61–70 of 495 posts
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What’s the appropriate number of employees for the federal government?
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But you don't understand. If the government helps you file your taxes, they'll use the service to collect your personal data, so the communists could use it against you at some point in the future. (this is the right wing argument, so to speak)
The IRS already files its own version of your taxes. They use their version to check against what you the individual files.
TIL that in America, if you work on a free tax filing system you are considered by some to be part of the "far left".
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Whoa, I thought DOGE was just trying to root out waste and corruption to save America from its deficit, but now you tell me it's to cement right wing loyalty in the deep state?!
GSA, Digital Analytics Program: https://analytics.usa.gov/
Huge amounts of data about how government websites are used including: locations (cities, countries), languages, referral sources, media sources, devices, browsers, OS, website destination, and top file accesses.
Treasury, Government Spending Explorer: https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
Really thorough breakdown of government spending from 2017 onward, with per month, per quarter, and year spending totals by budget function and agency. Divable categories so you can look at the $1,400,000,000,000 in National Defense spending, and actually find out a little about where it all goes to each year.
Edit: Here's their Github and 1200 repositories: https://github.com/orgs/18F/repositories
If I had enough money to hire them, I'd snap their employees up quickly.
TIL that in America, if you work on a free tax filing system you are considered by some to be part of the "far left".
Our tax filling is free for decades, but lots of things can be made better.
https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/agenda/rules-as-code-rencontre...
TIL that in America, if you work on a free tax filing system you are considered by some to be part of the "far left".
In the US privatization is conservative, so anything that reduces private profiteering on mandatory activities is by definition “far left”.
(The creativity has to do with asset games of fixed overhead that only amortizes on sizable fortunes. Poor people had better file their taxes correctly. If you work for a wage, you are poor for the purposes of this discussion.)
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Intuit and their lobbyists, because.. you guessed it! Money.
Rich people, because... you guessed it! Money. (Direct File doesn't directly affect them, but the push towards automated tax collection strikes at the heart of their games.)
I don't think that's even it. The goal is to make taxes seem scary and complicated to the public, to build a consensus that taxes should be eliminated or simplified - which inevitably plays out in ways which will largely, if not entirely, benefit the wealthy. And in this light, the reason the wealthy are opposed to Direct File is obvious: having it available reduces the pain that people (and particularly the working class) will feel from having to file taxes, making it harder to drum up popular support for "reform".