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

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

#711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly, it can vary a lot what people consider free. And therefore, this statement isn't true in general. The US does indeed have a lot of things I would consider freedoms, yes. But in Germany, for instance, I feel it is a great freedom to not have to worry about most healthcare issues, regardless of their income. A freedom (in my perspective) I wouldn't have in the US. There are other issues that fall into that cat…

It's easy to achieve such "freedoms" in a small ethnostate. Not so easy to do in the racially, economically diverse US.

Australia is much more ethnically diverse than the US, and also does this successfully.

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

#712
post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally, you'd want the IRS to be able to reliably populate a tax return, where all you do it sign it (or make corrections). A world where the IRS is pre-populating a return that may not be correct starts getting tough, even with such a taxpayer-warrant system.

Ideally, yes. If you need to preserve the ability to get refunds earlier than April 15 then one of two things needs to happen: 1. Move up the deadline for companies to submit tax information to the IRS, or 2. Allow taxpayers to declare that the IRS will not receive any more tax information than what they already have, with penalties for lying (presumably, the same penalties as what happens today if you submit your ta…

#1 - You’d have the entire corporate world up in arms every year.

#2 - Probably the best solution, though kind of waters down the revolution.

#3 - Probably what SHOULD happen, but again, political suicide.

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

#713
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think you can get $14k worth of deductible mortgage interest Sure you can. Even with the new $750k cap, and if you assume a (very low; chances are it's higher by a factor of 1.5 or 2) rate of 2%, you can get to $15k. If you assume a 4% rate, then you get to $14k with a $350k mortgage. In various coastal-metro markets that's basically an entry-level house. The other common itemized deduction is charitable co…

> Sure you can. Thanks -- I hadn't done the math, and was mostly grumpy about my mortgage interest + SALT not being enough. No significant charitable donations this year, I bunched up with a DAF in tax year 2017 for several reasons.

Yeah, i only deducted housing, and state, ended up with around 18k in deductions, and my mortgage is signifacntly less than even ops numbers. Its people with double or triple the average housing prices who are hurting, because hcol areas are let out.

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

#714
post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem. There shouldn't be a gazillion things, and the fact that there are is a major reason why rich, savvy, and unscrupulous people are able to game the system while average people pay full freight.

TFW you learn it's unscrupulous to read the tax code

The three adjectives I mentioned are all independent variables that each afford more tax advantage.

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

#715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are suitable alternatives? Aren't they the best in class, regardless of how shitty that class is?

If your taxes aren't complicated (i.e. you use the standard deduction), there's a service called "Free Fillable Forms" through the IRS that allows you to fill out your tax forms online and e-file them for free. Many states have an equivalent system as well. Last year I went to an independent preparer, which cost me around $160 and took an hour. This year I wanted to save some money so I decided to try filing myself a…

I was waiting to finish my taxes for state and federal before replying to this.

Turbotax was 100% free for both with automatic imports of my forms. As long as you avoid upgrading to unnecessary services beyond their basic service, you can file for free and save PDFs of both returns when you're finished.

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

#716
This is so infuriating and needs to change. Ultimately the problem is our Congress who votes for this nonsense. It's a uniquely American problem, in most of the rest of the developed world tax filing doesn't require manual data entry, is quick (Made a video to help raise awareness of the problem and solution

https://youtu.be/5YVnSVulQAE

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

#717
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But while I'm sure some of them had that in mind, I think very of them went around thinking "how I vote on this specific piece of legislation will make a difference in how much I make afterwards". The Clintons is a good example of why that would no sense: Their revenue is effectively diversified enough that it would make very little difference. They're trading off their perceived status and recognition - if they'd pu…

I'm not overly concerned with hurting a politician's feelings. I am bemused at the idea that someone can observe the last few decades of the capture of the government and major political parties by corporate and oligarch interests and the increasingly lucrative payoffs to these people, and not come to the transparently obvious conclusion that these are commercial relationships. This is institutionalized and legalized…

Saying "these are commercial relationships" (that we should try to stop) is different from saying "people are outright buying specific votes".

The problem is that people are too often looking at this as if it is the latter, when it usually is the former. That doesn't mean it's not a problem, but it means that attempts to try to address the latter will be totally ineffective, and addressing the former is far harder in general, because the "payoff" can be very tangentially related and non-obvious.

E.g. it can be as tangential as "look at me giving money to this cause over here that I know that you like (wink, wink)". No direct exchange needs to happen. No direct benefit needs to be had then and there - just the acknowledgement that party X will be very grateful were you to listen more carefully to what they say (not even one on one with you, but say, in a committee, or even in PR releases) and understands your interests.

Direct bribes are "easy" to stop in comparison. And so they're the wrong focus. The consequence of shifting focus to more indirect influence is that the only viable solutions to stop this kind of influence is to disperse power of politicians more by weakening their individual influence, and to reduce the powers of potential beneficiaries of there decisions inherent in accumulation of capital. You draw the conclusions.

Politicians feelings doesn't come into it - nothing you try to do to stop this by regulating their interactions with business will have any real effect.

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