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Comment by lidHanteyk | Hacker News Reader

Who else lobbies like Intuit? Who else spends millions of dollars on defeating measures intended to make paying taxes simpler and easier?

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The Republican party? Seriously Grover Norquist wants taxes to be painful so you associate them with bad feelings. They made it illegal to compete with TurboTax by offering a free piece of software from the IRS. Look up California's FreeFile software. There is nothing Republicans have done that helps taxpayers unless they make over a higher than average amount of money. I'm not even trying to be political, this has just been an arm of their platform since the 1980s. I've included a link to a podcast which goes pretty deep on this topic.

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/07/18/tax-filing-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/house-bans-free-government-t...

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...

The Republican Party itself is not a lobbying group, but a political party. To the extent that they want to make taxes worse, they are both internally motivated and also the subject of lobbying. To make my original question more pointed: Who else lobbies like Intuit? It is already well-established that the Republican Party's members broadly support these antisocial tax-frustrating positions; we are examining the people who put money into those positions, not the people who put people into those positions.

Norquist is a great example of a lobbyist worth examining. He's a real piece of shit. His group is Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). Their 2019 sheet shows $390k spread across 6 lobbyists who did not hide their representation; they had opinions on a variety of issues and bills, all related somehow to taxation. [0] Intuit's sheet shows spending of $1.28m in that same time period, spread across at least ten firms, including dozens of revolving-door politicos and industry insiders, all aimed at one single piece of legislation: The Taxpayer First Act of 2019, an attempt to modernize tax legislation and filing processes. [1] Surprisingly, ATR has officially said nothing about the Taxpayer First Act, despite Norquist's well-publicized position against such efforts.

To recap: Intuit spent 3x what Norquist's group spent, and focused that spend on one specific bill which would have eased tax filing. If Norquist is a piece of shit, what does that make Intuit?

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientlbs.php?id=D00004709...

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientbills.php?id=D000026...

Republicans are not a lobbying group, but as a political party Americans have spent a heck of a lot of money on them, especially when you include PACs. Since you've limited it to specifically lobbying groups I don't know that the PACs qualify either. They definitely aren't as narrow either. It's certainly an interesting question.

That's hard to disentangle, because there are lots of individuals and large corporations that benefit from complex holes in the tax code that would go away if the code were made simpler. Intuit's efforts are just easier to ascribe to that purpose.

There's also the block of special interests that advance their agendas via the tax code. Things like the capital gains tax regime, Child Tax Credit, and mortgage interest deduction.

> Who else lobbies like Intuit?

Google spent $21 million in 2018. Facebook spent $12 million. Amazon spent $14 million. Microsoft spent $9 million.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/23/tech-companies-lobbying-...

Your point being? This discussion refers to an article about tax filing and Intuit’s efforts to retain tax code complexity and self-beneficial regulatory conditions.

Yes, companies like the ones you cited spend significant amounts of money to educate and persuade lawmakers. Academically I’d like to see what a world without lobbying looks like, but honestly, I’m not confident it would be significantly better for citizens (and may be significantly worse in some ways).

But that’s a tangential topic for a different discussion.

Numbers quoted in comment and link are total spent on lobbying, not on preventing easy tax filing.

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