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Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

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Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#181

Post by toast0 »

bzbarsky wrote: post #170
toast0 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as of tax year 2018. SALT deduction is capped at $10k, standard deduction for married filing joint is $24k. I don't think you can get $14k worth of deductible mortgage interest, but I guess maybe. If you're filing single with a mortgage, it seems more likely to end up with itemized, still.

> I don't think you can get $14k worth of deductible mortgage interest Sure you can. Even with the new $750k cap, and if you assume a (very low; chances are it's higher by a factor of 1.5 or 2) rate of 2%, you can get to $15k. If you assume a 4% rate, then you get to $14k with a $350k mortgage. In various coastal-metro markets that's basically an entry-level house. The other common itemized deduction is charitable co…

> Sure you can.

Thanks -- I hadn't done the math, and was mostly grumpy about my mortgage interest + SALT not being enough. No significant charitable donations this year, I bunched up with a DAF in tax year 2017 for several reasons.

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#183

Post by floren »

mullen wrote: post #146
floren wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked with an independent tax preparer for the last few years. In January, I walk over to a nearby restaurant where we meet, I hand over tax documents, she makes sure it's all there and asks some brief questions. A week or two later, she sends the completed state & federal forms along with the appropriate authorizations which will allow her to file on my behalf. I pay $200 for this service and consider it far…

Your tax preparer probably uses Intuit's tax preparation software for professions. I think it is called ProConnect.

Good point! I don't know what she uses :/

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#184

Post by MR4D »

pwncake wrote: post #178
MR4D wrote: post #174

You know, I get the uproar about this, but I'd like to put one thought into your heads before you respond: Imagine, as complicated as tax forms are, and as obtuse as the IRS instructions are compared to TurboTax. Now imagine the government puts up a website for you to file your taxes. Do you really want to use that? Do you think it will be as easy to use? Do you think you'll have a nice wizard to walk you through it?…

Then why crush the option? Let the market determine it. If Intuit's product is so much better then it will win.

Because the free-priced government option will drive out the non-free commercial providers. Even if this only lasted a few years, it would put some of them out of business.

In other words, for the same reason we have laws against unfair competition.

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#185

Post by dragonwriter »

MR4D wrote: post #174

You know, I get the uproar about this, but I'd like to put one thought into your heads before you respond: Imagine, as complicated as tax forms are, and as obtuse as the IRS instructions are compared to TurboTax. Now imagine the government puts up a website for you to file your taxes. Do you really want to use that? Do you think it will be as easy to use? Do you think you'll have a nice wizard to walk you through it?…

> Seriously - I get the frustration of the current situation, but if you've ever done it on paper and have anything other than the 1040EZ form, this should give you pause.

Imagine if back when we had paper forms H&R Bloch had managed to lobby Congress to prohibit the IRS from providing free forms and mail in processing directly to taxpayers, and instead required them to work with private vendors to provide proprietary forms and postal tax filing solutions? Would this really be better? How does “with a computer” change this?

And, yes, I've done 1040 and 1040A filing by paper in the past

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#186

Post by tptacek »

renholder wrote: post #161
rayiner wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, the social security administration gives out social security numbers. But that aside, more than 40% of children don't live with both biological birth parents: https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-than-60-of-u-s-kids-live-wit... . So your automated calculation will get it wrong almost half the time. > All of those tax credits you mention are given by our respective tax agencies when we become employed and/or w…

> Every year, I have to dig up receipts for what we spent on daycare, what we spent out of our HSA accounts, etc. The government doesn't track any of that. Aside from the daycare costs (as an aside, creche in Ireland is quite decent[0]), isn't all of that is still reported to the IRS? Your HSA isn't sitting in some dark corner that the government doesn't know about, ever since the Patriot Act, yeah? I'm fairly certai…

No, your day care does not make itemized reports of potential deductions for all its clients to the IRS.

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#187

Post by MR4D »

dragonwriter wrote: post #185
MR4D wrote: post #174

You know, I get the uproar about this, but I'd like to put one thought into your heads before you respond: Imagine, as complicated as tax forms are, and as obtuse as the IRS instructions are compared to TurboTax. Now imagine the government puts up a website for you to file your taxes. Do you really want to use that? Do you think it will be as easy to use? Do you think you'll have a nice wizard to walk you through it?…

> Seriously - I get the frustration of the current situation, but if you've ever done it on paper and have anything other than the 1040EZ form, this should give you pause. Imagine if back when we had paper forms H&R Bloch had managed to lobby Congress to prohibit the IRS from providing free forms and mail in processing directly to taxpayers, and instead required them to work with private vendors to provide proprietar…

That's not apples-to-apples.

To make that fair, they would have to lobby against E-File.

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#188

Post by the_gastropod »

MR4D wrote: post #184
pwncake wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why crush the option? Let the market determine it. If Intuit's product is so much better then it will win.

Because the free-priced government option will drive out the non-free commercial providers. Even if this only lasted a few years, it would put some of them out of business. In other words, for the same reason we have laws against unfair competition.

The U.S. used to primarily have for-profit firefighting. Switching to a state-run system drove out the commercial providers. And that's by all accounts, a wonderful thing.

Business for the sake of business is not necessarily good. If the business does not provide real value any longer, it shouldn't exist.

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#189

Post by SilasX »

SilasX wrote: post #142
rayiner wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want this? We are very bad in America about hiding taxes, e.g. through unfunded mandates and mandatory cross subsidies. We don’t need to do anything more for people to have even less insight into what the government actually collects from their paycheck.

That seems more like an argument for a different interface than against the service entirely -- that would justify making it so that you still have to see and sign a form that shows how much you're paying against what earnings. I think you're falsely equating (as do the Norquist types) a) "the financial burden of the tax should be explicit" (which is fair) and b) "the paperwork should be unnecessarily burdensome" (wh…

Can someone explain how rayiner's argument goes against the idea of IRS-prepared taxes itself rather than the UX of the implementation? It sounds like he’s just trying to be devil’s advocate (to put it nicely).

Re: Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

#190

Post by shalmanese »

tzs wrote: post #171
everdev wrote: post #61

I'm self employed and had to explain to my kids why taxes in the US were so complicated and took hours to do over the weekend. There must be powerful forces at work because Republicans have touted a flat tax or a return the size of a postcard for decades but when they controlled all three branches of government couldn't get anywhere near enough votes to pass it. It's truly an abysmal system and I hope my kids don't h…

> There must be powerful forces at work because Republicans have touted a flat tax or a return the size of a postcard for decades but when they controlled all three branches of government couldn't get anywhere near enough votes to pass it They don't actually try to pass a flat tax because it is not feasible to actually do a flat tax in a country like they US with such a wide range of incomes. Even with a low rate, th…

Every flat tax proposal comes with a Negative Income Tax portion to counter regressitivity. People misunderstand what flat tax proposals are all about.

With a tiered tax system, individuals need to be the ones who pay taxes because people who combine income from multiple sources need to pay differing amounts of taxes. With a flat tax system, all income is treated exactly the same so governments can switch to collecting income taxes from corporations. Corporations basically report the amount they spend on payroll every year and pay some percentage of that as a tax to the government. Then the government takes some portion of that money and remits it back to individuals as a negative income tax (essentially a UBI).

Flat tax changes the way money flows, instead of company -> individual -> government, it goes company -> government -> individual. It's both easier to tax corporations than individuals and easier to give money to citizens than take money from citizens. These two powerful benefits alone are meant to make up for the severe rigidity and lack of flexibility that flat tax systems intrinsically have. It's an open question whether these two things are enough to make up for all the flat tax flaws but I don't think there's an obvious right or wrong answer that we've discovered yet.

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