561–570 of 717 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A situation worth getting back to, imo.
Which taxes (if any) would you prefer?
To me (as a Dutchman) this sounds crazy. Here in Holland the only way to file your taxes as in individual (I don't know about company's) is to login to the government tax website (with my digid (a government issued digital identity)) and then to simply check if all the information that they have collected on me is correct. It usualy is. All I have to add is my deduction items, and BAM! it's done. Also, we automatical…
I find the Dutch way (slightly) crazy, as someone from NZ for the most part, you just don't file taxes and it works out. If you have a more complicated situation you might need to, but otherwise there's no point. Everything is withheld correctly. At least the Dutch ones tend to just be click-click-check-done, so it's not too bad. But it was sad moving to filing annual tax returns from a much simpler system.
This is generally the case as long as you do not deviate. In the past I requested to delay having to file taxes and they rejected my request because I did not have to. The 'but' is that as soon as you screw up, or one of your bosses screws up, or you forgot to file something, you have to file from that point onward.
It is always a good thing to do anyways as you might get money back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question I have is whether a government provided automatic filing would actually be cheaper (or more effective) than say, Turbotax. I see a couple of ways in which it might not be as favorable: 1. It costs more than $100 per tax payer per year to implement (about the cost of Turbotax). However the flat $100 or so that most people pay to Turbotax can be seen as a kind of regressive tax. 2. It is less effective at…
>The question I have is whether a government provided automatic filing would actually be cheaper (or more effective) than say, Turbotax. The question is valid, but the numbers do not add up. TT asks ~$50 for federal return. If everyone in US used the service, the cost would amount to over 16 billion dollars. That is more than the entire IRS budget[1] right now. [1] https://www.irs.gov/statistics/irs-budget-and-workfo…
Planet Money covered tax filing a few years ago and visited it again recently: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor... My understanding is that the main opposition appears to be (1) the tax preparation lobby to protect their business interests and (2) anti-tax activists that believe that making people calculate their own taxes will make them more aware of how much they are paying in taxes. The…
It’s not really about making people more or less aware of what they are paying. The point is to make filing taxes as time consuming and obnoxious (and therefore emotionally painful) as possible, ideally without the public connecting the dots and getting outraged.
Planet Money covered tax filing a few years ago and visited it again recently: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor... My understanding is that the main opposition appears to be (1) the tax preparation lobby to protect their business interests and (2) anti-tax activists that believe that making people calculate their own taxes will make them more aware of how much they are paying in taxes. The…
The second argument is about raising all relevant barriers to submitting your tax return. If I were in this camp I’d be pushing for everyone to have zero withholding and carry cash to a tax filing center. Ideally, there would be very few tax filing centers so you would need to travel far and wait in line. My bet is that within the first year of this taxes would be massively reduced. Also, very few people would actual…
My guess is within the first year, they'd be reformed on administration to put less needless pain on taxpayers. My guess is also that with the needless administrative headaches so visible, it would actually make it politically feasible to pass tax increases that would otherwise be impossible, so long as you also deal with the needless administrative headaches.
Plus, I'd guess that even before that, every single politician attached in any way to creating the administrative headaches would be hounded out of office, or worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not really about making people more or less aware of what they are paying. The point is to make filing taxes as time consuming and obnoxious (and therefore emotionally painful) as possible, ideally without the public connecting the dots and getting outraged.
The point is to enrich Intuit and other tax preparers that lobbied for this.
From a european perspective, having tax returns that are not pre-filled, and having a tax administration that doesn't strive to make payment as easy and quick as possible is nonsensical. Why would the state not want its services to replenish its coffers in the fastest most efficient way possible?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is actually how things were done pre WW2. If people were able to budget for it then, why not now? The current system makes filing taxes and getting refunded seem like a reward, it should probably be a bit painful to do your taxes. Without the painful transparency, it becomes too easy for the government to nearly invisibly turn up the tax rate on individuals to pay for whatever boondoggle or foreign war they see…
> If people were able to budget for it then, why not now? A failing public education system and increasingly consumerist culture that encourages bad spending habits using psychological advertising tricks, to start. Go look at how little savings Americans have currently as well, which has been covered ad nauseam by most news outlets in the past few years. > Without the painful transparency, it becomes too easy for the…
While these may play a small part in why people couldn't budget for it now, I think a bigger part of it is that income tax just did not apply to most people in as large of sums that it does today.
For example. The lowest tax bracket in 1940 was 4% and went from $0-4000. Median income at that time in the US was about $950.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what anyone would gain from this. Citizens would be more cash-rich throughout the year, then cash-poor when tax time came. Over the years, people would learn to squirrel away similar amounts to what they're withholding now. Withholdings exist now as a forced savings plan for the poor and a free loan system for the .gov for the upper class. > My bet is that within the first year of this taxes would…
The anti-tax group wants to make paying taxes as painful and inconvenient as possible based on the assumption that if taxes suck, more people will be more actively in favor of reducing taxes (as opposed to, you know, making the process not suck). It's not about reducing liability at all right now, it's about making more people anti-tax.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question I have is whether a government provided automatic filing would actually be cheaper (or more effective) than say, Turbotax. I see a couple of ways in which it might not be as favorable: 1. It costs more than $100 per tax payer per year to implement (about the cost of Turbotax). However the flat $100 or so that most people pay to Turbotax can be seen as a kind of regressive tax. 2. It is less effective at…
First, adding a host of third party’s increases the risk of data breaches for minimal benifit. Anyway, the government needs to collect and verify all information anyway. So, the sum total of TurboTaxes value is creating screens to collect information. If they can do a better job than the government then let them charge for it. But, by banning the free option they are saying they don’t actually create value.
Eventually. Not necessarily by the time you file, and not necessarily on every return. Remember, the IRS only audits a small fraction of returns for accuracy. Auditing every return would be a much bigger job than they currently do.
I'm not saying they shouldn't, but it isn't as trivial as a lot of people here seem to think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely agree that the intentions of the ruling elite will be formalized into nice-sounding theories, irrespective of their faithfulness to reality or their utility outside of supporting the system of rule. Marxism for example and you can replace ruling elite, with people who want to be that. Then you get notions like identity politics, feminism, cultural Marxism, misandry, racism. There's an interesting second…
How can it be that ideologies such as 'racism' and 'identity politics' are only born from people who want to be the elite? (If this is indeed what you are saying) Was not America's founding based on identity politics and racism by white Christian people? How is the genocide of indigenous people and enslavement of black people not racism and identity politics? Besides that, I don't think racism and feminism stems from…