> socialized health care is expensive

Socialized health care? There's no such thing in Switzerland.

Sure, health insurance is mandatory. No question that it's heavily regulated (i.e. basic insurance can't rule you out or discriminate against you for pre-existing conditions).

But socialized health care? Give me a break.

> like the ~20 page tax declaration that is due this month

The actual declaration is covered by 4 basic pages. In addition there's a declaration of assets and a couple of helper pages for deductions.

You can download tax declaration software for free (at least in the canton of Zürich) and using it for your declaration takes all of 20 minutes.

It may be a bit more complex if you own real estate, or if some other complexities are involved.

You either don't have a clue or you're massively over-exaggerating for reasons, which elude me.

Taxes? You fill in the form in on your computer and can file it digitally. And if you print it it‘s encoded in a format similar to QR codes.

Tax offices are fully digital since at least 10 years. If you file with paper it‘s scanned and destroyed. Your local tax office receives all the documents digitally. Of course this could vary by canton.

> Of course this could vary by canton.

It does. Zurich still sends me a thick envelope with the 20 pages and tells me to throw away 90% of it if I do my taxes digitally.

I actually double checked.

What they send out (and yes, in the canton of Zürich) is two A3 pages (printed on both sides) a form informing you how to extend sending it in and, most ironically, an A4 page informing, why they send out less paperwork

It's right in front of me. So feel free to prove me wrong.

You should check your envelope again. If you did your taxes online in the past you don’t even have to snail mail the receipts anymore, they accept digital copies/photographs now.

I only got this the first time after moving here, after that they switched to just sending me the access code.

In backward Wallis, I've been receiving a single folded A3 page for at least 5 years. And since last year, I could even snapshot the substantiating documents with my mobile and attach them to my digital tax form if I wanted to.

Also, person-based systems break down when asked to scale suddenly, because it takes a while to hire and train more people. We already saw this with how quickly even contact tracing systems break down when infections go above a certain point. Depending on economic conditions, there also may not be people to hire; pre-COVID, there were public transport funds in Seattle being unused, because there was not enough drivers to spend the funds on.

Another example, comparing how digital COVID payments in South Korea were a lot simpler and faster than in paperwork-heavy Japan: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-20/in-virus-...

There seems to be plenty of economic incentive for automation in the US without socialized health care.

It has occured to me though that one thing that makes automation and digitalization of society "affordable" by comparison to human labor is -- skimping on security, building this giant house of insecure fragile IT. If we were to actually pay for reliable secure systems we probably couldn't afford the computers-replace-person-hours version either, not sure where that would leave us.

The USA-ians definitely like their money as much as the Swiss.

Tax declaration are the cantons (state) responsibility . Some are further than others. I filled out my first declaration some 14 years ago via a web platform.

Most everything being decentralized maybe makes nationwide digitalization slower, but that is crucial aspect of the political system.