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How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)

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Re: How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)

#441

Post by Twirrim »

irrational wrote: post #221
Twirrim wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK has a similarly simple tax system as New Zealand. Taxes are taken out of pay every month, and that's it. Every individual gets assigned a tax code, and that tax code defines how much is taken from your pay. That tax code takes in to account how many kids you have etc. etc. The UK tends to approach tax deductions in a different way, preferring to subsidise stuff up front instead, so you never have to remember t…

Do you get any kind of deduction for giving to non-profits/charities? I give about 12-15% of my gross income to non-profits/charities every year and get a generous tax deduction for doing so. The other thing that tends to be complicated with my taxes is selling stocks. How does the UK handle things like that?

With tax, others have answered that.

People don't tend to invest so much in stocks, instead settling for other instruments, like ISAs that already handle the tax end of things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Savings_Account). ISAs are an attempt by the UK government to encourage saving / investment by providing tax incentives to do so. Again, tax considerations done upfront vs after-the-fact.

If you do invest in stocks, you're liable for capital gains tax, just like in the US, but whether you need to file or not is dependent on how much you actually made. If you make too much, you'll have to file taxes yourself, but it's relatively straightforward.

The point is not that the system is perfect, but that it handles the case for probably >90% of the population, without stress or complications for them.

Re: How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)

#442

Post by joering2 »

smsm42 wrote: post #244
joering2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quite a lot of it. E.g. my charity donations aren't. I think you missed the point. IRS will know about your charity donation shall you decide to give this information to TurboTax for TT to lower your tax burden. IF you don't want to lower your burden, don't give it to TT and don't give it to IRS, problem solved. So at the end of the day it doesn't matter if you provide something to TurboTax and they forward to IRS,…

> So at the end of the day it doesn't matter if you provide something to TurboTax and they forward to IRS, or IRS will have it directly from you by adding this information to your online tax form on Gov site. Ah, in this scenario it indeed wouldn't matter - but this scenario means that there's a government-run clone of TurboTax. I doubt the government will do better job and be cheaper than Intuit, which have a lot of…

> but this scenario means that there's a government-run clone of TurboTax.

No, in this scenario there is no place for companies like TurboTax in the first place.

> which have a lot of experience and knowledge in doing this.

TurboTax has more knowledge and experience in taxes than.. IRS ?

Re: How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)

#443

Post by hackuser »

MarkMc wrote: post #363
hackuser wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't use it without end-to-end encryption, and I probably wouldn't trust your implementation of encryption (no offense, but probably you can't be a wizard at both financial software and encryption software) unless you used some proven third-party solution. And even then ... I would just keep the data local and encrypted. Why do I need to put it in the cloud? However, I'm a tiny market of 1, and I and the HN cro…

Thanks for your feedback. I guess the benefits of putting your financial data in the cloud are the same as for any online system: Access your data from any computer, automatic backups, and easily share your data with other people (especially your accountant or co-workers). The problem is more about marketing - every online system claims to have strong security, and users have no way to test those claims. Users regula…

> I guess the benefits of putting your financial data in the cloud are the same as for any online system: Access your data from any computer, automatic backups, and easily share your data with other people (especially your accountant or co-workers).

I definitely could see that applying to business accounting, but not to my personal finances. I don't need to look at the latter very often, and very rarely do I need to share it with someone who can't look at my laptop.

Re: How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)

#445

Post by wpietri »

closeparen wrote: post #276
wpietri wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "only solution" is far too strong. It seems to me there are two sorts of lobbying: positive sum informing of legislators, and zero/negative sum jockeying for societal advantage. We want to keep the former and minimize the latter. So my proposal is: 1. Make all paid lobbying illegal. Make corporate donations to candidates, campaigns, and parties illegal. Eliminate revolving doors. Strongly limit individual don…

> Make all paid lobbying illegal. Regulatory capture is a problem, but I think you'd have much worse problems regulating complex industries without talking to them. For example, the FCC doesn't really exist to protect consumers from anyone, but to be the "traffic cop" protecting manufacturers and operators of radio equipment from each other. I have a hard time believing the FCC could make coherent rules and spectrum…

I didn't say nobody could talk to industry. See points 2-4.

If, e.g., the FCC believes they need input, they can ask. I expect that regulators would get in the habit of requesting quite a bit of information on a regular basis.

If trade associations would like to get Congress to attend to an important issue, they can call up a newspaper reporter and try to interest them in an article. And note that there's nothing stopping an individual citizen from calling up a representative and saying, "I'm an airline pilot, and I am concerned about urgent issue X!"

Lobbying is an arms race. The best solutions to arms races is to limit to the lowest sustainable level. And it's important to note that lobbyists are not just competing with other lobbyists. They're competing with everybody who can't hire a professional lobbyist. That is, the majority of America.

Re: How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)

#446

Post by wpietri »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #224
wpietri wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "only solution" is far too strong. It seems to me there are two sorts of lobbying: positive sum informing of legislators, and zero/negative sum jockeying for societal advantage. We want to keep the former and minimize the latter. So my proposal is: 1. Make all paid lobbying illegal. Make corporate donations to candidates, campaigns, and parties illegal. Eliminate revolving doors. Strongly limit individual don…

So questions to your proposal: 1) You make corporate political donations illegal, but that's pretty specific to a single class of interest group. What about those that regularly act in opposition to corporate interests, such as unions, environment groups, consumer groups? Your point 2 seems to imply they would be included, but why are you specific here as to the prohibition? Or do you propose to treat different assoc…

Thanks for the detailed questions.

1: I'm flexible. Corporate donations are the most problematic, in that they create a feedback loop. If I can lobby for a thing that gets me money, I can use some of the profits to buy more favorable legislation. But I'd be happy with pure public funding of elections, no donations allowed. Or an individuals-only model, where each person has a strong limit, like $250.

2: I left out for-profit corporations on purpose, but I'm sure there's a reasonable case for including them.

3: The same way we police campaign finance, lobbying, public records, and elected official ethics. That is, a variety of groups with investigative power who do their best to root out offenders. You couldn't eliminate everything, but as long as we got the bulk of it and reduced the financial incentives for elected officials to favor donors, I expect we'd do pretty well.

4: In this case by neutral I mean "paid by the government to serve the legislators". Sure, there are risks. But giving legislators their own well-funded research groups means they'll have to lean less on industry-created "facts".

Everything is of course corruptible, but perfection isn't my goal. We're already much less corrupt than most other countries [1], and I'm suggesting that we could do better by limiting or strictly controlling channels of information and money. Those old channels made more sense when we didn't all carry around all the world's opinions and information in our pockets.

[1] http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percepti...

Re: How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)

#447

Post by wpietri »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #314
wpietri wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "only solution" is far too strong. It seems to me there are two sorts of lobbying: positive sum informing of legislators, and zero/negative sum jockeying for societal advantage. We want to keep the former and minimize the latter. So my proposal is: 1. Make all paid lobbying illegal. Make corporate donations to candidates, campaigns, and parties illegal. Eliminate revolving doors. Strongly limit individual don…

I am writing a second reply to you because this is a new thought and only something I just remembered which seems to not be covered by your proposal. I was involved with a startup in the past several years where one of the people in the startup had a relative that was an official in a federal bureaucracy. The startup was in an area which was tangential to the regulatory authority of that bureaucracy, but relied on th…

Yeah, regulation is another thing entirely from legislation.

I think US regulators are much less of an issue than US legislators, in that normal government employees know that they are not supposed to take money from the companies they regulate. I'm sure it happens, but I think we already have decent mechanisms in place to handle that sort of corruption. And if they turned out to be insufficient, the way we'd fix that is through legislation, so I'd still want to focus on that for now.

Re: How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)

#448

Post by kobeya »

josefresco wrote: post #420
kobeya wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the largest military in reserve? No problem with that, personally. Having them used as they are now and deployments in the recent past, not so much.

A large military "in reserve" becomes stagnant, and unable to operate in new real world conflicts. Look at the Vietnam war, or the current conflict in the Ukraine. Tactics change, and large militaries bent on keeping their swollen budgets in tact are poor at responding to emerging threats. My point is that these smaller conflicts (albeit mostly misguided) are useful to guide and reform strategy, tactics and spending.

So we should kill a couple of hundred thousand people every decade or so to keep our game up? Seems pretty indefensible. I'd rather invest a much smaller amount of money into honest red team war gaming.

Re: How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (2013)

#449

Post by LoonyBalloony »

paulddraper wrote: post #432
LoonyBalloony wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even ones more complicated than 1040ez. Could you list any of these websites or PM me please?

I worked for the company that runs www.taxhawk.com and www.freetaxusa.com List of supported forms, including 1040: https://www.taxhawk.com/eligibility.jsp They don't do everything, but they certainly go beyond 1040EZ. Federal filing is free. They charge for federal extensions and state returns.

Thank you very much. :)
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