It's hard to tackle the complexity of the tax code when the company you're defending here has spent millions to keep it complex and out of the hands of the government.[0]
The "tax complexity" argument is a red herring when talking about tax prep. The US government could absolutely offer free tax filing services to taxpayers without the help of private industry and also without needing to simplify the tax code. I'm not saying that the complexity of the tax code isn't a problem, but it's out of scope here. The idea that the complexity of the US tax code standing in the way of better filing options for taxpayers has absolutely no merit when companies are spending millions to fight legislation that gives the government the ability to offer its own tax prep software.
This is rent-seeking behavior on the part of private industry, plain and simple.
0: https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...
That is because they could pre-populate much of the W2/1099/stock sales/etc data since its all being reported to the IRS from other organizations. For the vast majority of people it could be as simple as logging into a web site and clicking "no" to a bunch of questions like "did you have more than 20k of medical bills last year", and then "I accept" at the bottom where it prints your final tax. As I understand it, that is how some other countries handle their taxes..
Someone has never worked in government contracting or developing Software from Government Committee
a IRS Tax Software would look more than the universally hated Unemployment Systems, or the government healthcare markets
Not a easy to use streamline system
If you want something to be inefficient, have the government do it
The government is more than capable of accomplishing tasks. There is no inherent reason why government is incapable of doing anything but a corporation is capable of doing everything!
If you design a system to fail from the outset and it doesn't work, then they achieved the goal. So really, the government nailed it. And the better part is they nailed it for people who feel the way you do. It's literally a self-fulfilling prophecy of politically-motivated people who don't believe in the ability of the government to get anything done working as hard as possible to make sure that the government doesn't do a good job.
edit: transcript from an NPR interview where Norquist takes this position: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/521132960
> However, I am a realist
Choose one.
You totally do have choice to not pay your taxes, just like you have a choice to not pay your rent or mortgage or renege on other kinds of private contracts. The making those choices may lead to outcomes that aren't good for you, but it doesn't mean you have no choice.
I happen to think the government should impose taxes, and tax evasion is a moral failing, but I also recognized people were born into a contract with the government, and I'm not going to argue that's fair.
The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
--Lysander Spooner
Yes, but I like civil society, infrastructure, paved roads and what little social safety net we have in this country, so...
Maybe it's extortionate, but the entire premise of government and the social contract is extortionate to a degree.
Sad reality is most private roads are better maintained than the public roads which driving to my home everyday is like a obstacle course.
Then there is the fact the vast majority of Roads (in the US) are paid for not with Income taxes but with User Fee's such as Gas Taxes, Car Registration, Wheel Taxes, Tire Fee's, Sales Taxes on Cars, and many other sources
But hey let keep up with the narrative that with out income taxes we would all be driving on mud paths
Money, taxes, and the crime of theft are all creatures of the law. Taxes aren't theft because that would be a literal contradiction. Taxes are just part of the rules about how money operates.
I should also note that 1) the law isn't just what some individual or other feels is natural, 2) I'd imagine that primitive law that defines theft also defines obligations to the community (which are analogous to taxes).
Then please stop using the things we fund with them. Roads, GPS, etc.
Would you rather have a system that’s inefficiently built by a government or one efficiently built by a private company that illegally extracts fees from users, as the FTC alleges Intuit has done? What’s the point of being obsessed with “efficiency” when the company screws end users anyway?
I support the FTC's actions to go after intuit, but I have filled my taxes every year for many decades and not used Turbo Tax.
OTOH, you have to remember that the IRS is already developing a fairly complex bit of software which allows the tax companies to "e-file" the tax returns. Then they are verifying those companies results in house against the data they already have. At which point, apparently the returns are either rejected, or assigned some kind of weight for a human inspector to come along and review for whether a formal audit should be undertaken.
So, its quite possible that cutting out the e-file portion and replacing it with a webUI actually simplifies things.
Consider that your opinion on what is "universally hated" is mostly shaped by the sources of information that you consume. Yours happens to be wrong. Overall the country views ObamaCare ~50% favorably, with some specific parts close to 90% approval.
> Following Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the summer of 2017, KFF Health Tracking Polls have found a slight uptick in overall favorability towards the 2010 health care law. The most recent KFF Tracking Poll shows over half of the public (52%) hold favorable opinions of the ACA while about four in ten (41%) hold a negative opinion of the law. [1]
> Some 55% of Americans support the ACA, a record high since the law went into effect a decade ago, according to a recent report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, while 37% of the 130,000 respondents in the nationally representative poll hold unfavorable views. [2]
> But the election of Donald Trump and efforts by Republicans to repeal the ACA have boosted the law’s popularity. Since November 2016, on average, 49.4% of the public has had a positive view of the law, compared with 41.6% who view it unfavorably. [3]
[1] https://www.kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/6-charts-abou...
[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-affordable-care-act-is...
[3] https://www.ajmc.com/view/how-has-public-opinion-on-the-aca-...
I support the ACA, but when you implement the benefits in a law and repeal or ignore most of the new taxes and mandates, that will happen.
Rather, the individual mandate was zeroed out in 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017
The Cadillac tax has been delayed, seemingly indefinitely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_insurance_plan
The employer mandate was delayed.
The Independent Payment Advisory Board was canceled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Payment_Advisory_B...
The nutrition labeling requirements were delayed from 2010 to 2018.
There are many other more technical provisions that have been delayed as well. It is easy to find many relevant sources online, though it's hard to keep them up to date because many delays just continue! https://cgsnet.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/ACA_Delays_at_a_...
In addition, medical insurance makes no sense as a risk-pooling strategy, as everybody consumes some medical care annually, and the average cost of care consumed is greater than the amount most people can pay. There has to be something else going on.
Clearly I was not commenting on ACA but on the Websites people use to Sign up for Government Subsidized Plans under the ACA which have continually been reviewed poorly by the people needing to use them.
I'm sure many other governments around the world do the same.
https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-t...
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...
They spent more than 1.2 million in direct lobbying against California's online tax preparation & declaration system pilot (ReadyReturn) between 2001 and 2010.
So how exactly does Ted's plan to simplify the tax code have anything to do with filing in the first place if the organization you're backing up your argument with doesn't even support doing away with private tax prep? You think the tax code is gonna be simplified to the point that Intuit just lays down and says "welp, no more money to be made here, the market solved itself out of a revenue stream"?
0: https://taxfoundation.org/pre-filled-forms-solution-tax-comp...
I’ve used them for about 20 years and every year it’s a hassle to find a reasonable price, figure out what they call the product I need each year. I spend as much time trying to figure out what to buy and clicking “no” as I do filing my taxes.
This is as a customer that uses them once a year and that’s it.
If they just sold a clean product, then it would be fine. But they are asshole marketing / rent seeking quite a bit.
Lots of non-savvy friends buy the $200 version instead of the free or $50 version because of the way intuit markets within their product about buying audit protection and what not.
It also infuriates me that their boxes software costs less than the web site. I think companies that sell physical copies of software for less than the website version are jerks. Obviously, they can do this, it’s legal, and people fall for it. But I would feel bad doing this and I think anyone who does this is a bad person.
Therefore, I hate intuit and will switch in an instant when I can.
It isn't like that though. The IRS has nearly all the pieces it needs, if not all the pieces, to create a system like the UK, where they just send you your return and you sign it unless you think there's a mistake. But that system doesn't exist because of companies like Intuit who lobby hard to prevent it from existing.
In essence, Turbotax is solving a problem that Intuit is creating (or at least lobby to prevent anyone from fixing it).
Some things would need to change to make this statement true. Stock brokers and portfolio managers would have to be forced to stop reporting gains without basis. Without the basis the IRS has no idea what your gains were.
Fidelity reports the basis in a supplement section in the same damn document. Moving them together would be trivial, but I've been told the law is forcing them to do it this way (they didn't tell me that, I just read that somewhere. Not sure if it's true).
As someone said, almost no one has investments. If you remove 401k, it's a tiny fraction of people. If the only thing I'd have to do to file my taxes would be going online, finding the list of my sales and needing to add the cost basis then click submit, it would still be a huge improvement compared to what we have now.
Still, it's a problem that's pretty easily solved.
So, yes, such people are already using the simplest possible form, but ease of filing is a big deal, and I suspect many people are like me and use online filing software for that just as much as ease of filling out the forms.
I also only just realized that the IRS no longer just mails everybody a form 1040 and instruction book.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/opinion/filing-taxes-in-j...
They don't know what a given taxpayer owes. They can estimate based on various filings, but there is some stuff that is only reported by the taxpayer when filing. That said, it isn't an excuse to push all the work onto the taxpayer when almost all of what a typical taxpayer needs to fill out could be pre-populated.
> we're forced to spend hours tracking down documents and hoping we didn't mess up and get audited
That the IRS audits taxpayers is evidence that it doesn't ever conclusively know what some people were supposed to pay in a given year, let alone by 15APR of the following year.
Two years ago the paper form for standard federal 1040 was cut to about 1/4th its previous length. It's happening, just slowly.
(Yes, I still use the paper forms yearly for both federal and state. I've never seen any software as necessary for filing taxes...)
Unfortunately very few people seem to understand that government, intrinsically, is inefficient and bad at everything it does. This can not be avoided or changed it is the natural state of a monopoly.
They seem to be able to recognize that when a large corporation that has become monopoly that is bad for people, however they fail to recognize that government is the worst kind of monopoly as unlike a corporation, they have the legal authority to put you in a cage if you refuse them, and kill you if you resit the governments attempt to put you in that cage.
This is a laughably false statement. It's easy to find stories of government projects that came in ahead of schedule and under budget, but you have to look for them because those stories don't get nearly as much attention as the inverse.
Take the Hoover Dam, for example. That was one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in American history, and came in years ahead of schedule, and millions under budget.[0] Google around infrastructure publications and you'll find dozens more stories like this.
To say that every thing a government does is bad is to fundamentally ignore reality, which is that no, not everything the government does is bad. You can never be taken seriously making sweeping generalizations like that.
0: https://www.marketplace.org/2010/05/28/why-we-might-not-have...
Arguably, this high-level decision making is the only part that the government did, and should receive credit for, as the Six Companies consortium actually executed the construction.
It's unfortunate that these arguments often involve people talking past one another; governments (being made up of people) are obviously capable of good outcomes. They're also capable of generating bad or inefficient outcomes. Those two latter points are where I think there is value in the discussion: is a governmental act moral, and does it increase efficiency (in the sense of humanity prevailing against its default state).
I agree with this, but couldn't it also be applied inversely? If a government project experiences cost overruns due to a private contractor poorly estimating the project, shouldn't blame also be placed on said contractor? Success is so often privatized and failure socialized.
The entire purpose of project was because the government needed to find something for thousands of unemployed men to do. It was literally the definition of "busy work"
Further the budget was massively reduced because they did not have to concern themselves with minor things like environmental impact, or worker safety...
I hope that is not your only shinning example of government as it is very much tarnished by the stain of blood
And yet, we need it to work well if we want things like property rights, functioning markets, public safety, law and order and so on. So why not focus on how it could become better, instead of giving up on it?
Perhaps energy should be directed at the actual tax code complexity rather than software built to help navigate filing.
Ted Cruz's tax plan would have practically eliminated the need for TurboTax-type software. https://taxfoundation.org/details-and-analysis-senator-ted-c...
But, let's not forget what Milton Friedman had to say about tax reform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8