311–320 of 338 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anybody who makes more than about $200K-$300K/year is likely making a mistake if they don't have a CPA.
I disagree. If there's a CPA who wants to give me money-back guarantee, be my guest. I do my taxes first. You (CPA) look over it, if can save me any additional money, I'll give you 1/2 of the additional money saved as your compensation. Deal?
It's SUCH a win that they managed to roll this out to a small set of tax situations and states to start. Every government project I've been on has required creativity in defining an MVP that doesn't include shipping to everyone. This was cited consistently as one of the great successes of this project, they were able to ship something that successfully filed 150k taxes b/c they were able to scope things down to somet…
sigh this is a baby step but - Many if not most software engineers in California earn more than the $200K household limitation for using Direct File - From my understanding there is no way auto-generate my state tax return from Direct File so I would have to do all the work twice even if I can use it - Complicating my tax situation (legally) allows me to save more money, I would save far more than the price of TurboT…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
US government services are bad almost across the board. Most of us would pay a premium to use a private version over a government version of almost anything. I’m guessing you would find it equally confusing if I told you we’d pay a premium to use a private DMV or private post office. Here in the US, that statement wouldn’t be controversial at all.
I'm in the US and I find your statement confusing. With the exception of the irs which was deliberately made hard to use by the republicans, most government services are fine. I certainly doubt a corporation would do any better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can't you use freetaxusa?
I didn’t check last year but free tax USA didn’t support importing stock trades. I didn’t wanna have to input every single trade I made.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>We only want to maximize national wealth after we've funded government services fully and redistributed wealth There's a chicken or the egg issue here. If your country isn't rich enough to fund government services such as education, transport and healthcare you need some economic development first.
Except we are vastly more wealthy than needed to provide these services. Wealth inequality is so laughably bad that a tax on just a handful of mega rich billionaires could cover the cost of many important social services.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
94% of Americans make less than $200k a year. Not everything is meant for "software engineers in California".
I meat this is Y Combinator Hacker News, so I would expect "software engineers in California" to be a significant fraction of the user base here.
How volatile is this to the political winds? As the article makes clear this was largely done with the support of the current incumbent, but what if the next one is more amenable to TurboTax's ideas? That seems to be an ongoing headache in the US with executive branch created programs, courts can just immediately squish them or political winds can change, then they're suddenly gone. Something like this, in order to b…
Not very, absolutely everyone hates doing their taxes and the whole shady process behind it all. The IRS should have to declare what they think you owe before you pay or submit any paperwork, I don't know if that'll ever happen but any baby or big steps towards that reality will win bipartisan support, easily. Just have to get past the conflicted-out members of congress who are truly being controlled by Turbo Tax and…
I like preparing and paying my taxes.
> The IRS should have to declare what they think you owe before you pay or submit any paperwork
Agree.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Where are crimes more likely to occur, a city with 10,000 or 1 million? A city of 10,000 may very well have a higher rate of crime. In terms of your analogy, consider my lawn man, who only takes cash for his services. I know he's not taking in millions of dollars a year (or even hundreds of thousands), but I also strongly suspect that he does not report all of his income. Same goes for every cash-only business I kn…
> Not much you can do to hide, for example, a land value tax. Unfortunately I’m not sure this is entirely true: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/opinion/sunday/property-t...