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Comment by Finnucane | Hacker News Reader

Turbotax et al. lobby heavily to prevent this. Given that much of the relevant information--W2s, 1099s, etc., are already reported, you'd think that this would be easier for a very large percentage of taxpayers. But it would effectively kill TurboTax's business.

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Couldn't the legislators just... not do what the lobbyists want? Are they really all that corrupt?

You can't actually use the word "corrupt" to describe what the legislators are doing, that's painting them unfairly.

All they're doing is lining their own pockets with millions from TurboTax et. al to make sure laws are favourable for those big companies. But because it's perfectly legal, and there are no thugs with guns or drugs or "bad members of society", it's absolutely not corruption.

Absolutely. And with the tax companies, it turns out that it's very cheap to corrupt a US congressperson.

what the going price? do you know?

Bout 3.50

The economist's answer:

If that were so, there wouldn't be so much money spent on lobbyists by companies.

I guess there's a reason they call it "the dismal science."

when something doesn't provide a reliable return on investment, they stop spending that money. that's how much you know something works, whether it's buying advertising or congressmen.

With the caveat that the ability to measure ROI exists and is also reliable. See for example advertising, and especially online programmatic targeted advertising: https://hbr.org/2013/03/did-ebay-just-prove-that-paid

Yes. They really are. Here is just some over the table stuff: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/congress-corpor...

Legislators are basically doing triage, responding to perceived consensus. Kinda like a product manager. Think attention economy. There's 10,000s of bills filed every year. No one has the resources or bandwidth to handle that.

Any given legislator has 1 maybe 2 issues that they care about, for which they will advocate an agenda. The rest, they rely on what they're hearing.

Intuit's lobbying effectively drowns out alternative view points. Assuming that anyone anywhere is consistently advocating for something like free auto-filing.

Source: Have lobbied. Know legislators and their staff. Also read many books about legislation. Most legislators would LOVE to hear from their constituents; will bounce out pro lobbyists to give their own people an audience.

>Most legislators would LOVE to hear from their constituents

Yeah, I'm sure that desire to hear from them is only up to a point, at which they love the lobbying dollars more.

Source: Have lobbied.

Ahh... that makes sense why this is one of the more reasonable descriptions of how lobbying works. HN seems to think it works by guys in $3,000 suits handing over bags of cash to Congressmen.

Your point about legislators loving to hear from constituents is true - one reason why lobbyists are so effective is because there is often few or no other voices in the room. If voters actually organized around some of these topics they'd be surprised how much power they have.

They can ignore the lobbyists, but they like the money, and they like not having to campaign against the lobbyist's marketing. Enough to make it difficult to pass reforms.

And that would be a good thing

Does anyone have any idea what these lobbyists actually say? What excuse (however lame) that they actually give for blocking simplification etc?

They usually claim that if people didn’t have to file their own taxes, they would not be aware of how much they are getting taxed. In their view, this would eventually make it very easy for the government to increase taxes without significant protests from the public.

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