51–60 of 454 posts
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Paying TurboTax $59.99 is cheaper than going to H&R Block and paying a tax preparer $169
The IRS already knows what taxes you owe. In most cases they could just send you a bill.
With stocks, capital gains, dividends, write-offs, company you need to handle these manually and the government doesn't know your write-offs and all sources of income.
I would have expected at least most of western Europe to have reached that point.
Serious question: Is it possible for society to criminalize rent seeking behaviors like this? It seems clear that there's no benefit to keeping the status quo tax filing system except for the benefit of tax preparers. What's stopping the US from creating a law that says if a company attempts to lobby for something in bad faith (like the tax example), they will face sanction?
Probably that your proposed rule is so vague that it would be impossible to be enforced .
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I've never met a doctor who wants people to be sick. I'm sure they're out there, but the great majority wants to help people, and would gladly be put out of business.
> "and would gladly be put out of business" But someone still has pay their student loans :)
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Paying TurboTax $59.99 is cheaper than going to H&R Block and paying a tax preparer $169
The IRS already knows what taxes you owe. In most cases they could just send you a bill.
The IRS cannot correctly calculate what the typical small business owner owes, what the typical real estate investor owes, what the typical upper middle class family owes, because they don't have all the information available to them.
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The IRS already knows what taxes you owe. In most cases they could just send you a bill.
Yeah, if they can check if I've paid the correct taxes then they know how much I should pay. Can't they just tell me?
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Same old same old: show me a doctor who doesn't want you to be sick. Show me a lawyer who doesn't want you to get in trouble with law. Show me a priest who doesn't want you to sin. It just blows my mind up to what degree TurboTax will go with this!
Doctors want you to be sick? - no. HMOs? - maybe. Lawyers want you in trouble with the law? - no. Prison Corporations? - definitely. People are generally good, corporations are evil by design.
Doctor want you to be sick? - no. Health Execs - yes.
I have a better idea. Simplify the tax code so anyone can do theirs on an index card. There is absolutely no reason for the gargantuan tax code in a free society.
Great idea in theory, but hard to implement. Tax breaks were often created for a reason. Take them away, and that special interest group will try to protect it and lobby to keep it in place.
I always love reading absurd statements made by otherwise reasonable people who - of course - a salary depends on being unreasonable. Here: > Intuit argues that allowing the IRS to act as a tax preparer could result in taxpayers paying more money. Majority of work will be done automatically by some free jQuery and PHP scripts (hello Obamacare website) and taxpayers have only shell-out initial cost. Even if TurboTax i…
> I honestly laugh at this one. Just exactly which part of information that IRS process is not already in the IRS possession? With that statement -- they really reach out for the dumbest people hearing them out. They won't have data from people who are self-employed. That said, neither does TurboTax so there's no difference here based on their argument, just as you said.
The correct way to refute such argument would be to prove that the simple cases - the ones that can be auto-files - constitute not a small part of cases but a part big enough to warrant IRS doing it. That's the argument I'd like to see - with proof, of course - i.e. how big is that part that can be auto-filed completely without increasing IRS knowledge it has now.
Serious question: Is it possible for society to criminalize rent seeking behaviors like this? It seems clear that there's no benefit to keeping the status quo tax filing system except for the benefit of tax preparers. What's stopping the US from creating a law that says if a company attempts to lobby for something in bad faith (like the tax example), they will face sanction?