621–630 of 717 posts
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A situation worth getting back to, imo.
Which taxes (if any) would you prefer?
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Which many countries do already. In France, before this year, if you were an employee, you rarely filled a tax form, you just validated a prefilled one, usually with one click on the internet. Now it's just taken every month from your salary, and you get a chance to correct it once a year.
Many countries do this, because in those countries, the government actually represents the interests of people. If there was ever a clear case of the US government putting the needs of businesses before the needs of the people, it's this: keep taxes as complex as possible in order to create business opportunities to sell products to make it easier again. It's a complete bullshit business that shouldn't be necessary a…
I've often read headlines noting that the tax-prep lobby spends huge sums to preserve the status quo. But the numbers quoted in the article as evidence don't appear to support that claim. $6.6m seems low relative to these figures https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2018&inde... * *I can't vouch for this site or its data Relevant quote from the Tech Crunch article: "One reason why folks Congress could b…
The perrenial misunderstanding about lobbying in the US is that it's about money. It's not. It's about access. The money spent by lobbying firms is almost always in pursuit of that access. AKA buying a $10,000 plate at this donor dinner gets you a sit down with the Senator. Not only do lobbyists get more accessible they get more credibility. The lobbyists are high paid lawyers at respected firms. They have degrees fr…
I think we caught a glimpse of what lobbyists are telling senators when Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens sloppily repeated the explanation of the internet he was fed.
(To head off the argument: I agree that the "series of tubes" part itself was correct; the problem was the lacking understanding of the relationship between "data transfer has a cost" and "why net neutrality is bad". Also the dubious anecdote about intern emails. "Series of tubes" is just the label for cluster of confusions, not the part he got wrong.)
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> Without the painful transparency, it becomes too easy for the government to nearly invisibly turn up the tax rate on individuals to pay for whatever boondoggle or foreign war they see fit. Non-sequitur. Taxes are already seen on every pay stub and tax return. Even if taxes weren't explicitly state, simply having less money is painfully transparent.
If thats your argument, then you must agree to do away with witholding, there is no downside to the rational actor.
But if I were to design a tax system, it likely wouldn't have withholding. I'd probably mess around with some weird purely transactional/continuous tax system though.
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Have you considered any alternatives? I use taxcut but have used sites in the past like taxbrain.
For the vast majority of people, filing your taxes by hand is so easy, I'm not sure why more people do not do it. It also has the side benefit of making the government pay more to collect your taxes. The IRS is also extremely wonderful to deal with, and is happy to answer your questions. I've had questions about procedures before (even made a mistake), and you just call (or they call you) and you fix them.
Why would that be a benefit? It means more taxpayer money is literally going to waste.
Planet Money covered tax filing a few years ago and visited it again recently: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor... My understanding is that the main opposition appears to be (1) the tax preparation lobby to protect their business interests and (2) anti-tax activists that believe that making people calculate their own taxes will make them more aware of how much they are paying in taxes. The…
The US has the most idiotic tax system. Your employer, your mutual funds, your 401k, your bank -- everyone reports what you make to the government. The government already knows what you owe (excluding those that itemize). They should just print out a summary and hand over a bill / refund.
Moreover, if you set up all yoyr withholdings correctly then you do not need to file anything. You only need to file if you owe (ie you set up withholding wrong) or want yoyr money back (ie your withholding was wrong)
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I have used Credit Karma Tax since it came out (I think this year was 3 years) and it has been a great product and is free for both federal and state filings. Doesn't support some more complex scenarios, notably partial year and multi-state returns (you can still file your Federal return with it, though). Edited to add additional details as to what isn't supported.
I was going to use Credit Karma this year, but their definition of "too complicated" includes "moved from one state to another" (cf. my profile).
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The point is to enrich Intuit and other tax preparers that lobbied for this.
These anti-tax activists seem to be playing the role of Useful Idiots for the much more substantial reason 1, bearing in mind that the very existence of such companies making tax filing easier does indeed destroy point 2 entirely (in addition to the what OP pointed out which also takes away any credit this idea might have had). From a european perspective, having tax returns that are not pre-filled, and having a tax…
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> I find the Dutch way (slightly) crazy, as someone from NZ for the most part, you just don't file taxes and it works out. This is generally the case as long as you do not deviate. In the past I requested to delay having to file taxes and they rejected my request because I did not have to. The 'but' is that as soon as you screw up, or one of your bosses screws up, or you forgot to file something, you have to file fro…
Also from NZ. Is 'file taxes' a synonym for a post-facto 'tax return' when the government overcharges, due to charitable donations etc? Otherwise I can't imagine any reason why I as an NZ employee would ever need to consciously think about _paying_ tax :)
Planet Money covered tax filing a few years ago and visited it again recently: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor... My understanding is that the main opposition appears to be (1) the tax preparation lobby to protect their business interests and (2) anti-tax activists that believe that making people calculate their own taxes will make them more aware of how much they are paying in taxes. The…
A better way to do 2 would be to do away with withholding. After a year of that we’d see a radically different tax system.