What kind of insanity leads to this? The government is prohibited from creating software that helps its citizens?
There's a lot wrong with Brazil but here I just download the government-provided software (that runs on Windows/Linux/Mac) and fill my taxes in 10-15 minutes. Every year they release a new version that is easier to use than the previous one.
"Lobbying" and "campaign contributions", aka paying congresspeople aka straight up corruption but you can't use the C word in US politics.
H&R Block and Intuit have been greasing palms for years to keep the agreement in place and encode it in law: https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-...
> Those efforts have been fueled by hefty lobbying spending and campaign contributions by the industry. Intuit and H&R Block last year poured a combined $6.6 million into lobbying related to the IRS filing deal and other issues. Neal, who became Ways and Means chair this year after Democrats took control of the House, received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block in the last two election cycles.
So it's more about having money to get reelected than a simple personal bribe.
Sure, it's paying people off with more steps, and keeping them when they are so they keep providing the services you paid them for.
> Money paid to a PAC is very much separated from the politician. They can't so much as coordinate with the PAC.
They can't so much as explicitly and officially coordinate with PACs. I'm sure a second of thinking will reveal the flaw.
> So it's more about having money to get reelected than a simple personal bribe.
You're the one talking about personal bribes. And I still fail to see how the fig leaf of "campaign donations" is anything more than a bribe with more steps. “Oh they’re not getting money they’re getting the means to make money”.
There were whole weeks of "The Colbert Report" where Colbert and Jon Stewart legally set up a super PAC for colbert to run for "president of South Carolina" where they exploited every bit of the super PAC legislation just to show how easy it is and what kind of legal things people can do with the money. The "you cannot coordinate" part was hilariously easy to get around.
I think that's a distinction without much of a difference.
Related: TurboTax Deliberately Hid Its Free File Page From Search Engines
https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hid...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758126
We have systems in place to push back against the slow but incessant march (back) to plutocracy, but we don't always use them in a timely fashion. After almost 250 years there's been some... entropy.
Except it's not entropy, it's order (which helps with the sales pitch). Just not the kind of order everybody needs.