatists party" (a party for big companies and organizations). In that sense, they're just as "bad" as the Republican Party, and due to how the whole democratic system is set up in the USA, Americans are in reality bereft of alternatives. Picking anyone else than those two, is effectively a blank vote. This system can at least in part explain why so many Americans choose to stay at home during the elections, because to them, for whatever reason, it doesn't really make much of a difference who is in power.

This is why it's important to vote in primaries and to cultivate leaders at the local level. The Republicans became a lock-step far right party by building up infrastructure and candidates at the lowest levels and building from there. Too many progressives don't seem to pay attention to any elections below the presidential election (and then whine that things are rigged when their candidate gets less votes than someone they don't like).

The Republicans deliberately built the grassroots top down, with targeted media and subsidised networking. Supposedly grassroots orgs were aggressively seeded and astroturfed.

It's not that progressives don't pay attention, it's that the Democratic machine doesn't do this. In fact it works to sabotage and disempower effective grassroots opposition to its corporatist policies.

There are always a few break outs in every cycle - like Cori Bush this year - but they're there for show, not for policy. If they get too pushy they run into opposition, and if they don't accept a compromise with the party line they're quietly removed by PACs that funnel non-grassroots special-interest money to challengers.

To be fair, the presidential election thing progressives are whining is rigged is that their candidate lost despite getting 3 million more votes than someone they didn't like.

That it happened twice in 3 presidents is icing on the "it's rigged" cake.

I was referring to whiners in the primaries. There are many factors for why trunmp won in 2016 and changing any one of them could have changed the outcome. One of those factors was Sanders voters who stayed home or voted for third-party candidates.

They are not, alone, responsible for it, but it is still a fundamental difference in the parties; some Democrats are pro-big-business, but only one party has public-private partnership as a party plank.

Democrats may profess to be anti-big-business, but in practice they clearly aren't.

> greatly simplifying the burden and toil of tax season by issuing 90% of Americans a pre-filled-out "This is what you owe; sign this and return it or dispute it with your own filing,

All of Scandinavia does this. Has been doing it for ages.

Most people need do nothing at all. And it works really well even if you do have to make some amendments (income in a foreign country for instance that the tax authorities can't see directly).

It's also one of the reason why the tax office is one of the most popular government agencies in Sweden. It just works.

"There is 100% nothing stopping the Federal government from offering a full-faith-and-credit-backed "America electronic transaction system" for electronic transactions, with those fees handled by taxes."

And there's technically nothing stopping the US from sending humans to mars either.

There are many reasons that it's not done, including the most important one, which is that it's not necessary.

Simply producing or supporting a standard, and then maybe having some regulations around it would be 100x easier.

> There is 100% nothing stopping the Federal government from offering a full-faith-and-credit-backed "America electronic transaction system" for electronic transactions, with those fees handled by taxes.

That is the plan, albeit the minimal fees involved paid for through users of the Fed’s system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24103753

I actually like this aspect of the USA. Most parts of the world, specially more socialistic-leaning countries, would have politicians eager to expand their powers and size of the state so that they have control over a bigger cut of the pie. Of course, this is supposedly for the good of the people.

It seems to me that more people is socialistic-minded in the USA these days, to me that looks like a indicator of the decline of the country.

The thing that always bothered me about this argument is that in reality the US has many more regulations that apply to regular people than most of what you call "socialistic-leaning" countries (one example look at the regulations for what you can or can't do with your house/yard in many suburbs )

Singapour usually ranks top 5 in these lists and it’s forbidden to buy chewing gum there. What baseline are you comparing against?

If you want, you can mail Visa a check for 3% of your spending at the end of each month. A small price to pay for your freedom.

There are many countries. Go live in a +70 in economic freedom and you’ll gain a lot of perspective on the freedoms the USA has.

People should have feel the burden that taxation places on them.

Payroll withholding already artificially dampens the strain that taxation imposes on everyone that earns a paycheck. Issuing a pre-filled out form is another step backwards.

Paying taxes should be burdensome and uncomfortable.

That is an ideology and a rather twisted one. We were over this when people were opposing anaglesia and anaesthesia. Wanting people to suffer needlessly is a bad thing.

Then stop over taxing us.

I don't think that does what you want it to.

Make taxes burdensome, and you create a market for tax filers who make them easy for you. All youve done is make taxes more expensive then, without getting better government services.