Lobbying, duh. Definitely not a bribe.

It's pretty wild that legal lobbying + the realities of campaign finance effectively mean that our government has instituted a policy of mandatory bribery. I mean, democracy is always going to have warts, but this one is really special.

(quack)

Seriously, though, go on. I'm dying to hear how you've got a definition of "lobbying" that cleverly gerrymanders around all the corrupt dealmaking and only includes purely informational communication. I can't wait to hear why we should confuse this definition -- which seems precision-engineered to deflect blame away from certain shortfalls in our political apparatus -- with the common usage of the term, which frequently refers to real life events and therefore inevitably includes a great many situations where the thing going "quack" is, in fact, a duck.

Registered lobbyists work for interest groups to have their voices heard. It's not always innocent, but it is not the same problem as campaign financing. Money is not changing hands.

Its sticky because that's not the only purposes; GOP politicians who want to campaign against taxes to push serial tax cuts weighted to the rich as the solution to every problem also want to preserve the current filing system as a source of leverage because it makes the perceived burden of taxes higher, though some of them (e.g., flat taxers) are willing to trade it off in exchange for a permanent massive downward redistribution of tax burden.

I'm not talking about pushing “exemptions”, I’m talking about motivation for specifically not allowing the IRS to prepare and provide taxpayers with a baseline calculation based on information they have as a complete return for the common simple cases requiring supplemental filing for compelx cases.

> Notice the Democratic support state tax exemption

Both Democrats and Republicans support the State and Local Tax Deduction; the GOP supports a dollar cap so as to increase pressure for low-tax state policies (more than would exist without the deduction at all or with an ubcapped deduction), Democrats prefer it be untaxed which leaves the federal hand off state tax policy.

It's just unjustifiable that we have the current system in place. There is not one single, rational argument to be made that US citizens are better off having to file their taxes every year. A system in which people get a tax bill from the government with an explanation of how it's calculate, then they can file their own tax return if they disagree, is just clearly better in every single way.

I think Intuit is a company that makes a lot of really useful products, but I can't look at them as anything except just utterly unethical because of their lobbying on this topic.