FTC bans TurboTax from advertising 'free' services, calls deceptive advertising

Saving interest is often paid gross but if you go over the savings allowance and don't fill in a tax return HMRC will just automatically take more tax from your payslip.

There is also a £20,000/year ISA allowance which shields investment from tax so any holdings within an ISA can be ignored for tax purposes.

However, the dividend and CGT allowances have been reduced recently as the government tries to find ways to raise more revenue without raising the headline tax rates, and the £20k ISA allowance hasn't been raised for years despite inflation.

So as it stands, in the future a lot more people will have to start filling in tax returns.

> Every dollar I've ever paid in federal taxes has been thrown into a black hole of debt never to be seen again

This contradicts what you say later: taxes are returned in the form of public services.

Back in the 50s the max tax rate (for a very few, but very rich people) was 90%. Corporations collectively contributed about half of what individual taxes did; now it is about 10%. The 2017 (?) tax bill forgave more than $1T in corporate taxes that were owed and gave some people a couple thousand dollars tax break; but while those corporate tax cuts were permanent, that same law that dropped the rate for some individuals was written to increase individual tax rates every two years and in no time those people are paying more in taxes than before.

If the Bush and Trump tax cuts for corporations and rich people had not ever happened, the debt would be going down (ignoring the extraordinary circumstances of covid).

Rich people and rich corporations can afford to get the laws written in their favor.

corporate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FCTAX individual: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A074RC1Q027SBEA

chart showing the ratios over time: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/composition-of-fe...

For example, look at all the Facebook posts from older people who repost things like "TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY!!! SHARE AND YOU WILL FIND $10K TODAY!!!" They don't realize it's fake. They don't understand where that $10k comes from. There could be some secret hidden value stream built into Facebook that's promoting this. Maybe I'll find out later. Maybe I'll have to sit through a seminar for a timeshare. Maybe it will all be worth it.

The people who fall for this would fall for anything. The reason why it's so dangerous here, is that the IRS wants tax filing to be free. They've been trying to make it free, actually free, for years. And taxes are something that 100% of Americans have to do. So the market is literally 1*[entire population], annually. But these capitalists keep finding predatory ways to ignore the IRS and FTC. They just need to be fined so substantially that it wipes out a couple years profit. That's the only way the risk will no longer be worth the reward and these companies will stop.

Sure, funding the IRS increases revenue. But we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. The amount of revenue they collect is utterly massive and should be more than enough to pay for all the public services we need, but it's not because they are wildly irresponsible with it. I find it hard to swallow that the solution is to squeeze us for even more.

> Every dollar I've ever paid in federal taxes has been thrown into a black hole of debt never to be seen again

> This contradicts what you say later: taxes are returned in the form of public services.

Taxes are returned in the form of public services in a healthy functional system, one which I would like to live in. My argument is that our system is not healthy and functional. Public services are provided but taxes have little relevance in how those services are paid for, at least on a federal level. If the government has the authority to simply print all the money it needs, and does so frequently with seemingly no limits, then what is the point of taxes? As I said, I think it's just to relieve inflationary pressure caused by fundamentally irresponsible monetary policy, whereas in an ideal functioning system there would be a direct relation between revenue -> spending on public services, as you say.

As for the rest of your post I basically agree, our tax code is quite obviously the product of corporate interest. But I don't think it's fair to conflate the opinions of "50% of the country" with that of the GOP party brass corpos. I think the predominant feeling on this topic among the GOP base is that of mistrust for the IRS (which is justified considering their previous political scandals) and more general sentiments of smaller government, which is not the same thing as 'taxation is theft'