251–260 of 454 posts
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I'm an immigrant. I consider it a blessing to be able to do so.
I'm an immigrant. I consider it robbery to be intimidated by force into paying taxes.
Don't like it? Don't eat.
I live in New Zealand. I don't have to file taxes if my income is a standard wage my tax payments are automatic. My employer deducts them from my wage and they are sent to the IRD (Our government tax dept). My student loan and super payments are also automatic. If there is anything wrong then at the end of the tax year I can file to correct things. I also get donations rebates, this is a one page form that lists all…
It's almost that simple in the US if your situation is that simple. What happens in NZ if you make $400 selling vintage cabbage patch dolls on eBay? What if you earned $1k in returns on your investment account? What if you are renting your place out on Airbnb? If all you have is a simple income in the US, then the 1040ez is a single page and you can file it for free online if you make under a certain amount. You can…
Plus, tons of third-parties will file returns for free, even ones more complicated than 1040ez.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The United States has a complicated tax code because it attempts to make things more "fair" for some people. Some of these are things people like, such as deductions for people with children, paying mortage, etc. Some are more dubious.
Why is it fair to give a deduction for mortgage? Buying a home instead of renting is just choosing to invest in real estate instead of anything else you might invest in. Why artificially subsidize one extremely illiquid and volatile type of investment?
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You... love paying taxes?
Yes. I love paying taxes. Not because I like having less money in my bank account, but because I understand what paying taxes represents.
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Why is it fair to give a deduction for mortgage? Buying a home instead of renting is just choosing to invest in real estate instead of anything else you might invest in. Why artificially subsidize one extremely illiquid and volatile type of investment?
One could argue that by subsidizing home ownership you redistribute profit from people that rent out housing to those that would have been renting that housing.
When I read this, unfortunately I'm thinking "don't hate the player, hate the game". Lobbying is a double-edged sword, and it is a game played very well by the powerful and the rich.
A tangential issue: It seems almost impossible to me that the systems of tax preparation services, whether cloud-based, local software, or offline, are secure. The standard of security is, make the target more expensive to breach than it's worth to the attacker. How much would it be worth to have access to the tax returns of large swaths of the population? I don't know the answer, but I'm guessing it's easily worth b…
> I am very doubtful that Intuit or H&R Block, for example, invest in security sufficient to protect themselves against that level of attack. I can't speak to H&R Block, but I used to work for Intuit and I can attest that they took security very seriously. We were often subject to extreme security precautions despite the fact that the application I worked on didn't have any PII and the entire purpose of it was to mak…
This is almost the cononcial / text book example of when you would opt to host on a cloud provider.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's almost that simple in the US if your situation is that simple. What happens in NZ if you make $400 selling vintage cabbage patch dolls on eBay? What if you earned $1k in returns on your investment account? What if you are renting your place out on Airbnb? If all you have is a simple income in the US, then the 1040ez is a single page and you can file it for free online if you make under a certain amount. You can…
In practice, the difference between US and other countries is still pretty big. In US, about 60 percent of individual tax returns are filed by a professional tax preparer, at every income level. People who owe no income tax still have to file tax returns to receive tax credits. In many other modern countries, _the_majority_ of the tax payers file no tax returns at all.
I live in New Zealand. I don't have to file taxes if my income is a standard wage my tax payments are automatic. My employer deducts them from my wage and they are sent to the IRD (Our government tax dept). My student loan and super payments are also automatic. If there is anything wrong then at the end of the tax year I can file to correct things. I also get donations rebates, this is a one page form that lists all…
U.s. govt uses tax code to incentive behaviors. We have 1040ez which is almost as simple as the NZ system if citizens don't want or have any deductions.
I live in New Zealand. I don't have to file taxes if my income is a standard wage my tax payments are automatic. My employer deducts them from my wage and they are sent to the IRD (Our government tax dept). My student loan and super payments are also automatic. If there is anything wrong then at the end of the tax year I can file to correct things. I also get donations rebates, this is a one page form that lists all…
because far too many people vote against their own interest just so gay people can't get married, or transgenders using the right bathrooms or to stop the war on christmas or whatever fake crisis was invented for that election year.