Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 438 posts

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

#321

Post by maxxxxx »

chimeracoder wrote: post #318
maxxxxx wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No, because the idea behind a flat tax is to eliminate most or all of those deductions," Removing deductions has nothing to do with the tax curve. You could do that with the current curve and tweak it accordingly.

> Removing deductions has nothing to do with the tax curve. You could do that with the current curve and tweak it accordingly. In theory, but (serious) advocates of the flat tax generally are proposing both.

My impression is that most advocates want the flat part which reduces taxes on high incomes and then are pretty hand wavy about deductions.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

#322

Post by scott_s »

hundt wrote: post #317
nightski wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but you are very OT at this point. The parent was arguing that for the vast majority of people taxes are boring and do not involve 1099-INTs or taxes on numerous stock trades. While true, these people have the easiest time calculating their required tax. No one ever was trying to say that IRS doing your taxes for you would never make things easier.

42M out of 150M tax returns filed in 2015 had taxable interest (1099-INT) https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-inco...

We're in the weeds here, but 1099-INT are also used for interest on money-market savings accounts - my guess is a lot of that 42 million filers do not have stock trades. I think W2s and 1099-INTs for money-market savings accounts still qualify as quite boring.

However, I still claim that even such boring filers would benefit from the IRS sending out "yea/nay" forms. It removes a lot of the stress and mystery from the process.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

#323

Post by [deleted] »

hundt wrote: post #317
nightski wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but you are very OT at this point. The parent was arguing that for the vast majority of people taxes are boring and do not involve 1099-INTs or taxes on numerous stock trades. While true, these people have the easiest time calculating their required tax. No one ever was trying to say that IRS doing your taxes for you would never make things easier.

42M out of 150M tax returns filed in 2015 had taxable interest (1099-INT) https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-inco...

[deleted]

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

#324

Post by pratheekrebala »

philwelch wrote: post #242
pratheekrebala wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this would prevent you from using a CPA or Itemizing your return. However, this system could be very beneficial for the 68.5% of the population that doesn't itemize[1]. [1] https://taxfoundation.org/who-itemizes-deductions/

Itemizing deductions is totally different from reporting cost basis on a stock sale.

Right, I was just pointing out that OPs case is in the minority of tax filers and that making this option available would benefit a lot of tax-filers and wouldn't prevent OP from filing their taxes as they normally would.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

#325

Post by hundt »

scott_s wrote: post #322
hundt wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

42M out of 150M tax returns filed in 2015 had taxable interest (1099-INT) https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-inco...

We're in the weeds here, but 1099-INT are also used for interest on money-market savings accounts - my guess is a lot of that 42 million filers do not have stock trades. I think W2s and 1099-INTs for money-market savings accounts still qualify as quite boring. However, I still claim that even such boring filers would benefit from the IRS sending out "yea/nay" forms. It removes a lot of the stress and mystery from the…

You don't have to guess :) About 26.5 million had losses or gains from sale of property (of which stock trades is the simplest case).

Stock trades are also reported to the IRS, although the basis often isn't.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

#326

Post by hulton »

The IRS administers and enforces the income tax laws beyond the parameters of the laws passed by Congress and signed by the President as well as beyond the parameters laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Moreover, the IRS’s own internal procedures, manuals and literature itself indicate the IRS knowingly deceives the American public about the scope of its true income tax authority.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

#327

Post by lern_too_spel »

nightski wrote: post #308
lern_too_spel wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is boring for the IRS's computers, which calculate everything the IRS needs to know automatically from the data sent by my brokerage firm.

Right but you are very OT at this point. The parent was arguing that for the vast majority of people taxes are boring and do not involve 1099-INTs or taxes on numerous stock trades. While true, these people have the easiest time calculating their required tax. No one ever was trying to say that IRS doing your taxes for you would never make things easier.

I'm saying that many people have tax returns that are not easy to file but should be. My stock transactions are just one example.

As soon as return free filing becomes an option, intermediaries will pop up to automate IRS reporting for many other taxable transactions (think Square for plumbers and business credit cards for automatic business expense deductions). Even those who have simple returns are wasting half an hour a year.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

#328

Post by mindslight »

mjevans wrote: post #290
mindslight wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who is ideologically predisposed against speed limits, bullshit. If you've ever gone much faster than is customary for a road (say 110mph following a cop), and then slowed down to say 90mph, it will feel quite slow. If you then don't set about consciously lowering your speed, you will even find yourself creeping back up. Humans are notoriously bad at perceiving what-if dangers and being aware of our own l…

As someone who's driven over distances that had notably higher speed limits (EG 75 MPH in extremely rural areas), I have found that /in those areas/ the speed I went //without// looking at the dashboard was more or less very close to the actual speed limit. I was actually driving at the real speed that is safe for a typical small car on such a road in 'ideal' conditions.

Were you able to reproduce this effect on analogous 55mph/65mph roads? Are you sure you aren't just used to driving 75mph on highways in general (ie you're not from Seattle), and found speed limit signs that actually matched?

Driving through rural areas you must have experienced the sudden ~30mph sign, signifying a town coming up. Did this "drive what you feel" approach line up there too? When the town was at the bottom of a hill?

For context, I've done around 25k miles cross-country non-interstate. I've concluded that what the individual states choose to sign as the general maximums has more to do with local culture and politics than with general terrain.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

#329

Post by hulton »

stephengillie wrote: post #3

I'm annoyed that there is no simple system for the IRS to tell me what I owe, and let me pay or dispute. Instead, we play this game where the IRS provides a bunch of complicated documents, I guess which ones to fill out and submit, then wait 3 years to see if I was randomly chosen to see if I was correct. So it's very easy to make a mistake for dozens of years, then suddenly be penalized at random. It's the worst kin…

The IRS administers and enforces the income tax laws beyond the parameters of the laws passed by Congress and signed by the President as well as beyond the parameters laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Moreover, the IRS’s own internal procedures, manuals and literature itself indicate the IRS knowingly deceives the American public about the scope of its true income tax authority.

Re: Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes? (2015)

#330

Post by llukas »

chatmasta wrote: post #243
elefanten wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truly impoverished recipient won't owe much in taxes to begin with.

Right, the IRS will actually owe the resident money, i.e. a refund. Trouble is, the IRS often has access to only a subset of deductions and/or circumstantial life information, so it’s likely they would undercalculate the refund owed to an impoverished resident. The status quo is that residents must either (a) do nothing and receive a fine, or (b) file their taxes, explicitly opting in to any refund programs they qual…

So instead of spending time on researching only deduction part let's force poor people spend time to do entire process.
Post reply on HN