Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

We would have to file to get the proper credit, though, right?

It's quite apparent that you've completely missed the overarching point of this discussion.

> It matters to your statement, which is wrong as you made it.

What part exactly? You speak from narrow anecdote in your limited encounter with 1, maybe 2, online service providers and have provided precisely zero supporting reference otherwise. I've provided corroborating citation direct from the IRS.

> It matters whether the "code" needed is...and can thus easily retrieve.

No, it really doesn't. All that matters is that it's easily misplaceable or forgotten...the more arbitrary and useless, the better it'll serve the objective role of vendor lock-in in a world where options abound and financial incentives to the filer are the same as a direct consequence of the inherent simplicity of their case filing.

You've also made certain unjustified presumptions on the ease of retrievability. Once upon a time, at least one well known service provider would produce a digital summary of your filing only after the IRS had accepted the return (not to be confused with receiving it), and this personal copy was generated for free if and only if it was downloaded before the tax year rolled over. So if you forget to download it for personal record, they'd gladly reproduce the summary any time in the future...for a nominal fee. In the past, this dark pattern disincentivized e-filing with a different service provider in subsequent years, and it wouldn't surprise me if some still pull this tactic.

> Everyone should be retaining...

What everyone should be doing from a records management perspective is both completely irrelevant to this discussion and disconnected from happenings in the real world, especially as it pertains to individuals on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder. It might surprise you at how many people actually fail to maintain a copy of their vehicle's registration and proof of insurance in the only vehicle that it would be applicable to, or how many people don't even have a copy of their own birth certificate. These are pretty damn important documents, yet surprise: the human condition is real and people are inherently lazy as fuck. That you actually expect the poorest and least educated in society in general to maintain annual records on something as obtuse as tax returns is quite naive. Do you really think the tax return service industry isn't actively exploiting the crap out of basic psychological shortcomings of society to the benefit of their bottom line??

> More effective mechanism for what?

It's the whole point of my original remark: identifying the fundamental mechanisms which are largely responsible for producing repeat conversion in an industry where options abound, the product is free, and little to no differentiating factors of value exist between competing service providers.

At the ass end of the totem pole, the game of repeat conversion isn't about which service provider is going to somehow provide a filer with the biggest tax return as the parent asserted, and to which I disagreed...we're talking about candidates who qualify for free filing; these are the simplest of turnkey cases, hence why the service is offered for free to begin with! It doesn't matter what you think about the pragmatic utility of the self-service PIN because the fact is it's one of two options mandated by the IRS as a requirement to e-file. Some service providers will require you to produce last year's self-service PIN to e-file, some will require last year's AGI...wouldn't surprise me if some require both.

The W4 form should be sufficient (since it's used to determine the credit, if any, you receive per paycheck). You shouldn't need to file a 1040. Your employer would file the W-2 form which would allow the government to determine your income for the purposes of the amount of credit you receive per paycheck.

I'm glad you're curious to know more. The situations you refer to seem very threatening so I'm going to try to cover all bases.

The intentions of the ruling elite are formalized into nice-sounding theories that people get easily addicted to.

Racism is a bit more subtle than feminism, in that, "racism", as in discriminating against people of a different race, is a real thing, and it's wired in all of us. It should probably be better called "groupism" or "majorityism". All of us, in whatever sized group, have some mental concept of group identity, us vs them, insider vs outsider. That's just human nature. It's not evil, it's even adaptive. But it is NOT the driver of things like genocide and slavery.

These things are always driven by resources seeking, powerful players competing for resources. Black people sold black people to white people to be slave labor to farm tobacco and sugar.

America wasn't founded by White Christian supremacists, on a crusade against black people. It was founded by economic subjects of the British empire mad about money, and rebelling the attempts by the Empire elites to manipulate them. The civil war wasn't about our built in racism, or about how whites had gotten used to black slaves, it was about the power of a unified country, and preventing secession. Narratives had to be spun to mobilize people's passions to get them to kill for the elites who wanted to get power.

African genocidal wars are not racial. Hitler was not a racist. All of these mobilizations of injustice need a way to rationalize the economic or political driver. So narratives are promoted that hack our wired-in, benign biases and exploit them. Just like social media giants hack our reward systems to fill their pockets, robber-barons and warlords of previous eras hacked our adaptive, genetic heritage of reward and fear circuitry to mobilize large numbers of us to go kill other large numbers of us, by spinning narratives of bogeymen, evil outsiders, etc.

Then, with the narrative created, "Racism" (capital R), is blamed, rather than the actual elite-driven cause. Thus empowered, "Racism" can become a term of abuse, and people are convinced their inherent nature is at fault, when actually these massive injustices were driven by power seeking elites, and enabled by the clever abuse and exploitation of their human nature by these powerful bad actors.

Identity politics is getting more mileage out of the same outsiders bias, by defining legions of new groups, convincing people that membership of that group is tied to self, splashing in some extra strong circuitry if needed (sexuality), and getting groups to fight each other.

It's the same old trick of codifying intentions into nice-sounding theories to get people to go do stuff. It's propaganda, advertising. It's cattle herding with humans.

Wanting to be elite is just making the point how many of these new narratives are adopted by people as substitute "paths to power". These narratives actively substitute people's intentions to build a better life, and hijack their reward circuitry to get them addicted to fake payoffs such as blaming others, not taking responsibility for creating what they want, fake self-righteousness, and cargo-cult like belief that the "movement" will bring them the results. Obviously, if you want to stop people advancing in your society, you want to them be doing things that will never get them anywhere. It's an ingenious and insidious way to disempower people, by directing their actions toward useless, zero result ends, rather than having them try to actually create change or results themselves.

Elites promote these narratives for two reasons: economics and control. The more afraid, angry and triggered we are, the more we consume, and the more easily manipulated and controlled we are. The flip side is, if people actually got happy, and became aware of their personal power, they would definitely organize, rise up and create a better situation. The system preserves its own homeostatic equilibrium by keeping people triggered into their ape-brain as much as possible.

We're all a lot more powerful and good (minus the resource scarcity / resource seeking that leads to war) that these divisive fake narratives would have us think. More important than what "opportunities" someone is given, is what they do with what they have, and what they create for themselves.

The biggest thing stopping people achieving is not "structural inequality", is getting away from this idea that it's about what you "get", rather than what you "make". Nothing will stop a woman being rich, healthy, and happy, if she makes the right choices. Women can stand up for themselves, say what they want and don't want, they don't need a "movement" to get what they want, they can figure out how to get what they want themselves just like anyone else, unless they believe they're a helpless victim by virtue of their sex who has to be saved by some movement and given the success they feel privileged to, but don't want to earn.

People being killed and threatened don't need to fight racism, because our in built racism isn't bad, they need to avoid violence. If you can live in a safe society, that's your best chance. The state probably has a duty to protect its subjects, so pick a state that you like. If you don't want to move, and you live in danger, build yourself a fortress and get good at violence, because fighting the people who are trying to kill you will be your only way to survive.

This is something I hear a lot of (overwhelmingly) American people say, after which I am inevitably reminded of poor healthcare, food deserts and exploitative corporate practices. At this point those are all so entrenched in the "american experience", I don't understand how you can say unironically that "the market" is a fix for anything or does in any situation "work well".

It's a superpower, and it is in it's entirety an example that disproves that this is the case.