101–110 of 180 posts
8,500 IT workers in the IRS is insane. They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work
They built IRS Direct File which was a huge improvement. Then the administration killed it to serve tax prep companies.
Not that impressive.
I'd be more impressed we got rid of income tax on salaried people entirely, or permit families the same type of deductions that businesses get, and only tax my actual profit - I can't deduct my overpriced housing, or my utilities unless I have a home office for ny own business.
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Of course they're not, but this is how you smell someone that doesn't really want to enforce paying taxes, but just wants to evade them as much as possible. How quickly people show their colors.
I don't think that's fair. The US has so many administrative layers with taxing powers - federal, state, county, and municipal, and in many cases administrative bodies also charge massive filing fees, and courts charge large fees to finance themselves because they're consistently under-funded by legislatures. So Americans get taxed a lot at many different levels of activity. The cognitive load of having so many diffe…
Wholeheartedly agree, but I see the root cause of the issue being income tax itself. As soon as you tax income, you'll go down and endless rabbit hole of what's fair to tax, how much, what kind of income, investment income vs wage income, percentage vs flat rate, etc...
That gave us the mess we have.
I like the idea of consumption tax exclusively (would require an amendment). You're taxed on your purchases.
It's easy to drive behavior (more tax on some things... tax on cigarettes, yachts and private jets) and easy to make more fair (exclude grocery staples).
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> Get rid of sales tax, property tax, exemptions, IRAs, 401ks, short capital gains, long capital gains, medicare, state, all of that bullcrap. Annualized, non-annualized, credits for having an EV on the 4th day of the second Tuesday while being a fisherman, married and single filing differences, end all of that. I agree with your overall point of simplifying taxes by merging more things into income tax, but some of t…
> The United States has a federal system That doesn't prevent there being a single point of collection and distribution.
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The public sector is where you need 12 people (and a project manager) to build an Access database.
And the private sector is how the US has arrived at a miserable, unworkable healthcare system and an out of control carceral system.
Health insurance being tied to employment benefits is because the IRS taxes money, but not benefits, for example.
To be clear: when it failed, I just got an error code and was told to fax in the paper form. Which contains exactly the same information I had just typed into the website.
I don’t think the IRS needs fewer tech people.
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It's not "going after" the poor. You have to be out-right negligent to end up with any penalty at all, and the penalties involved are relatively small (20% of how much extra you owed them anyway). The vast majority of these low-income audits consist of "hey, we know you made money X, you didn't report it on your taxes. Fix it".
‘We know you’re trying to survive in your low income, but we want to extract more money from you so the billionaires don’t have to pay as much tax’
Poor people pay very little income tax, as is the entire point of a progressive set of tax brackets and a large standard deduction.
It is trivial to not do your taxes wrong if you have legal employment. If you for some reason doubt your ability to do a couple calculations and copy over 6 numbers to a simple form, Turbotax will do that "hard work" for you for $30.
Even using Turbotax, I once failed to report a W2 (because I technically had more than one job) and the "penalty" was a letter that said "Hi, you missed this, we fixed it, give us $270 + $1 interest", which I never responded to because I am disordered, so they took my state income tax return.
No court. No threat. No serious penalty. I didn't even have to talk to anyone.
If we are talking about poor people, who by definition have minimal income, how do you think they supposedly would get hit by some giant IRS penalty? What is the magical pathway?
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> Get rid of sales tax, property tax, exemptions, IRAs, 401ks, short capital gains, long capital gains, medicare, state, all of that bullcrap. Annualized, non-annualized, credits for having an EV on the 4th day of the second Tuesday while being a fisherman, married and single filing differences, end all of that. I agree with your overall point of simplifying taxes by merging more things into income tax, but some of t…
> The United States has a federal system That doesn't prevent there being a single point of collection and distribution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> Get rid of sales tax, property tax, exemptions, IRAs, 401ks, short capital gains, long capital gains, medicare, state, all of that bullcrap. Annualized, non-annualized, credits for having an EV on the 4th day of the second Tuesday while being a fisherman, married and single filing differences, end all of that. I agree with your overall point of simplifying taxes by merging more things into income tax, but some of t…
what stops "local governments" from applying same type of tax as higher levels? why would they need taxes specific for them?
I'm starting to realize that an LLM isn't gonna take my job, but it's beginning to make the job aggravating enough to quit anyhow. So many managers have decided they're going to have an AI Miracle and aren't interested in hearing otherwise, no matter what staff tells them.
Everyday I am more and more pleased with our company's (or at least our company's tech department) to effectively ban AI.