21–30 of 105 posts
In Portugal, if you are an employee or pensioner and have no other sources of income, the tax form is filled in automatically for you. Just confirm if you want, and hit 'send'.
The US tax and banking systems are so bad that it’s genuinely hard to understand from the Euro perspective.
In Portugal, if you are an employee or pensioner and have no other sources of income, the tax form is filled in automatically for you. Just confirm if you want, and hit 'send'.
This is the case in almost all European countries nowadays. The US tax and banking systems are so bad that it’s genuinely hard to understand from the Euro perspective.
Without a doubt, the US tax system is broken in mumerous ways. To a close approximation, everyone agrees on that. But the OP's notion makes about as much sense as asking if Amazon can somehow draw lessons for improving the efficiency and simplicity of its global software and hardware infrastructure by studying the super-simple software and hardware infrastructure of some tiny company. It strikes me as... highly unlik…
For simplicity sake, a 10% tax on income would scale infinitely, no matter how big an economy grows (I’m not arguing in favor of this tax).
But the point of the article, in my opinion, is that US has a large problem, costing tax payers an estimated 40 billion in labor figuring out their taxes, where other countries have almost automated the entire process.
I think there is something to be learned from there, as most people would agree that the US tax system is a mess.
In Portugal, if you are an employee or pensioner and have no other sources of income, the tax form is filled in automatically for you. Just confirm if you want, and hit 'send'.
Without a doubt, the US tax system is broken in mumerous ways. To a close approximation, everyone agrees on that. But the OP's notion makes about as much sense as asking if Amazon can somehow draw lessons for improving the efficiency and simplicity of its global software and hardware infrastructure by studying the super-simple software and hardware infrastructure of some tiny company. It strikes me as... highly unlik…
I don’t think bigger always needs to be more complex. For simplicity sake, a 10% tax on income would scale infinitely, no matter how big an economy grows (I’m not arguing in favor of this tax). But the point of the article, in my opinion, is that US has a large problem, costing tax payers an estimated 40 billion in labor figuring out their taxes, where other countries have almost automated the entire process. I think…
And yet, the bigger a software company gets, the more labyrinthine its systems get. Ask any software or IT engineer who was at, say, Amazon, Facebook, or Google, as the company grew from serving a few hundred thousand customers to hundreds of millions of customers.
Similarly, the bigger a country is, the more labyrinthine its systems are (tax, legal, regulatory, etc.). Large distributed systems tend to become very complex, even though no one wants them to be. There are always many competing interests negotiating with each other and reaching compromises that no one likes.
Faroe Islands is a tiny speck. Countries are a cross between oil tankers and nuclear power plants. There's nothing to learn politicians have debated every single tax system known to human civilization. But even small changes are Herculean tasks.
"It's easy for them to do, but we're a huge country with near-infinite resources, we couldn't possibly". I mean sure, it means you have to scale the operation to match, which is why the IRS has more staff than the Faroes have population. But "we can't take on these projects, we're too big" makes it sound like we should have expected Belgium to land on the moon instead of the US.
First of all, tax systems are typically result of huge forces within the country and represent history of negotiating between parties or other groups of people that each tries to get something for themselves while the government needs to deal with finite budget and groups of people dissatisfied that somebody else got something but not them.
Second, Faroe Island is a tiny, tiny country. With any kind of organisation, as the organisation grows things get more and more complicated.
And third, they point out Faroe Island has a huge GDP that comes from a fortunate resource. Countries that are in this position tend to have simpler tax systems because they do not need to rely on their citizens. Citizens rightly assume that if the country has a national resource they are entitled to have the resource pay for the infrastructure and government and not them. There is no need to fight to figure out where the money will come for this or that project -- the answer is always pretty much the same and it is not to put a levy on citizens but rather on the resource the country has.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turbo tax and H&R Block, companies that produce software for filling taxes, lobby to keep taxes complex and non-easy (unless you pay for their software)
Well, the easy part of tax filing is easy: yes, it's a bit tedious in a sense that you have to copy some stuff from your W2 to 1040, but that's it. Calculating part time rental property depreciation is complicated, but that's because it IS complicated.
Without a doubt, the US tax system is broken in mumerous ways. To a close approximation, everyone agrees on that. But the OP's notion makes about as much sense as asking if Amazon can somehow draw lessons for improving the efficiency and simplicity of its global software and hardware infrastructure by studying the super-simple software and hardware infrastructure of some tiny company. It strikes me as... highly unlik…
I don’t think bigger always needs to be more complex. For simplicity sake, a 10% tax on income would scale infinitely, no matter how big an economy grows (I’m not arguing in favor of this tax). But the point of the article, in my opinion, is that US has a large problem, costing tax payers an estimated 40 billion in labor figuring out their taxes, where other countries have almost automated the entire process. I think…
I suspect it’s very high 90s of percent.
It's completely irrational but any mention of this place is tainted by their dolphin hunts. How about learn about their taxes and they learn about PR.
The article has a good point from a few Faroese guys about how the mass inhumane US harvesting of beef, chicken, and pigs, is probably very similar in aggregate. But when the food item is something Americans culturally eat, it becomes difficult for animal rights activists to push on because they get labeled as crazy immediately. Whereas food items Americans are not used to eating like whale or snake gets a round of a…