141–150 of 288 posts
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That's standard behavior. The US is more plutocracy than democracy at this point. You can help choose the brand of oligarchy that runs the United States but you can't vote against it.
Technically, you can vote for anybody you like, including yourself or Santa Claus. But no, LaRouche was never going to make it.
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Huh, I've never had my filing rejected but I've had the IRS send me letters a couple times. Once a year or two later, the other time (last year) a few weeks later or so before I got the refund: each time they told me exactly what they thought I'd missed. Which still highlights the absurdity of making me re-enter the stuff they already know.
In most cases, you know the information (and may have to file) before they’ve processed it. Request your tax account transcript (what they know about your account) on April 15 and again on August 15. I can pretty well guarantee they’ll be different for the prior calendar year. It might be stuff they’ll eventually know, but it’s not necessarily stuff they already know at the relevant time.
It’s amazing that 54% of adults in the United States have a literacy below 6th grade level, but it is expected for the same population to have the financial literacy to file their taxes accurately. Going further, the IRS already knows the details of most people’s taxes before they file, yet everyone is expected to complete what amounts to a complex task for many people. I cannot fathom why it is still done this way.
It’s amazing how much of an idiot I felt like when we hired a babysitter for two days a week for about a year and then it came time to do things properly regarding taxes and her wages. I understand why it’s important to do it properly (for the employee’s benefit) but when I tried to look into what we had to do, as technically her employer, and it was nearly impossible for me to figure out what we had to do and then h…
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I understand the noble intent behind much of the tax code, but it has grown into a gnarly beast full of loopholes for the rich, and the wrong kind of societal incentives for the poor.
Is there a specific country's tax system that you look up to as the ideal? I see often people claim that the US tax code sucks (nobody is going to defend it with the rising inequality), but there isn't any proposal about how exactly to enact the changes while still keeping the benefits of the tax code that apply to the disadvantaged. Also, I'd like to point out that the tax code has every type of federal tax, adminis…
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> the fact that you work for your employer isn’t a secret I would prefer if it was. It's even worse than that, the government has entitled itself to be a party to every transaction over $600, so even the self employed have to shoulder this unseemly burden. > Your salary isn’t a secret It is. It's a shared secret. Again, I would prefer if I didn't have to do this. My salary is not at all the same as my "taxable income…
It's not a secret if your company uses any of the large payroll services due the Equifax "The Work Number".
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> the fact that you work for your employer isn’t a secret I would prefer if it was. It's even worse than that, the government has entitled itself to be a party to every transaction over $600, so even the self employed have to shoulder this unseemly burden. > Your salary isn’t a secret It is. It's a shared secret. Again, I would prefer if I didn't have to do this. My salary is not at all the same as my "taxable income…
There never was a point in the period of time when people filed taxes in the US that the government wasn’t entitled to know your salary. It used to take more time and effort to get the info, but better technology doesn’t change the game, it highlights that it wasn’t a « shared secret ». Your employer has a ton of paperwork to file related to your pay.
Before all of this unconstitutional collection of Americans information the government had to have a target and go out and collect and tabulate the information.
Now it’s a select where citizen does thing x over y threshold. How is this not changing the game?
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> It’s amazing that 54% of adults in the United States have a literacy below 6th grade level, AFAICT this is a mis-interpretation. IIUC the actual study says "54% of adults in the United States have a literacy IN ENGLISH below 6th grade level". They might be highly literate in some other language but that wasn't tested.
Only 14% of the US is foreign born according to the last census so that’s not enough to make up the difference. The functional literacy statistics are bad no matter how you dice them.
The shock value of the original statement derives from the idea that sixth-graders are basically illiterates who can barely function in society, but what if that's not the case and six years in school are actually enough to learn reading and writing? It's a pretty long time already. What further improvements are to be expected from another six years?
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The anti tax republicans believe that if Americans had an easier time filling their taxes then they would have less objections to the same or higher level of taxation. https://www.npr.org/2013/03/26/175332655/what-would-the-u-s-...
They're probably right about that?
it is pretty cynical to say "i don't want to make people's lives easier so they better align with my political goals"
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Swedish views on privacy don’t necessarily apply outside of Sweden. Are income levels not deserving of privacy?
Is your address? Your ssn? Your phone number? In Sweden, anyone can look it up. https://ratsit.se
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It’s amazing how much of an idiot I felt like when we hired a babysitter for two days a week for about a year and then it came time to do things properly regarding taxes and her wages. I understand why it’s important to do it properly (for the employee’s benefit) but when I tried to look into what we had to do, as technically her employer, and it was nearly impossible for me to figure out what we had to do and then h…
Non-US citizen here: you have to declare what you paid the nanny to the IRS? Where I'm from, only the receiving end of the money needs to declare how much they earned. The only reason we file expenses is for tax deductions. The US tax system has always seemed so hostilely complex to me.