Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 405 posts

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

#301

Post by mfukar »

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…

> Grover Norquist, the well known promoter of the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" took the counterintuitive view that just making the process easier equated to a new tax, since taxpayers might end up paying taxes already on the books that they might have previously unintentionally evaded.

I just fail to understand the logic exercised by some US residents. Norquist's argument is insane, and if you're not only trying to be kind to it and not call it as such, your stance towards it seems insane to me too.

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

#302

Post by aninhumer »

dragonwriter wrote: post #293
ericd wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting link, but don't you think it's a bit complicated? I think the opacity of the determination method could lead to a lot of mistrust from the general public. What's the problem with just assigning a number 0-10 for every candidate that you care to, and summing up the points? Or just instant runoff?

> What's the problem with just assigning a number 0-10 for every candidate that you care to, and summing up the points? The problem with this (Range Voting) that there is no consistent mapping from preferences to 1-10 ratings, so that equivalent ballots have different meaning and equivalent preferences result in different ballots from different voters. Approval has the same problem for normal elections. This issue is…

>equivalent ballots have different meaning

Isn't this just a fundamental problem with voting? In FPTP, one voter might not like the candidate they vote for as much as someone else, or in a ranked system, someone might like their 1st and 2nd choices a lot more than their 3rd choice.

We give everyone's vote equal weight, and they can decide how to use that. Within that constraint Range Voting gives people the most freedom to express their true preferences.

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

#303

Post by jonnybgood »

meddlepal wrote: post #230
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'm nearing the point of being completely convinced nothing is actually improvable anymore in the US. If you touch anything, even the most broken or inhumane thing, you'll find someone defending it until the death either because of vested interests or ignorance.

I wouldn't stress too hard. US politics has always been like this. Slavery and then later civil rights are the two biggest examples. As long as there are those who keep up the Good Fight change does happen.

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

#304

Post by pas »

RobertoG wrote: post #298
losoq wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately "starving the beast" doesn't seem to actually work. Low tax revenues don't lead to lower spending, just fiscal indiscipline. I personally would prefer a leaner federal state but it's not clear how to get there. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/starve_the_beas_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast#Economic_anal... https://niskanencenter.org/blog/cant-make-government-smaller...

When I read this "starve the beast" thing, I can't avoid to ask myself where this people think the money is coming from in the first place? In order to tax, the government have to spend before.

There's this thing called the economy, full of private entities, all transacting throughout the year, creating wealth, expanding the money supply, generating a bit of inflation, and so on.

Yes, the fiscal multiplier is important, but simple problems like corruption (regulatory capture and federal/state/county/municipality contracts to clients) and (very) unequal accumulation of wealth leading to serious power inequality seem more relevant today.

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

#305

Post by wkz »

I live in Sweden. Just a few days ago I audited and filed my returns for 2016, it took me about 2 minutes.

1. Go to skatteverket.se (IRS), enter your "personnummer" (SSN).

2. Open the BankID app on my phone, which contains an X509 certificate identifing me, issued by my bank. Enter my password to decrypt the cert's private key and sign the authetication ticket from skatteverket.se.

3. Audit my pre-filled returns. Contains all information about income tax, captial gains tax and so on.

4. Press "Sign", enter password in BankID again to sign the returns.

5. Smell the roses.

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

#306

Post by pas »

spinlock wrote: post #275
toomuchtodo wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US government lends itself SS and Medicare funds because there is no safer asset class than US treasuries.

Bullshit. The government bond traded for SS and Medicare funds is not sold on the open market. It has got zero to do with the risk free rate of return. The government can default on all SS and Medicare payments without affecting any bond holders.

It shouldn't even have to hold bonds, it's a closed system, so why exactly? The Social Security system is funded by the current active population, and the beneficiaries are the inactives of past generations.

Sure, it's great that in theory your payroll tax is converted into a bond, and then when you retire they sell it and pay you from that, but ... that's not what's happening in the big picture, because if there's surplus then it just lowers the yearly deficit in the federal budget. (As it happened for years, but the fund will be depleted around 2034.)

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

#307

Post by sooheon »

pas wrote: post #304
RobertoG wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read this "starve the beast" thing, I can't avoid to ask myself where this people think the money is coming from in the first place? In order to tax, the government have to spend before.

There's this thing called the economy, full of private entities, all transacting throughout the year, creating wealth, expanding the money supply, generating a bit of inflation, and so on. Yes, the fiscal multiplier is important, but simple problems like corruption (regulatory capture and federal/state/county/municipality contracts to clients) and (very) unequal accumulation of wealth leading to serious power inequal…

Expanding the money supply and controlling inflation are precisely the things the Fed does (with monetary policy, the fiscal multiplier is only part of it).

Re: corruption and concentration of wealth, I see no reason why government should have a monopoly on that. The 2007 crisis, and Enron before it, and countless other scandals, are evidence of the former being rampant in capitalism. The observation that without exogenous (non-capitalistic) forces, return on capital will always outpace economic growth (popularized by Piketty) is evidence of the latter.

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

#308

Post by pas »

avmich wrote: post #242
quadrangle wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"IRS gets a loan" is metaphorically true in a sense but really doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The IRS doesn't actually get money from taxpayers at all. The IRS is just the bureaucracy that determines things. The money that you "pay" in federal taxes is just dollars that are deleted out of existence so that the dollars created by federal spending don't create inflation. The federal government's "cash flow" is made up en…

> The money that you "pay" in federal taxes is just dollars that are deleted out of existence so that the dollars created by federal spending don't create inflation. Does it mean that taxation in another country is different than taxation in US? Especially in a country where local currency has a fixed exchange rate to US dollar? They presumably can't create money that easily.

No, it isn't.

The same cycle goes around in other countries, the fixed exchange rate (it's called "pegged to the dollar") means that the central bank has to do open market transactions (on/in foreign exchange market venues) to achieve that fixed ratio.

That means that in case the rate of inflation, economic growth, balance of accounts of foreign trade, etc. differs between the particular country's and the corresponding metric of the USA, then they will have to act. (Of course it's not a top-to-bottom thing, but it's directly influenced by forex markets, therefore there are a lot of speculation when central banks try to maintain a fixed ratio of anything to whatever. [You might remember when the CHF/EUR ratio started to go haywire and the Swiss central bank intervened ... and then suddenly stopped that intervention.])

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

#309

Post by gsnedders »

spoonie wrote: post #262
virmundi wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that had more to do with the fractured taxing powers of the Feds, state and various local taxing authorities. For example Florida sales tax is 6%, but my county charges a 1% tax to provide sand road maintenance and paving. Pretacking is easy enough once in the stores, but somewhat odd when dealing with taxed and no taxes items.

It's the same in Canada: different sales tax/VAT rates in different provinces on different goods. E.g. HST on clothes in Ontario but no tax at all on clothes in P.E.I. I think it does have a lot to do with the federal system. The UK is unitary, so there is a flat 20% VAT on everything taxable, which is included in the sticker price. I wonder if Australia includes tax?

The UK has three different VAT bands: 20%, 5%, and 0%. (And then there's VAT exempt items, which aren't the same as 0%!)

See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax_(United_Kingdo....

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

#310

Post by RobertoG »

pas wrote: post #304
RobertoG wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read this "starve the beast" thing, I can't avoid to ask myself where this people think the money is coming from in the first place? In order to tax, the government have to spend before.

There's this thing called the economy, full of private entities, all transacting throughout the year, creating wealth, expanding the money supply, generating a bit of inflation, and so on. Yes, the fiscal multiplier is important, but simple problems like corruption (regulatory capture and federal/state/county/municipality contracts to clients) and (very) unequal accumulation of wealth leading to serious power inequal…

"There's this thing called the economy, full of private entities,[..]"

Sure, but in order to interact, private entities, use money, that it's backed and come from the government. If you "starve the beast" you could discover that it's all of us who are feeding from its blood.

That's not so strange, because, after all, the beast is all of us.

Post reply on HN