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I mean, I feel like we should've seen this coming. They chunked off a significant portion of the market, and now they can try to make tax filing more expensive such that they can make more money. It's disappointing, because I love online tax filing, and I just hope their lobbying efforts don't pay off.
I would say so, considering it's not their first time doing this:
https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-mil...
Could we not start a non-profit that builds software as good as H&R block and allows people to file their own taxes?
I have complex multi-country taxes to file (Canadian living in Canada, but with some income the IRS says is American income). H&R Block have a guy who has handled this exact kind of tax filing hundreds of times before. If I make any mis-steps in filing, the IRS is going to demand I give them thousands of dollars.
I'm not paying H&R Block $600 (CAD) to fill out a piece of paper, I'm paying for the time and experience of someone who won't screw it up and knows how to fight back if the IRS has a problem with it.
The root cause is that our tax system is overly complex and it doesn't need to be. We need to address that rather than build software to help make the complexity continue.
The government would actually love this. Most people are ignorant of tax laws and would just sign a piece of paper to get all of their taxes done. It would be an instant pay raise because most people would never even know if they could write something off. It would also allow them to easily remove the ability to write anything off, without too many people complaining. What many people don't like to talk about is that…
The government has all the information about me. Why do I have to gather it all up and tell them again?
A friend in Finland tells me it takes him 10 minutes to approve the tax documents prepared for him on a Finnish government website. Why can't we do the same here?
> But the legislation would also permanently bar the IRS from offering its own free alternative. Why should we as citizens of this great country be forced to give up the right to form a public option? Not quite 1:1 but the analogies to health care do come to mind.
Should they go become used car salespeople and McDonald's fry cooks?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's strawman, IG Farben was a company in Nazi Germany, which had different laws and different rights. If you want a better example, yes, Haliburton, GSK, and Koch, all have the right to lobby in their best interests (at least in the US).
...And Enron, and Goldman, and all of the companies that tanked us in 2008. Right? Where is this right spelled out exactly, except in the fiction that corporations are people without the responsibilities?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can we condemn something that's "never wrong"? They have no right to lobby for anything they want. They may have the legal right to do so, but it's still wrong in some cases.
You're conflating two different things. If Company A wanted to lobby for the killing of all blue eyes babies, they could. They can make signs, start campaigns, attempt to get a meeting with a member of Congress. All of that lobbying would be useless though because we all know that that idea is disgusting and wrong (hopefully we all know... with this current climate, nothing is certain). The act of killing the babies…
But then afterwards you concentrate entirely on legality. If you just wanted to say that it's legal for businesses to lobby like this, I don't disagree, but I don't see how that position is described in the original comment, nor do I even understand the point of making that comment, since I think we all already know that it's legal.
If you did indeed mean to say that it's legally allowed but morally reprehensible, then we are indeed in agreement and I don't think there's much to say here.
Could we not start a non-profit that builds software as good as H&R block and allows people to file their own taxes?
Stop using HR Block and Turbo Tax. For most people, taxes are not very complicated. The IRS publishes detailed instructions that literally explain what every box means and what should go in it for every form. Just read it, fill it out, mail it in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can we condemn something that's "never wrong"? They have no right to lobby for anything they want. They may have the legal right to do so, but it's still wrong in some cases.
You're conflating two different things. If Company A wanted to lobby for the killing of all blue eyes babies, they could. They can make signs, start campaigns, attempt to get a meeting with a member of Congress. All of that lobbying would be useless though because we all know that that idea is disgusting and wrong (hopefully we all know... with this current climate, nothing is certain). The act of killing the babies…
No one is saying they don't have that legal right; they're saying that "legal" doesn't imply "ethical".
Consider Company A's lobbying efforts succeed and people start killing blue-eyed babies. Even if Company A never kills a baby, they still did something unethical, since there's a causal relationship between their lobbying efforts and a thing we just agreed was wrong.