221–230 of 438 posts
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Are you suggesting those "excessive" velocities are not actually safe?
If you look at the stopping distances at 80+ mph I don't see how you can argue those speeds are safe.
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It is not that simple and there are deeper issues. If buying out politicians was easy Google and Amazon would have easily raised H1B cap by now. Just like in immigration there are multiple forces at play in taxation too. The powerful anti-tax group (which I support) is against this simplification problem. We believe making it simple would also make it simple to raise taxes and people will not realise how much money t…
> We believe making it simple would also make it simple to raise taxes and people will not realise how much money they are paying to the government. In other words you think people are too dumb to do the math, but yet are smart enough to make intelligent protests against taxes when they have to write a check?
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This is certainly true. In particular, Americans for Tax Reform (the group founded by Grover Norquist) lobbies against any attempt at making paying taxes easier for this reason. Their argument is that people should be constantly aware of how much they are paying in taxes, and making it too easy would hinder this. These groups, combined with tax preparation companies, prevent any meaningful attempt to make paying taxe…
> Their argument is that people should be constantly aware of how much they are paying in taxes, and making it too easy would hinder this. Which is so stupid because so many people have no idea at all what they pay in taxes because of employer withholding. I knew more than one coworker who thought they didnt pay taxes because they get a check back at the end of the year. They had no idea how withholding worked until…
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It is a straightforward answer: This is because the IRS would make less money. It is like a poker game. Their number can only be smaller than yours. If you go under their number they penalize you. If you go over their number they keep the difference.
> It is a straightforward answer: It's also patent nonsense.
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It is not that simple and there are deeper issues. If buying out politicians was easy Google and Amazon would have easily raised H1B cap by now. Just like in immigration there are multiple forces at play in taxation too. The powerful anti-tax group (which I support) is against this simplification problem. We believe making it simple would also make it simple to raise taxes and people will not realise how much money t…
This would be fine and good if: 1. There was any relation between how much we spent and what we pay in taxes. There isn't. In the U.S., so-called "fiscal conservatives" routinely give massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while simultaneously voting to increase spending in the largest discretionary spending category we have: the military—which currently represents 53.7% of our discretionary budget. 2. People…
> People currently had any idea what they were spending on taxes.
This is precisely the opposition to IRS doing your taxes for you. Imagine you receive a bill every month that shows the clearly what all these payments are and you have to write separate checks.
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> The IRS have all the data Not..entirely true. My 2016 taxes were professionally done, but we somehow forgot to include one of the something-something-1099 forms from a brokerage firm. The brokerage reported some RSU stock-sells to the IRS but didn't report the cost-basis, and so the IRS assumed the cost-basis was $0 and thus taxed the full sale as income (effectively double-taxing all the RSUs). They just sent a ta…
> Not..entirely true. Obviously. You should read categorical statements like this one as, "The IRS [often and in many of the most common cases] have all the data." That's a generally-applicable, useful, mental substitution that saves us from unnecessary and constant waffling and equivocation in everyday conversation.
So they only know your revenues, not your expenses. And this applies for business as well as personal.
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Most people have tax withheld from their paycheck then are delighted to receive a refund the next year. I don't think that provides any meaningful awareness of how much they are really paying, any more than if the process were entirely automatic.
Irrational feeling people have with tax refunds. If you receive a high refund you should be crying. That is money you lost. Nobody is giving you free money. With a really pessimistic 5% return, you ended up paying $5 more per $100 of refund...
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The IRS has actually run trials like this in the past. Very successful, at least for simply W2-based returns, since most people's taxable transactions get reported by companies anyway (i.e., mortgages/interest, other income, etc.) and most people use the standardized deduction. Inuit and Quicken subsequently lobbied to end those programs and even bar the IRS from running similar programs...
Nearly everyone I've talked to (on both sides of the political spectrum) agrees on this issue; if the IRS has the means to verify and audit the data, they might as well prepare the forms and just get authorization (+ any additional info they might be lacking) before tax returns are submitted. So how is it that lobbying alone is enough to persuade lawmakers to take the side of Intuit et al.? And which lawmakers are so…
The lobbying is a big part, but the other part is anti-tax ideologues in Congress want to keep the tax process as painful as possible so that people are as angry as possible about taxes, to maximize support for and engagement on anti-tax policies.
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I don't think this would prevent you from using a CPA or Itemizing your return. However, this system could be very beneficial for the 68.5% of the population that doesn't itemize[1]. [1] https://taxfoundation.org/who-itemizes-deductions/
I never itemized and I’m pretty sure the IRS could never do my tax forms while I was in China...heck, they never even asked for anything like a W2 since my income was all foreign.
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http://www.sehinc.com/news/truth-about-speed-limits-explaine... There is no guarantee that a speed limit will have any effect on driving behaviors. The fact is, when driving, most motorists choose a speed in which they personally feel both comfortable and safe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Travel_speeds on a free-flowing section in 1992, the recorded average speed was 132 km/h (82 mph) with 51% of drivers exceeding the recommended speed. The autobahn has a long history proving that people feel comfortable and safe at excessive velocities.