IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete with TurboTax

Nobody's evading anything. The federal, state and local governments together are your government. That's why you've always been able to deduct the local from your state and federal, and state from your federal. In fact I can't think of a country where that's not true, can you?

> Double taxation and beyond is the norm. You have sales tax, paid to a vendor that pays their own income tax, for goods that were imported with tariffs.

Not with income taxes. Historically not within the United States, and again, as you continue to refuse to address, not for taxes paid to foreign governments. The US has a huge network of no-double-taxation tax treaties with foreign governments because it's not fair to tax people on their taxes.

The IRS has a no-double-taxation treaty with Azerbaijan and yet it can't manage to sustain one with California? [1]

> Unless you voted against the California politicians, you should enjoy paying your taxes. Those politicians are why we can't cut expensive government programs at both the state and federal level, and why we must tax heavily to compensate.

California's top tier is 13.3%, the US federal is 37% + FICA. You can't tell me with a straight face that California's measly tax rate is the reason the US federal government has to charge 40% of both my income and my taxes.

I have no problem paying my fair share. I'm also a non-citizen so I can't vote.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/international-businesses/unit...

I'm not sure how you think private filing is related to manually filing your taxes. Yes, if taxes were just paying an invoice at the end of the year, that would make them less noticeable, but that's not a necessary component of private taxation. Adding up all your income and just calculating a simple percentage would create just as much awareness--probably more, because there's some clarity/transparency that is easier to understand.

In fact, I'd argue that a complex filing process puts a focus on where money is coming from, rather than where it is going, which is arguably much more important to make transparent to people.

> I don’t think people would consider Chile and Mexico to be developed countries.

Any basis you could have for not considering Chile and Mexico to be developed countries applies to large sections of the US (incidentally, they tend to be the parts of the US with the lowest taxes). There's more poverty in the parts of Alabama and West Virginia that I've visited than the parts of Ecuador I've visited.

> You’re right that Ireland and South Korea are lower (depending on the year, Ireland cut taxes significantly recently). But they’re together with the US in the bottom band.

So the rest of your argument doesn't work, since it was based on your claim that we have the lowest taxes.

Yes. And as part of that you have to decide how much each person is to contribute.

> We should have a simple tax formula strictly dedicated to funding the government where everyone has skin in the game

Yes.

> ..and contributes equally along some metric.

Yes, according to their means. The metric is contribution proportional to your ability to contribute and that folds in implicitly the idea that your "means" are non-linear with respect to marginal utility. Noblesse oblige. [1]

> The flat tax seems a dead simple reasonable metric and is unquestionably equal when focused on contributions.

No, it is not. Because 10% of 10K/yr income of someone working at burger king is an undue hardship whereas 10% of 1M/yr income of someone running a big company is no burden at all. 1K to someone making 10K may be the difference between sleeping in a bed and sleeping in the street, but 100K to someone making 1M, frankly, they wouldn't even notice it.

> Once we start trying to equalize along these other dimensions of marginal utility or equality of some other thing we're no longer focused on funding government but enacting some equality/justice endeavor.

No, we know how much we need to fund the government based on cost of policies enacted. That's not the job of the IRS, that's the job of the budget committee in congress. What the IRS is doing is figuring out how to apportion that burden among the population.

> Those I imagine probably also suffer from holding no simple formula to calculate their equalities against. Let such endeavors be handled by some other government agency dedicated to those causes, why drag the tax system into the mix and complicate things is what baffles me.

Again, the goal is to figure out how to apportion the burden, and that's done by indexing to marginal utility, bringing us back to where we began.

To be clear this isn't coming from someone looking to take from others, I'm in the top marginal income tax bracket, and I think it should be much higher than it is. IMO it should go back up to 70% as it was for much of the 1900s. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/27/top-tax-...