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Tax System in the Faroe Islands

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Re: Tax System in the Faroe Islands

#41

Post by Turing_Machine »

lokar wrote: post #39
paulryanrogers wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US system is difficult by design. Automation would make filing less painful, and one party dislikes taxes so prefers people feel the pain.

The IRS could do a simple automatic return for the vast majority of Americans. Lobbying from intuit prevents it.

While Intuit and their friends do lobby, the US tax code was fiendishly complex long before Intuit was even a thing.

"The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through, if you are a crook or a martyr." -- Will Rogers

Will Rogers died in 1935.

Re: Tax System in the Faroe Islands

#42

Post by naasking »

cs702 wrote: post #25
dr_petes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don’t think bigger always needs to be more complex. 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,…

> 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.

It's not the number of customers so much as the number of diverse things they do. Ditto for a country's taxes. I expect the Faroe islands' industry is fairly limited compared to the US, so they may not need as many exemptions, tax credits, deductions, etc. No doubt there's still considerable room for streamlining though.

Re: Tax System in the Faroe Islands

#43

Post by lokar »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #41
lokar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IRS could do a simple automatic return for the vast majority of Americans. Lobbying from intuit prevents it.

While Intuit and their friends do lobby, the US tax code was fiendishly complex long before Intuit was even a thing. "The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through, if you are a crook or a martyr." -- Will Rogers Will Rogers died in 1935.

But the majority of Americans have only w2 income and no deductions

Re: Tax System in the Faroe Islands

#44

Post by dxs »

For several years now I've been wondering about a couple of things.

One would be to come up with a simple taxation formula for individual income.

(1) No deductions.

(2) Peg the tax rate to a formula, something like tax = 1% per $10,000 of income. (These specific numbers would not work very well.)

This would be simple, absolutely predictable, and would set a maximum income at whatever the culture decided was right.

And/Or: eliminate inheritance.

This could replace a maximum income because no one could pass along a fortune to heirs, and wealth would be automatically recycled on death.

(1) Set up a citizen's commission that selects members at random for a three-year term, 1/3 of members to be replaced each year.

(2) The commission decides what entities are worthwhile. (Charitable, non-profit, humanitarian, research, whatever.)

(3) At death, any remaining funds belonging to a person are disbursed.

(4) Disbursed funds go to eligible entities selected by the deceased, or to the U.S. Treasury as a default.

(5) Wealthy individuals can support their children through college up to age 25 or so, after which the kids are on their own.

(6) Not necessarily any limit on how much wealth a person could accumulate because it would be impossible to develop a hereditary plutocratic class.

Re: Tax System in the Faroe Islands

#45

Post by ratg13 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #41
lokar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IRS could do a simple automatic return for the vast majority of Americans. Lobbying from intuit prevents it.

While Intuit and their friends do lobby, the US tax code was fiendishly complex long before Intuit was even a thing. "The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through, if you are a crook or a martyr." -- Will Rogers Will Rogers died in 1935.

They already do your taxes for you. This is how they know if your returns are off or not.

The only difference is that in the rest of the world, they show you the calculation the government came up with first.

Re: Tax System in the Faroe Islands

#46

Post by alkonaut »

Most of the benefits listed, apart from the extremely simple tax code, exists in all modern countries country (here I use the tautological definition of “modern” as meaning somewhere where everyone has a bank account and “doing your taxes” is typically less cumbersome than accepting a cookie banner).

Re: Tax System in the Faroe Islands

#47

Post by AwaAwa »

alkonaut wrote: post #46

Most of the benefits listed, apart from the extremely simple tax code, exists in all modern countries country (here I use the tautological definition of “modern” as meaning somewhere where everyone has a bank account and “doing your taxes” is typically less cumbersome than accepting a cookie banner).

Always useful when you can define 'modern' to preclude the major economies of america. Which is beside the point the article is making.

Re: Tax System in the Faroe Islands

#48

Post by metacritic12 »

theonlybutlet wrote: post #30
metacritic12 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's the intelligence of the animal that's the issue. Not some cultural bias.

Pigs are widely considered pretty intelligent, but I don't think the median American thinks of then as more wrong to eat than say chicken.

Re: Tax System in the Faroe Islands

#49

Post by 1123581321 »

lokar wrote: post #43
Turing_Machine wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Intuit and their friends do lobby, the US tax code was fiendishly complex long before Intuit was even a thing. "The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through, if you are a crook or a martyr." -- Will Rogers Will Rogers died in 1935.

But the majority of Americans have only w2 income and no deductions

Their taxes are easy, too. Just a handful of clicks through a free e-filing system. Most can also use a free in-person filing service (VITA.)

Most of the thousands of hours you hear about comes from working through legitimate complexity (complicated assets, stock splits, self-employment, etc.)

That’s not to say it wouldn’t be good to have more computing thrown at automating the rules for that complexity.

Re: Tax System in the Faroe Islands

#50

Post by monkeycantype »

twawaaay wrote: post #27

If I was a government body responsible for setting tax rules after reading the article I still haven't learned anything. 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 tha…

…Australia looks on confused… what you’re saying mass resource extractors should pay tax for that…
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