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Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

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Re: Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

#141

Post by avar »

ams6110 wrote: post #21
ars wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone earns money via income. You have to define what "income" is exactly, then it starts getting complicated...... Example: I route my investment earning via a company, that company can claim expenses such as paying my utility bills and buying my groceries, anything leftover they give me. They work it out so my net income is zero, oops. It's easier actually to tax purchases.

Taxing consumption would rapidly explode into a vast array of categories and rates for different types of consumption, luxury taxes, etc. Food, maybe no tax. But maybe there's some tax if it's ready-to-eat. Or based on sugar content. Automobiles maybe taxed rather heavily, but the first $5000 is exempt so poor people can buy cheap cars, etc. It would become just as complicated as the current code.

Iceland (where I'm from originally, so I'm familiar with it) is already your worst nightmare when it comes to this. There's a 500 page PDF[1] exhaustively detailing every product category and what tolls & fixed fees you pay on certain products. Ketchup 0% toll, Mayo 0% but 19 ISK per kg etc. Turn to page 50 and you can see different tolls & fees for different types of cabbage.

It's an entirely byzantine system, but because it's happening when products are imported, or at the point of sale, it's vastly easier for consumers than an equivalent system that works through tax rebates.

Things on that list occasionally become a political issue. E.g. the tax on added sugar has gone back & forth a couple of times depending on who's in government.

Still, this adds zero complexity to your tax return, or to the average person's interaction with the government or private businesses.

1. https://www.tollur.is/library/Skrar/Tollskra/Tollskr%C3%A1%2...

Re: Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

#142

Post by nickpsecurity »

pillowkusis wrote: post #90
nickpsecurity wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the simplest I've heard is a limit on how much any one person can donate to a politician's campaign in any form. And only individual voters can donate. No corporations. Make it a high-end felony to forge that. Make banks track it. That would be a start. In this case, it would've blocked Intuit from buying a politician mentioned in the HN comments. That might have prevented opposition by that politician. Amplif…

Individual people already have a limit: https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/limits.php That said, allowing only individual entities to donate would be an improvement. But money would still find its way through, in unlimited amounts, through 1. SuperPACs, which are not allowed to communicate with a candidate, technically, but can receieve an infinite amount of money to further interests that are functionally identica…

Both solved by only allowing politicians in office to receive money directly from individuals at the rate limit and of course their pay checks. SuperPAC's can't give them money. Lobbyists can't give them money. That eliminates large part of the incentive.

There's other to tackle such as advertising. One way to do that might be that any paid advertisements for or against a politician must be paid for by the politician's registered donations. Corporate media might then try to offer extra due to their bias or for favors. That's an unknown right now, though, given they currently do it in exchange for the ad revenue that would go down a lot.

Re: Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

#143

Post by megablast »

jkaptur wrote: post #116
avar wrote: post #110

This whole thread is full of comments from people who obviously haven't read the article / listened to the podcast in question[1]. Joseph Bankman proposed ReadyReturn in California, which is the kind of tax return pretty much the entirety of the rest of the western world uses. I.e. instead of an empty return, it's pre-filled in with the details the government knows anyway. This vastly simplifies things for most peopl…

I think that a major component of Norquist's thinking is that the more painful people find taxes (including the process of calculating them) the more they'll support his agenda of "a government so small you could drown it in a bathtub".

Which is also one of the big reasons the US is one of the few countries that don't automatically add on sales tax.

Re: Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

#144

Post by sjwright »

icebraining wrote: post #87
javajosh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right speech is independent of its volume. Money can only increase volume, so get rid of it. Money isn't speech, it's amplification of speech, and as such should not be protected.

If a candidate makes a speech in the woods... You proposal is a recipe for electing only celebrities, who don't need money to be amplified.

Surely less bad than the status quo.

Re: Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

#145

Post by sjwright »

smt88 wrote: post #88
gnopgnip wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you fix money in politics without making the whole system worse?

1) Campaigning is restricted to a short time period, perhaps 6 months. 2) Every candidate gets a (small) fixed budget, paid for by tax-payers. (This is already the practice in some countries.) 3) Ads are subject to the same laws that govern ads for products: say whatever you want, but you can be sued for lying. Any of those ideas sound good?

That's pretty much what we have in Australia — except the campaign period is much shorter still, around 6-8 weeks.

Re: Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

#146

Post by scythe »

cwkoss wrote: post #108
TeMPOraL wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more important question I never see addressed is how you prevent "money in politics" from unfixing itself as soon as you're done with the fixing? Money and political influence are two sides of the same coin - power. Money gives more influence, which attracts more money, and so on, in a positive feedback loop. How do we break, or at least control, that loop? Is it even possible?

Decentralization of power. For example, I'd love to see a progressive tax rate for corporations: companies' tax rates would be based on total revenue or profits. ex. If your company earns less than $50k/year, no taxes, 10% tax rate up to 250k, 20% up to $1M, 40% up to 10M, 50% on earnings over $10M. This would provide a strong incentive to only maintain a large corporation if the value of your economy of scale exceed…

IIRC this is the situation (or with a slightly different mechanism such as regulations affecting only large companies) in e.g. France and some other European countries, but an unintended consequence is that the ownership structure of large corporations becomes complex and usually spread across multiple countries, such as the infamous tax-avoidance strategies used by IKEA. This creates a barrier to entry that makes large actors more entrenched in some cases. The best way to see this in action is to compare the ages of the largest European companies (e.g. BASF) with the ages of the largest American companies (incl. Amazon, Google); the largest American companies are generally much younger.

Re: Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

#147

Post by angry_octet »

fnordsensei wrote: post #138
jkaptur wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that a major component of Norquist's thinking is that the more painful people find taxes (including the process of calculating them) the more they'll support his agenda of "a government so small you could drown it in a bathtub".

Right! We can't make the government less awful, because happy people might not show us the support we need for our cause to make the government less awful.

it is not about the government being objectively awful, it is about the government regulating. A great deal of the tax code is about giving certain groups tax breaks while preventing other people from using those to create loopholes to avoid taxes. The conservative tax lobbyists actually want to reduce the effectiveness of taxation not its complexity.

Re: Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

#148

Post by scythe »

eigenman wrote: post #118
TeMPOraL wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more important question I never see addressed is how you prevent "money in politics" from unfixing itself as soon as you're done with the fixing? Money and political influence are two sides of the same coin - power. Money gives more influence, which attracts more money, and so on, in a positive feedback loop. How do we break, or at least control, that loop? Is it even possible?

I don't think you can fix money in politics without unduly limiting free speech, and even if you do, those who call foul on political spending hold the power. I think the only practical way to fix this problem is to remove the two party system which allows representatives to vote against the interests of their constituents except on the issues that strongly separate left and right. And the only way to remove the two…

Part of the problem is that people are capable of getting to "FPTP is kinda bad", and they have heard enough about experiments with instant-runoff and scoring (incl. approval) methods, where some election had a weird result, that they realize a single-winner system won't fix things, but everyone's conclusion is:

"some kind of proportional system"

You can't implement a real government with a metasyntactic electoral system, obviously. You need a specific system. I think the answer is Schulze STV, but most people don't know what that is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_STV

Re: Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

#149

Post by avar »

hundt wrote: post #139
avar wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had to file US taxes so this might be a stupid question, but how exactly are the people in your example worse off with ReadyReturn? Isn't ReadyReturn just e.g. summing up their reported wages for the return, which they'd need to do accurately anyway if they were filling it in from scratch? Yes, if you have a pre-filled in tax return nothing that the government doesn't know about & which might be deductible…

It's not a stupid question at all. In practice the U.S. tax code is not quite as simple as "Here is the tax burden for your income level; tell us if you have any deductions." Right off the bat, you need to determine your "filing status" (single, married, head of household, and some less common options) from a list of five choices, each of which has different rules for all the calculations that follow. Furthermore, fo…

What you're saying makes sense, but doesn't at all jive with the reported 99% satisfaction rate in the pilot program.

Wouldn't more than 1% have noticed an increased tax burden? Or perhaps the focus group wasn't diverse enough.

Re: Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

#150

Post by slg »

avar wrote: post #110

This whole thread is full of comments from people who obviously haven't read the article / listened to the podcast in question[1]. Joseph Bankman proposed ReadyReturn in California, which is the kind of tax return pretty much the entirety of the rest of the western world uses. I.e. instead of an empty return, it's pre-filled in with the details the government knows anyway. This vastly simplifies things for most peopl…

If this system is so popular, why can't it be introduced as a proposition in California? Take the lobbyist and politicians out of the equation and it should win easily.
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