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Killing TurboTax

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Re: Killing TurboTax

#651

Post by specialist »

javagram wrote: post #650
specialist wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that the Democratic caucuses, both federal and state level, are much harder to hold together. Every year there's a bill in my state to reign in pay day lenders. Basically banning usury level interest rates on loans. Overwhelming popular support (~80%) and editorial support. And every year there's a "blue dog" Democrat living in a purple district which bends to the pro pay day loan lobbyists. Vetocracy is a…

Making payday lending illegal will push poor people who desperately need the cash to seek it from organized crime instead. There’s a reason those bills get stopped and killed. They sound good on their face, but when you dig into the details they harm the people they’re supposed to help.

What's a reasonable interest rate for pay day loans? Should there be an upper limit?

Re: Killing TurboTax

#652

Post by FabHK »

xyzelement wrote: post #556
null0pointer wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, a vastly simplified tax code is needed. Here's my dream for a simpler tax code: The only tax is a Sales tax/VAT/GST. Pros: - Individuals never have to think about tax. It would completely eliminate tax returns. That alone is worth it's weight in gold since tax returns are such a time and money burden. - It would close all the loopholes megacorps/wealthy individuals use to pay less tax. You cannot avoid spend…

> Won't this disproportionately tax the poor? - Firstly, the existing tax code already does. I used to think this because it's often said, but learned it's not true. This sums it up: The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent. The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (38.5 percent) than the botto…

Counterpoint (note that this is tax relative to wealth, not income):

> The big picture: The very richest Americans pay much less tax, as a proportion of their total net worth, than the rest of us.

> By the numbers: The bottom 99% of Americans pay about 7.2% of their net worth every year in taxes, per Warren. The top 0.1%, by contrast, pay about 3.2%.

Source: Section 3 here: https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-capital-d213524e-b2f...

Re: Killing TurboTax

#653

Post by arduinomancer »

trymas wrote: post #296
lolsal wrote: post #282

TurboTax's offering is not just about literally filing my taxes. It's about managing risk that I'm not botching my filing in the form of missing something entirely, mis-filing, or leaving deductions on the table. Even if submitting forms online is entirely free, I'm willing to pay SOMETHING to make sure SOMEONE ELSE is responsible for making sure it goes well. I pay accountants for this for this exact reason. I'm sur…

It's a racket. Government already knows how much you owe them. So how about US government, like most modern countries, send you a form which says: "we think you owe us xxx$ (because of this and that), if not - provide extra information"?

> Government already knows how much you owe them.

I don’t get why people think this is true.

Take a really simple example of donating to a charity.

How would the government know you donated without you telling them?

How is the government going to know exactly where you put all your money?

Re: Killing TurboTax

#654

Post by Shivetya »

drdeca wrote: post #347
ghaff wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's nice to have a corporate bogeyman to rail against but it's not that simple. For example, there have been all sorts of tax deductions over the years to incentivize things like home energy efficiency improvements, EVs, solar power, charitable contributions, etc. And the mortgage deduction was/is intended to promote home ownership. I could go on. Someone can disagree with some of the choices around tax rates…

There are some people who are weirdly anti-charity, saying that all of it should be done through taxes? I don't understand their point of view.

there are many who think others should pay for what they themselves consider important and even get some glee out of forcing people they don't like to pay for something they otherwise would not.

then you run into those who think , why should I give to charity because its the government's job to fix that...

and finally those who just don't care

charity exist for those want to focus their person effort to fix their world and should be encourage but never be required

Re: Killing TurboTax

#655

Post by Shivetya »

yunesj wrote: post #379
azog_alone wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the tax code is so complicated is BECAUSE OF TurboTax. They lobby heavily to keep things complex and have brought down potential competitors through legal means. As such, "killing TurboTax" is the correct first step.

I didn’t see evidence in the linked article and the cited article therein that Intuit tried to prevent a simplification of the tax code. They just tried to stop the government from trying to build competitor software (partially paid for by Intuit and others in the tax accounting industry). Frankly, it sounds like a PITA to have IRS calculate your taxes with poorly written software, and then have to challenge it. I th…

Intuit has so little real effect. However it makes for sensationalist reporting and attracts eyes and easily picks up people who want to believe tax law is all the result of corporate greed. Simply put, its too complex for one company to have a significant effect.

Nearly every bill out of Congress can effect tax law and this includes even special appropriation bills; all the covid bills have had tax law changes.

there are some three thousand pages comprising Federal tax law however much of this is additionally subject to various regulations that can affect when and when not a tax takes affect. then throw in every state, city, and more.

To be honest I don't know of a good fix. there are too many forms of income and taxation that Congress would have to reduce the number of definitions for what is income into much simpler categories, say employer paid income, interest, capital gains, money transfers from others, and such, and then macro the rest into miscellaneous subject to a permanent fixed rate.

As in, account for the most common forms of income at a lower rate and they get all those that don't fit that definition and charge it at a higher rate as likely none of these would ever be claimed by the average tax payer.

when it comes to deductions, simply do what the Trump tax change did in 2016 but do it again, raise the standard deduction so that if you are under 250k you never need to itemize.

Re: Killing TurboTax

#656

Post by krebsonsecurity »

dang wrote: post #454

This is such an ongoing theme on HN that we could maybe use a bibiliography. If I missed any big ones let me know. In reverse chronological order: Show HN: ustaxes.org – open-source tax filing webapp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138446 - Feb 2021 (219 comments) TurboTax Tricked You into Paying to File Your Taxes (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102695 - Feb 2021 (306 comments) TurboTax’s 20…

Dare I add one other important story?

2 Former Employees Allege Intuit Made Millions Knowingly Processing Fake Refunds (Feb. 2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9097974

Re: Killing TurboTax

#657

Post by toddh »

My wife is a tax accountant. From a software perspective taxes are a nightmare. I made a service BasisCalc (https://basiscalculator.com/) to automate just one little part of the big multi-dimensional elephant that is the tax code and it was terrifically hard to implement. I can't imagine doing the entire tax stack. There's local, state, federal, and international. The code changes all the time. The dates change all the time. There are real substantial penalties for being late. There are so many data sources to integrate. She spends thousands a year and many hours of her time simply on tax code updates. She has serious legal liability for her work. So will your software. I would pick an easier target, like solving world hunger or world peace. Taxes will be simpler when politicians want them to be simpler and there's no profit in that.

Re: Killing TurboTax

#658

Post by whichdan »

dang wrote: post #454

This is such an ongoing theme on HN that we could maybe use a bibiliography. If I missed any big ones let me know. In reverse chronological order: Show HN: ustaxes.org – open-source tax filing webapp - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138446 - Feb 2021 (219 comments) TurboTax Tricked You into Paying to File Your Taxes (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102695 - Feb 2021 (306 comments) TurboTax’s 20…

Excited for this to get turned into an interstitial when posting a new story "are you sure we need to discuss this again?"

Re: Killing TurboTax

#659

Post by samstave »

BeetleB wrote: post #512
samstave wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure buddy. Let me ask you: Why are our roads so fucked up? Why are our teachers so underpaid? (Did you read the entire 1.9 TRILLION stimulus bill from Harris Biden? - I DID. Guess what they only gave $800 million toward edu packages which DID NOT EVEN CALL FOR OR REFERENCE TEACHER PAY INCREASES) Why are government workers not answering phones. Why is the military un-auditable. You are a fucking idiot. Let me tell yo…

> You are a fucking idiot. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names." "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle." "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis." "Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine." "Please don't fulminate." You were warned a day ago as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26323291

I apologize - I am just so upset on how things are going and I am livid at the inability to make meaningful change for the positive while we all watch ourselves being robbed.

The fact that there is a "vote" on a 1.9 TRILLION additional stimulus, on top of the ~6 TRILLION previous thefts - the fact that in 2008, many senators and congress folk had their spouses create LLCs - then get stimulus and bailout funds just illustrates the corruption.

The situation is bananas right now.

And people are defending the system.

This is like if you have major outages to prod and instead of doing a proper post mortem to get to root cause on the failures, you re-up your contracts with the vendors who failed you and pay bonuses to execs and ops people who left the system in a position to fail, then have all the other employees yell at anyone who questions what the hell is going on.

I get emotional - isolation for the last year has made emotions bottle up...

But seriously this situation sucks.

Again, I apologize for certain things - but not my indignant opinion of the current political and technical climate we are forced to live in.

Re: Killing TurboTax

#660

Post by vkou »

KirillPanov wrote: post #583
singron wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Income tax itself isn't the complicated part of taxes. I encourage everyone to do their own taxes by hand sometime. There are like 4 boxes for wage income and income tax, and 100s of boxes for everything else. And besides the boxes you do fill out, there is all the reading and calculating required to figure out you don't have to fill in even more boxes (e.g. in order to know if you have to fill in the AMT form, you p…

> biggest single thing that would simplify the tax code is removing the separate capital gains tax and just counting it all as income That's okay during times like ~1990-2020, a time of wonderfully low dollar inflation. The justification behind the long-term capital gains rate is this: during times of high dollar inflation , taxation on capital asset values turns into an outright tax on investment. If the dollar is i…

> This kind of economy-wide, sudden, and simultaneous disinvestment would be a catastrophe for the economy.

I don't know, it sounds like a great opportunity for the non-super-wealthy to buy shares in productive assets at a discount. Haven't all the prudent people in the room spent the past 8 years grousing about how poor the P/E ratio of the S&P is?

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