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Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?

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Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?

#81

Post by Shivetya »

dragonwriter wrote: post #69
Shivetya wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they don't check them when you submit them as they don't have all the information at the same time you do. Your W2 by law must be sent to you by the end of January I believe, however delivery to the IRS is not required by the same date. As such fraud creeps in. You pay Inuit because there are nearly eighty thousand pages of tax law that even IRS workers cannot properly comprehend all because politicians use the…

Intuit doesn't know tax law better than IRS workers, they just spend lots of money lobbying Congress to prevent simplified filing processes. Intuit is one if the powerful political interests you refer to, an integral part of the FUD system you talk about built to keep the current system as-is for their own benefit.

Wait till you try to figure taxes on employee stock purchases that you do through payroll deductions. I could not get a straight answer even from the IRS, to the point some told me to track each share back to its original purchase price and fill a form per affected shares. When you call and get a different answer each time it screams that the system is to complex.

Intuit is a convenient fall guy and nothing more. The real threat is that if the system were simpler and more open it could not be used to political advantage.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?

#82

Post by yummyfajitas »

1971genocide wrote: post #76
yummyfajitas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand how someone with the username 1971genocide could possibly trust the government. But I guess operation searchlight was a minor thing - after all, official government statistics say only 26,000 people were killed.

You are taking two very completely different situations to create a false equivalency. The people of Bangladesh fairly elected Sheikh Mujib but for some reason the government didnt want a bengali as the president and that was a good reason to overthrow the government. If Obama won the election by a decisive victory and someone said "hey! that was joke - we are putting Mitt Romney in power". That would be a good cause…

I'm very much pro-Bangladeshi independence, and pro-secession/revolution in general. I didn't mean to suggest any pro-Pakistan sentiment whatsoever. I'm just citing it as an example of why governments in general can't be trusted.

But I don't know why you cite Obama's election favorably. He ran on a platform opposing an individual mandate and then personally pulled the "hey! that was a joke - Obamacare time." Before him, Bush ran on a platform of humble foreign policy and limited government and then pulled "hey! that was a joke".

I'm not sure why "hey! that was a joke" is horrible when applied to a person, but acceptable when applied to policies. But then again I don't really go for identity politics - e.g., I don't care if the president is a Bengali or not, I care what actions he takes. (I'm also not pro-democracy.)

Do you think any software system can run with having validation every-time you pass an value to a function ? We put validation only in cases where the cost of putting it ( time-efficiency , memory ) is lower than the cost of security.

I believe the future of computing will be in dependently typed languages (e.g. Idris) which do exactly this sort of thing at compile time.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?

#83

Post by rayiner »

harryh wrote: post #66
rayiner wrote: post #14

People saying "Intuit controls the government" are missing the forest for the trees. The IRS doesn't compute your taxes and send you a bill because then you'll forget you ever had the money in the first place. Lots of people want to make paying taxes painful, so once a year you have to spend hours facing the reality of how much money the government is taking from your paycheck.[1] Intuit just jumped on the bandwagon.…

I don't think the marriage penalty is patriarchal bullshit. It's just recognition that couples have lower combined expenses than two single people and hence have more income available to pay for taxes.

The tax code does not allow you to deduct cost of living expenses, as a general principle. So someone making $200k in Iowa has more disposable income than someone making $200k in NYC, but the Fed. Gov. taxes them the same. To me, it follows that the tax code shouldn't impose an extra burden because of an inference about your living expenses made from your marital status.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?

#84

Post by [deleted] »

maxerickson wrote: post #77
harryh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the marriage penalty is patriarchal bullshit. It's just recognition that couples have lower combined expenses than two single people and hence have more income available to pay for taxes.

Some of it is also accounted for in the deductions/exemptions (which will all count against the top bracket). So if you have a couple that makes $50,000 and $100,000, they will deduct/exempt at least $20,000 out of the 28% bracket. Filing alone, the $50,000 earner wouldn't have any income subject to that tax to begin with. That's only $300 for those earning levels, so I guess it should only be a fraction of the diffe…

[deleted]

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?

#85

Post by maxerickson »

sobkas wrote: post #78
maxerickson wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah sure. What does that have to do with my comment? My point is that legislators are almost universally dedicated to keeping their jobs and will pretty much limit their responses to lobbying to the situations where it won't lower their chances of getting reelected.

Because they need contributions(direct and indirect) to get (re)elected or even able to be a candidate? And there are other ways to use money to influence this?

The 2008 presidential election certainly showed the impact that pulling in the right electorate can have on the result of an election (in some literal sense, the Obama campaign got more people on their side to care enough to vote). I think that is the most powerful effect money can have on an election.

I don't think campaign dollars have such a big impact on the elections of Senators and Representatives. Maybe Senators, but for representatives, the primary force right now is the shape of the districts.

What I'd like to see is the removal of the special seats that the parties have at the table. Make it staged signature collection for everybody, for everything.

(staged in the sense that 5 signatures would be enough to be the only name on the ballot but not enough to show up next to 3 other people that collected 1000+ signatures)

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?

#86

Post by scott_s »

timedoctor wrote: post #64

This is a ridiculous idea. Might work for people who have a very simple tax return but the IRS could not possibly calculate my tax return it's incredibly complicated and is not based only on information that they have access to.

I think you missed the actual mechanics of the proposal. The idea is that the IRS sends you something that says, "This is the information we have. This is what we think you [owe use | we owe you]. Sign and return if you agree." If you agree, then it takes you a few minutes and you're done. For many people, who have "boring" taxes, this would work great.

But if you don't have "boring" taxes, then you could still do them yourself. The idea, though, is that relatively few people have to do this.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?

#87

Post by fennecfoxen »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #82
1971genocide wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are taking two very completely different situations to create a false equivalency. The people of Bangladesh fairly elected Sheikh Mujib but for some reason the government didnt want a bengali as the president and that was a good reason to overthrow the government. If Obama won the election by a decisive victory and someone said "hey! that was joke - we are putting Mitt Romney in power". That would be a good cause…

I'm very much pro-Bangladeshi independence, and pro-secession/revolution in general. I didn't mean to suggest any pro-Pakistan sentiment whatsoever. I'm just citing it as an example of why governments in general can't be trusted. But I don't know why you cite Obama's election favorably. He ran on a platform opposing an individual mandate and then personally pulled the "hey! that was a joke - Obamacare time." Before h…

> I'm not sure why "hey! that was a joke" is horrible when applied to a person, but acceptable when applied to policies.

Let me quote Bret Stephens' take on the matter, writing in the (Republican-leaning) Wall Street Journal --

"Sometime in the 1990s I began to understand the Clinton way of lying, and why it was so successful. To you and me, the Clinton lies were statements demonstrably at variance with the truth, and therefore wrong and shameful. But to the initiated they were an invitation to an intoxicating secret knowledge.

What was this knowledge? That the lying was for the greater good, usually to fend off some form of Republican malevolence. What was so intoxicating? That the initiated were smart enough to see through it all. Why be scandalized when they could be amused? Why moralize when they could collude?"

-- http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-and-the-liberal-way-of-l...

Disclaimer. No representation is made in this comment as to the exclusivity or generality of this manner of lying to any particular political parties, politicians, or nations -- that is left as an exercise to the reader.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?

#88

Post by chrisbennet »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #72
1971genocide wrote: post #6

As an non-american this baffles me. Why is there so much distrust towards the government, police, and military in US ? Isn't the US the oldest democracy ? Society is built on trust - once that doesn't exist then nothing gets done.

> Isn't the US the oldest democracy ? No. They're one of the youngest. The English empire had a parliamentary system when the US left, that's where the whole "taxation without representation" thing comes from, they didn't get a representative in the English parliament. In fact the US governmental system is largely influenced by the English government system (with several changes made due to lack of monarch, and a nee…

It's even worse than that - in the US, technically speaking, we don't elect our President's. The Electoral College elects the president.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_%28United_Sta...

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?

#89

Post by hundt »

I volunteer through the IRS-funded program to help low-income people file their taxes.[1] I see a few dozen returns per year, and I don't know how representative they are of the "typical" return.

I would say maybe 30% of them would be done correctly if they were filled out automatically based on what the IRS knows. The great majority involve one or more questions like:

- (Education credit) When did you actually pay the tuition that your school reported to the IRS as "billed"? What kind of degree program are you in?

- (Dependents) Did you provide most of your brother's support for the year?

- (Earned income credit) Is your child a full-time student?

- (Married filing separately) Is your spouse going to itemize deductions this year?

- (Self-employed) What business expenses did you have?

- (Obamacare) What months did you have health insurance for? Do you qualify for any of the exceptions for the individual mandate penalty?

- (Mortgage interest deduction) Was this a home equity loan?

- (Gambling income) Did you have any offsetting losses?

As I said, I don't know how representative my sample is, but based on my own anecdotal experience, I just don't buy that the vast majority of people could have their return correctly prepared by the IRS without a TurboTax-like questionnaire. I would like to see more evidence for that claim.

If we're talking about greatly simplifying the tax code, then that's one thing. Or if we're talking about the IRS developing their own version of TurboTax, fine. But the idea that "the government has everything they need and only lobbying from Intuit is preventing them from just doing your tax return for you" strikes me as highly suspect.

[1] http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Free-Tax-Return-Preparation-f...

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?

#90

Post by mannykannot »

acheron wrote: post #80
mannykannot wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US individual tax reporting process is an annual reminder to voters of what they pay in taxes, that cannot be easily ignored. I am sure that fiscally conservative politicians see this as an advantage to their cause, though they are unlikely to publicly say so.

Someone else said that elsewhere in the thread, and I disagreed there, too... it's funny how people can look at the same situation and come to completely opposite conclusions. But to me it looks as though the entire system is designed to hide how much people pay in taxes. Almost everybody pays via automatic withholding so they never see the money in the first place; the defaults are designed so that people over-withh…

You have a point - it could be worse, but automatic withholding is not likely to go away, because the government needs the cash flow, and even most fiscally conservative politicians tacitly recognize this.

I think the the emotional impact is important: preparing a return is still burdensome, even if not as bad as it could be, and that adds to and reinforces the pile of negative emotions associated with taxation.

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