> It’s a highly competitive market.

It's a competitive market on a stupid game. The market solutions (maybe mostly just intuit) fight to keep the game near impossible for the lay person to play. They generate "GDP" by making it more grievous than it need be.

At least part of this is a symptom of a broken political system (the current process of voting encourages 2 party system which are incentivized to not experiment)

The political system is this way because the cities/urban areas and the rural areas have fundamentally different interests, and the vast majority of the resources and land area isn’t in urban areas.

The federal gov’t has enough power to make either of these groups miserable; and so each is using it to fight out who gets to do so.

Picking one to win isn’t going to stop the conflict, but it could turn it into a shooting war.

There's a monopoly to a first-order approximation.

Apparently TurboTax has ~70% market share for tax preparation software, and TurboTax + H&R Block have ~95% market share. [0]

But even that's still a heck of a lot more competitive and responsive than if the IRS shipped the only tax prep solution.

[0] https://secondmeasure.com/datapoints/tax-prep-2021-turbotax-...

No, not even by "first order approximation" because plenty of returns are done without any software at all, or done by professionals with different software.

> Dozens of companies sell online products to file

They all suck, and in a better society, that number for normal people would be close to 'zero', because the IRS could just send me a bill to attest to and sign.