Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

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> There is real conservative opposition to return-free filing. For instance, conservatives in general think the tax code is both too complex and too onerous. In a return-free system, citizens are given a summarized bill and encouraged not to consider the line items. The concern is that the bill is unfair, and the less citizens have it shoved in their face, the less likely we are to get a fairer tax code.

I'm a conservative, and I do believe the tax code is complex and onerous. Its made that way by lobbyists trying to get their special deals, and politicians using a revenue generation mechanism to push behavior.

The thought that its is only Intuit's 2.3MM/yr keeping the tax code complex is a bit bogus. There are many industries that rely on the current tax code's deductions and complexities to survive. The amount of money by companies, unions, and NGOs is staggering. They are backed by the helpful idiots in the media that continually preach that any tax code change is an assault on the poor. Even showing no understanding of basic math when deduction + flat rate taxes are suggested.

And yes, since I barely trust government accounting, having been the victim of a $1,000+ mistake which took a long time to resolve and hurt quite a bit and growing up under Indian Health Service, I don't believe in a return-free system. The thought anyone would take "trust us" from the IRS (or any government agency) is so foreign to my thinking, I just don't understand how it would work.

I believe in a flat rate tax with a larger base deductible with no social, moral, or lobbyist driven deductions. The IRS should have no political or social ties. It is there to raise revenue, nothing else.

> Even showing no understanding of basic math when deduction + flat rate taxes are suggested.

As a left-winger, my views and yours probably aren't that far off. I would be fine with a flat tax (that was actually collected from everyone) and a large deductible. Even more so if it was coupled with a meaningful basic income guarantee.

The problem is that I don't actually believe politicians when they say that is what they will do. With all the talk about "job creators", it really, truly sounds as though the modern GOP actually wants a regressive system where the rich pay almost nothing and there is no deductible because the poor need to pay their "fair share" (whatever that means).

So it isn't that we don't understand math. My preferred tax code probably looks surprisingly similar to your preferred tax code, I just don't trust any of your politicians to actually move us in that direction (and for the record, it's not like I trust HRC to do any better).

> the modern GOP actually wants a regressive system where the rich pay almost nothing and there is no deductible because the poor need to pay their "fair share"

None of the information I've seen posted for alternate tax systems by conservatives / GOP have ever had anything like that. That is something I hear a lot from papers that lean left, but is not the reality of any of the plans. Even the sales tax-based plans take great pains to make it easy on lower income folks. I just see it as more bad math.

I don't believe politicians will change the tax system because it is a powerful tool to impose their will and gain campaign contributions. Its a basic self-interest thing which explains the majority of politics.

But have any Republican elected officials actually put these policies into action? I mean, let's take Scott Walker. What has he done in Wisconsin? Seems like a lot of giveaways to the wealthy and not much else. This despite having a pretty solid mandate as mandates go these days (given that he survived a recall).

There are lots of reasonable-sounding proposals on various topics on both sides of the aisle (mostly from think tanks). The important thing is what happens when a party actually gets into government.

To your point, what has the Obama administration done when it comes to these issues while it has had power, especially considering the pretty strong mandate he had with control of both houses and a super majority in the Senate. The important thing is what happens when a party actually gets into government....

He used up most of his mandate pushing through health care reform.

If you call a bill with all of the benefits up front and the costs hidden over years of implementation, bundled with the final takeover of student loans to help finance this, "reform". Then I wish he world have actually spent the capital you speak of on something that was less insurance company hand-out and wealth redistribution plan than it is healthcare reform

I often wonder if a much simpler bill that proposed a national catastrophic insurance program where the Feds pay 100% over $50,000 for a health incident would have been cheaper and tipped the actuarial tables to push insurance rates down?

couple that with reform in health-care billing and practice of medicine and I think we would have had a winner.

a bill that couldn't be read before it was passed... yeah, stellar work there

Can you detail Gov. Walker's "What has he done in Wisconsin? Seems like a lot of giveaways to the wealthy and not much else."? I am not familiar with those parts of his policies?

As to the rest, I pointed out in another comment that the tax system is too nice a tool for politicians to alter.

Unemployment ticking under the national average, real budget reforms, and dismantling public unions. There are a lot of blue states that could use a Scott Walker.

> Unemployment ticking under the national average

Wisconsin's unemployment has been lower than the national average since before Walker took office.

> dismantling public unions

Except police and fire unions because it was more a political attack on the left's power base than a principled stand.

If that's what it was, why did he publicly back expanding Act 10 to hit police and fire unions on the eve of his Presidential campaign announcement? You think WI isn't a swing state, and he won't need every cop in the state to GOTV for him?

Something else I hate about political arguments on HN: they put me in a position where I might actually have to speak up in defense of Scott Walker. Blech.

That's a fair point. But it's worth noting that Wisconsin's overall drop in unemployment rate since 2011 has slightly outpaced the drop in unemployment rate nationwide, which isn't a mean feat considering that neighboring Illinois has trailed the nation in the recovery.

As for the public unions--I'd like to see someone take on the police and fire unions too, but that probably has to wait for another day. Walker's motivations for those measures are irrelevant. Pension and healthcare liabilities are going to take state and municipal finances off a cliff. There's pretty much no hope of averting disaster, but states that don't deal with their public union problem will catabolize more of their GSP base before the inevitable crash happens.

> ...the poor need to pay their "fair share"

The basic idea is that the Government should treat everyone equally. Treating someone differently because they have a lower income than others is discriminatory. Just as treating someone with a higher income differently is discriminatory.

Plus, as soon as you open the law up to treating people differently based on some arbitrary criteria, you open it up to corruption. A few "bribes" here and there, and suddenly this company is part of a group that gets special treatment. Or this rich person is able to avoid paying extra taxes because of some loophole created because the Government treats some group differently.

Thus, it's not about the "poor" paying their fair share. It's about everyone paying their fair share.

Treating someone differently because they have a lower income than others is discriminatory.

Wealth is not a protected class; unlike gender, race, and religion, we don't have a legal mandate to avoid making decisions based on a person's wealth.

It's about everyone paying their fair share.

What does 'fair' mean, though? Another 'fair' scheme might be that everyone pays the same raw amount (rather than a fixed proportion of their income). After all, isn't it discriminatory to include a person's income in the formula for how much one should pay? Our tax code then looks like:

Tax(person) = requiredRevenue / nPopulation

Unfortunately, this ends up requiring poor people to pay more than they actually generate, requiring government to throw the poor in jail for tax evasion and tax more to cover the cost of the prisons.

Ok, so we should be allowed to use a person's income as a parameter to the tax equation. The 'flat' tax scheme is to use a formula like:

Tax(person) = fixedRatio x person.Income

The fixed ratio can again be figured out by looking at total income of the population and the required revenue.

Two major criticisms (amongst many): a) The marginal utility of money is greatly increased when you don't have much of it. A 15% tax on $20k a year will lead to eviction, hunger and health problems, creating social ills that we'll need government programs to deal with. Or they'll just not pay the tax, so again with the prisons. And again, the overall tax needs to be increased to deal with a stupid choice in the tax code. This is inefficient and arguably unfair.

b) Furthermore, if we don't want to punish the poor for being poor, we have to reduce the ratio, meaning we greatly reduce investment in infrastructure, education, etc, mainly as a result of undertaxing the wealthy to avoid punishing the poor. This also seems hella backwards.

So maybe we end up with something like:

Tax(person) = min(0, r_0 + r_1 person.Income + r_2 (person.Income - baseIncome)^2)

with r_i fixed coefficients. So now we have four parameters to choose (or more, if we want a more general polynomial). And suddenly this requires real policy decisions to be made with some nuance...

So to me, it comes down to a question of whether we want to over-simplify the question of how to fund government - negatively impacting either a broad class of the population or drastically degrading the services provided by government - or whether we trust a segment of the civil service to do something a bit more nuanced.

I come down on the 'fix the fucking government' side, personally.

>> Treating someone differently because they have a lower income than others is discriminatory.

> Wealth is not a protected class; unlike gender, race, and religion, we don't have a legal mandate to avoid making decisions based on a person's wealth.

Discrimination and protected classes are two different concepts. It seems like you're arguing here that something shouldn't be thought of as discrimination because the discrimination isn't occurring against a legal "protected class." That's wrong. For one, we had unfair discrimination before we ever had "protected classes."

> What does 'fair' mean, though?

Just remove 'fair' from the sentence.

> a) The marginal utility of money is greatly increased when you don't have much of it. A 15% tax on $20k a year will lead to eviction, hunger and health problems, creating social ills that we'll need government programs to deal with. Or they'll just not pay the tax, so again with the prisons. And again, the overall tax needs to be increased to deal with a stupid choice in the tax code. This is inefficient and arguably unfair.

I disagree. If you know exactly how much money you have to pay each month, you can budget for it. A well planned budget can make $20K a livable income. I grew up in a family of 4 at that level. We tithed 10% of our income on top of the taxes we paid. We never were on Government welfare. And I never went hungry or didn't have a home. It wasn't easy, lots of people helped us, but I never realy realized we were "poor" until I went to college.

Sure it's just my family, but I'm pretty sure a lot of other families I knew as a kid were in similar situations.

> b) Furthermore, if we don't want to punish the poor for being poor, we have to reduce the ratio, meaning we greatly reduce investment in infrastructure, education, etc, mainly as a result of undertaxing the wealthy to avoid punishing the poor. This also seems hella backwards.

The goal is to help make it so that the poor are no longer poor. Government overspending, discriminatory taxation, loophole filled regulation, etc, helps mess things up so that it's really hard for the poor to stop being poor.

Fixing the tax code would be one step in solving the overall problem.

my parents lived off of grits (we're from the South) for three weeks when they were first married. They made it, with no help from the government - and my Dad never finished school, and could barely read. A lot of people have expectations of success without work.

I don't see how you can get a fair flat tax, once you take into account transfer payments and entitlements that benefit lower-income people. I think you can make government's intake look fair with a flat tax, but that the inevitable outcome of that will be a system that lowers the burden on the wealthy by doing fewer things for the poor.

I don't think the complexity of the tax system is really that much of a problem. And for the past few years, I've been getting a face-full of the system in all its complex and frankly idiotic glory. I think it's fine that the system kind of screws people like me, and also benefits accountants and a tax preparation industry. We can afford it.

"I don't think the complexity of the tax system is really that much of a problem."

The fact that TurboTax exists means the complexity of the system is a problem. For the average citizen to need a program to attempt to follow the law and still not get all the deductions owed points to a problem. The fact that the programmers at TurboTax have screwed up in recent years and cost people money and made them not comply with the law says the system is too complex.

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