> all sorts of tax deductions over the years to incentivize things like [...]

But plenty of other countries have those too and manage to not have an insanely complex tax-filling regime?

> but it's not that simple

I think if the main difference between the US and other countries is the aforementioned "corporate bogeyman", it probably does boil down to being that simple.

> But plenty of other countries have those too and manage to not have an insanely complex tax-filling regime?

Citation needed. How can you have a non-complex tax filing regime when you have so many deductions and credits that only the taxpayer knows about or has documentation of?

When I donate to a charity, they don’t report my donations directly to the IRS (nor should they - we don’t want the government to be collecting data on everyone’s charity giving). I have to collect the letters they send me at the end of the year and total my donations in order to deduct my charitable contributions. The government never even knows what charities I donated to unless I’m audited and they ask for proof.

> that only the taxpayer knows about or has documentation of?

Therein lies the rub, I suspect; other countries do know about what you're doing with the deductions and credits which means the tax office can handle all that for you - and, indeed, they are much more suited to be handling this - rather than pushing it onto each individual to try and scrabble together once a year.

I suppose we can add "incoherent fear of the government" to "corporate bogeyman" to the list of reasons the US has a messed up tax situation.

> (nor should they - we don’t want the government to be collecting data on everyone’s charity giving)

You do if there's specific tax breaks for doing that.

There are some people who are weirdly anti-charity, saying that all of it should be done through taxes? I don't understand their point of view.

Thread drift, but my objection to encouraging charitable giving is that the more you rely on charity to fund the public good, the more you rely on (largely) millionaires and billionaires to decide what counts as a public good. In other words the average citizen doesn’t get to vote on what good gets funded. This means givers’ pet causes get funded rather than projects that are democratically chosen.

It is possible (even likely) that I've misunderstood people who were just being hyperbolic and didn't mean to be taken literally, but my impression was that some were saying that literally no charity organizations should be necessary? I (somewhat..) understand the "but then the wealthy are determining what gets done" thing, as a reason to not rely too much on it, but it seems clear to me that there are also major inefficiencies in having to go through a consensus process of government democracy, rather than people simply acting in smaller groups, independent of a larger consensus, to further charitable causes. It seems clear that there are cases where charities work better than govt programs alone, and it is a clear error to think that all charities would be better handled as a govt service, even if some would be better handled by one.

Hmm, if the government were to run a quadratic funding of charities thing, with only rather limited requirements for eligibility, perhaps that would somewhat alleviate the "undemocratic" complaint? (It would have to make it illegal to pay someone else to participate in your stead though.)

I like your last point.

The rest of your post is based on the implicit assumpion that anything government run is inherently bureaucratic and slow and charities are instead simple and fast. But that's an orthogonal issue. Some level of bureaucracy is needed to prevent misuse, otherwise you have a rich guy pay their fines from their charity. Beyond that, there is no inherent reason for charities to be more efficient. You could make those governmnent-charities have local oversight, they could be organized very efficiently too and have the advantage of democratic legitimacy.

I suspect most of them are actually saying that relying on charity for some things is a bad idea, which isn't inherently anti-charity.

I don't think it's enough reason to not give to charities because people need help right now but the fact that food pantries exist makes my blood boil. It is beyond ridiculous that feeding our most vulnerable people requires a charity to take would be thrown out food from grocery stores and inefficiently spread them around a network of churches staffed by volunteers.

If only there was a massive logistics network for getting food everywhere we could use.

there are many who think others should pay for what they themselves consider important and even get some glee out of forcing people they don't like to pay for something they otherwise would not.

then you run into those who think , why should I give to charity because its the government's job to fix that...

and finally those who just don't care

charity exist for those want to focus their person effort to fix their world and should be encourage but never be required

Basically, the tax code is used by governments as an incentive mechanism to manipulate entities into behaving in ways they want.

Which can be a good thing. If there's an activity with negative (positive) externalities, then there's a deadweight loss, which can be corrected by taxing (subsidizing) that activity.

Depends on whether you agree with what the people in charge define as a 'good thing'.

In a democratic government, you might like how a powerful tool is being wielded when your people are in charge, and be terrified when the 'other' is in charge.

It's as simple as not deducting my taxes from my paycheck and forcing me to pay in. Almost as if I'd never be overtaxed then.

Can't you already set your withholding to 0?