Millions of Taxpayers Call the IRS for Help. Two-Thirds Don't Reach Anyone

https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs-search?search=OA2143

Ultimately, the tax question you asked it is something simple for a front-line worker to answer. So either one of two things must be true:

* either GPT-4o is so bad at answering tax questions that it cannot even answer easy ones confidently

* or GPT-4o is so bad at determining its own confidence level that it doesn't know when it is able to definitively answer even an easy question.

Either situation makes it bad for this task.

As I mentioned above, humans are good for answering questions even when they don't know the answer, because they're good at expressing their confidence to other humans. In this case, you'd want the support agent to answer definitively that animals do not qualify as dependents. One could certainly make their chat bot answer unconfidently randomly, or in response to strange questions, or all the time, but then the confidence signal isn't actually providing social value of communicating certainty.

In my life I've seen so many cases of that, and then, lo and behold, the reality isn't even remotely accurate. An example being UBI, for which there is literally no way to pay. Or ridiculous assertions of "just tax billionaires!" to pay for it, which won't even cover one year of UBI.

So when someone says "just change to a flat tax", without some raw data I balk.

For example, "compliance costs"?! Just what compliance costs are these? Are you planning to get rid of social security, and medicare taxes on pay cheques too? Fine, but I once pondered that many government jobs are little more than paid welfare.

Just what do you do with all those people that really cannot work well outside of a government, structured, coddled job? My point being, that "compliance costs" are no where near as much of a cost as you might think, as typically every penny paid comes back in income and other taxes, and also gets spent domestically on everything from groceries to car repairs. Those jobs aren't free, but they are not even 1/2 the price they appear to be.

You want to talk about a "compounding effect", that's what government workers are.

But regardless, the feds raised 4T this year, and 42% was income tax, and another 22% for social taxes, eg medicare, social and what not. If you're going to move those taxes from the "pay cheque taxed and income tax cycle" to "consumption tax at the till", then you'll need to replace 65% of existing taxes, which are >4T. Might as well say $3.5T at the federal level alone.

Here:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/249137/us-state-and-loca...

Says total revenue at the state AND county level is $700M.

Here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_Stat...

Shows an interesting graph, with some of the larger economic states, hovering at the top. I'm going to spitball and say 8% average. (The top 10 US states population wise, have more than 50% of the population, and that's why I'm going to poke it at 8%).

So $700M at 8%, is 3.2T at 24%. That's surprisingly close.

You are going to have to watch the black market though. Yes, it already exists.. so what? It will exist more. Especially with shipping stuff in from Canada, you're going to have to have to have "duty" of "federal state tax", otherwise everything will flow, shipped from Mexico and Canada.

How will the ATF help me with my taxes?

https://www.irs.gov/faqs/irs-procedures/refund-inquiries

If the check was not cashed, you can get it canceled and a new one mailed.

And yes, I've dealt with the IRS a few times some of which they owed me money. It is a bureaucracy, but the process will work even if it takes a bit of time.

No need to be so cynical.