With all due respect to the OP, most state run software operations are complete, utter, garbage. I'd happily pay money to avoid some of the clunky, poor UI/UX, and downright broken web tools that the state of California produces.
TurboTax on the other hand, is a relatively nice experience.
I never wanted "linear". My ideal tax software just has the forms to fill out on screen, but applies all the constraints and rules so that the return is either consistent or you have a comprehensive list of discrepancies. And cascades any fields that can be derived from others. Really, just like a compiler for taxes.
Edit: TurboTax used to work like this...
Intuit's tax products are regulatory capture, plain and simple, and deserve no defending.
Other government competition with private enterprise is not so clear. Paving roads? Providing medicine? Delivering packages? Its been a rocky road.
And the USPS has been going broke for decades now. Not a good example of a well-run service.
Medicare is still more efficient than private insurance, even allowing for Social Security handling a lot of the administration you mention. Social Security must exist, and must provide the services it does, so you would of course rely on their infra if you're Medicare.
Efficiency, sure, what's inefficient about the USPS? I sent a package over my lunch break today, and my package delivery is 10x better delivered by a USPS mailperson than someone hired by amazon. (A USPS mailperson leaves a package at my door, but I've had packages from amazon thrown into my bushes, or dropped beside the street)
could you please share your thoughts about internet access in the US of A? it seems that despite the best efforts of Saint Market, long may he reign, and all of this wonderful competition and efficient allocation of resources and so forth optimizing for short term outcomes has led to mediocre speeds and monopoly-ish behavior/choice in most areas.
or that Saint Market has led to pretty poor health outcomes in the USA despite spending massively amount more per capita than other nations
or that Saint Market's desire for profitability and efficiency leads them to, say, not replace lead pipes which ruin health of various communities (probably far away from yours, so it's OK .... for now)
it's almost like evaluating things based on extremely myopic criteria that people use to judge for-profit companies leads to outcomes that optimize for local maxima but are horrible when viewed from even slightly more far out, like, i dunno, a few years.
can you acknowledge that some things are best evaluated on performance outside of "profitability" and "efficiency" in the time span of 3 months?
Management responsible to the bottom line will sometimes improve those things. Management responsible to … I don't know what a government agency is responsible to? rarely upgrades, review, improves. It is axiomatic of government agencies that they exist for their own sake. And cost a bucketload of (our) money.
With taxes you're interfacing directly with the government; that's either as a citizen or Turbo Tax as a proxy for the citizen. To me, that seems more appropriate for the government to handle than fire, police, or sewer service. Whether it's the citizen or Turbo Tax, it costs money to implement Congress' tax code and build out a "UI" (tax forms). It still costs money to audit. So you're outsourcing one portion of the interface, you still have to build/maintain an e-file protocol, and you're doubling up on the auditing.
History bears this out as a band-aid. The program started in 2001 under GW because other countries already had online tax filing and engaging the private sector was seen as a way to "catch up" quickly. 20 years later it's still miserable for the average citizen and there are countless examples of other countries showing how much easier it can be.
It runs excellently otherwise.
Congress did that. It's political. It can be undone.
Free market people want the USPS gone. Trouble is the Post Office is in the Constitution, must exist barring some Amendment, and must be run by the Federal Government.
None of those are bad things. The Post Office has been exemplary.
The trouble began during the Bush administration. Two things were done:
1. Rate changes that turn big bulk mailings for companies into a subsidy. Deep discounted rates. That was coupled with significant increases for ordinary people and smaller publishers. None of that made much sense.
2. Forced advanced payments on benefits. At the time it was done, there were people not even born yet, who would end up working for the Post, whose benefits were being paid now, basically.
It's crazy.
In terms of the self-reliant rural communities, you’re not factoring the very significant cost that the entire population pays to support your rural lifestyle. As agriculture continues to decline and consolidate, those externalities costs will continue to grow.
The leadership of government organizations has pressure to get re-elected, or to get someone from their party elected.
I'm not sure whether you are simply ignorant how representative democracy is supposed to work, or whether you're feigning ignorance. Is it really so unfathomable that people might be motivated by something other than financial gain? Are we expected to take anything else you say seriously if this is the starting point of your ideology?
One only has to take a look at the Obama administration's apparent panic over healthcare.gov to see this at work. When it wasn't going well, it very much was a political issue at the forefront of political conversation.
A big advantage is overhead. If the work scales out, government employees get paid less, especially executives. The disadvantage was that you couldn’t make money to re-invest, and capitalizing new services was difficult.
.gov orgs get a lot of grief, but if you compare them to an average large company, they aren’t as awful as most people think.
My experience is that in the public sector, things often move slower, but the range of productivity seems to have a significant overlap with an average large company. I think the cost of nobody believing in what they are doing is an underappreciated drag on many private sector workplaces. The fact that failure is not an option in the public sector has several oft repeated negative consequences, but it also means that you have a reason for coming to work and making an effort, (other than not starving) even if nobody appreciates it, management is terrible, working conditions are lousy, pay is poor, co-workers are idiots, etc. That counts for something towards effectiveness, if there is a core group that hasn't descended into nihilism.
> The government, on the other hand, exists to defend the citizens.
Never a truer word spoken.
For this tax year I used TurboTax. I have a relatively simple return, but editing stock sales was extremely tedious and I was constantly upsold on random products when I just wanted to go to the e-file page.
One example where it worked well before and became a complicated mess now: for some deductions you need answer a lot of questions just for it to tell you that you are not eligible because of your income. Why not to check this in the very beginning?