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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

I know that ship has sailed, but I really wish politicians would go back to making promises that have an impact on everyone like abolishing tax fillings.

It might be different in the US, but in Canada I file my taxes using the CRA's data directly. TurboTax even fetches it directly from their website. What's the point? They have my T4, my T2202 (studies) and everything else. Just send me a letter telling me how much money I owe/I am owed and that's it.

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Intuit and HR Block spend way too much on US lobbying for that to change. The first step has to be repealing Citizen's United.

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

The sad thing is its not even a lot of money if you consider how much profit they make. Politicians are surprisingly cheap

True. Large on people scale not corporation scale which is why treating corporations like people is a terrible idea.

maybe the rest of us should start a gofundme so we can pool together our funds and buy a few politicians.

American politicians can be bought off very cheaply by corporations, but the minute people try to crowd-fund bribes to get actual representation in government corporations will just start to offer more. Some companies and industries have more wealth than entire nations at their disposal. If it comes down to a bidding war between you and Google you will lose. If paying out a little more to congressmen will keep an industry making even greater profits they'll do it.

The only real fix is actual accountability for lawmakers. It means massive amounts of oversight to catch those who accept bribes in any forms (including "campaign contributions") and it means making it simple for the people to vote out anyone who refuses to represent their interests.

Right now, bribery is effectively legal, there is zero accountability and between the two party system, gerrymandering, and voter suppression even if you manage to get someone out of office you're probably not going to like the person you're forced to vote in to replace them. We're a very long way from fixing the problem and all of the people in power have zero incentive to start getting us there because they profit off the system being broken.

A neat solution is actually public campaign financing. We currently say that you can give $3 towards public financing on your tax return when you file - why not make that $100?

Collectively, people have a lot more money than corporations do - the trouble is organization. But basically flooding the system with so much money that corporate bribery becomes insignificant is the other option to banning it

It’s too late. Citizens United means corporations and the ueber-wealthy can do whatever they want. McCain-Feingold represented actual progress in this area, and it’s gone now. We are going to witness heavy fascism in the US, and I wish I knew what to do about it. Other than somehow prevent Peter Thiel from escaping to New Zealand, since it’s partially his fault and he should have to reap what he sowed.

(Tangentially, Feingold was one of the smartest people in the Senate. Wisconsin voted him out in favor of Johnson, one of the stupidest people in the Senate — the only thing that keeps him from the top spot is just the fuckload of really dumb other Republican senators.)

This has actually been done rather often in the past, you can start a donor driven PAC that can compete with corporate lobbyists with crowdfunding. It's generally quite a bit cheaper too because while we all love to criticize politicians for only listening to monied interests if they can raise some campaign funds and get brownie points for their voting base they're happy to dramatically spurn the corporate funding they'd otherwise accept with open arms.

Honestly though, actually reaching out to your representatives and talking to them is far more effective than most people assume.

I'm considering starting a 501(c)(4) to advocate for state level legislation, but I wonder if something like a PAC might be more effective.

Every time I see this issue brought up I think about how if you sum up all the money spent every year on US politics, including personal donations, industry lobbying, and the budgets of think tanks, you get a noticeably smaller number than the amount of money spent every year on almonds. [0] It always makes me question if the lobbying is really the cause of the tax system being the way it is. Or is the money just to grease the wheels and slightly alter the course of whatever was going to happen anyways due to a multitude of complicated factors?

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

Take 5 minutes to complain to your elected representatives every time you file taxes.

The only people that your representative listens to is the ones that fill their political war chest with a lot of money.

If true, then we need to convince those people to complain about this. And of course, we may actually be some of those people.

So how does someone remain elected if they don't listen to their constituents?

Generally by massively outspending opponents in the primary.

No, this is just the cynic HN perspective and an excuse to do nothing about it.

I dont think its cynical at all, as someone who has done some work for political campaigns, follows them closely, and studies them. Incumbents keep power within their own party by generally massively outspending their primary opponents, making it extremely rare for them to lose in the primary. The only real exceptions to this recently have been Dem stronghold incumbents losing to progressives.

After that, its just whether or not the incumbent can defend against the opposition party in the general election. Primaries are generally where the biggest changes are made, and are also where its the hardest to oust the incumbent.

Its not cynical, nor an excuse.

> The first step has to be repealing Citizen's United.

Citizen's United was a group that made a political-advocacy movie and the FEC wanted to treat it as regulated political activity.

It was. And the consequence of this ruling was nearly unlimited amounts money being spent on the reelection campaigns of various lawmakers by corporations, with the obvious intent being to install friendly legislators.

Yup, every major newspaper and TV/Cable network is a corporation.

If the NYT can push candidates, why not Sears?

Sears is free to say what they want on their website or distribute leaflets. That's not the same thing as donating cash.

The "work product" of CU was their movie.

Is it okay with you if a corporation donates money to Roger Moore to support the production of a documentary that said corporation agrees with?

Does it depend on whether said documentary advocates for/against a candidate?

How do we define "advocate"? (Is saying "Fred took money from Mexican drug lords" advocacy?)

CU will never be peacefully repealed.

peacefully

Well, corporations are people, people have the right to bear arms, and the country was founded on the idea that if you really really don't like your government, violence is an appropriate response to change it. Of course the Constitution pulled the ladder up behind the founding fathers on that bit of political philosophy, but in recent years I've heard some rhetoric citing the Declaration as inspiration for the path they should take now. Corporate personhood adds an interesting twist to things, especially considering that Alphabet or Apple could secede and have a larger GDP than many countries. Alphabet might quickly get labelled a hostile foreign power for all their spying. Apple might start a trade war with their extortionate tariffs but we'd still probably have reasonable diplomatic relations with them.

Maybe 200+ years with only one major civil war is a good record under these conditions, and maybe the next one will have official corporate sponsors.

In the US, the Republican Party has a history of intentionally pushing for cumbersome tax filing as part of encouraging people to hate the idea of taxes in general.

I've heard that too. And the idea is disgusting to me. I assume those who genuinely espouse this idea are those who are rich enough to have an accountant do all their taxes for them.

Is it really necessary to "encourage" me to dislike taxes? Is not the money leaving my pocket sufficient?

I've also heard Republicans claiming that IRS-provided tax bills/refunds is equivalent to a tax. I guess the implication is that the government is going to intentionally charge you more.

Having to use TurboTax or someting like it is equivalent to a tax, but it's paid to a corporation instead of the government. If I had to choose between my money going to the government and Intuit, I'd choose the government.

I don't think it's a Republican thing, the Liberal party and the NPD in Canada are both left-leaning and they have a majority yet they aren't pushing for this.

Pretty sure it's just run-of-the-mill lobbying and corruption unfortunately. A typical "think of the jobs!" type of thing.

What parent is referring to is not just lack of pushing for it, but active campaigning against automatic filing. Not a "think of the jobs" but "automatic filing is intrinsically bad."

See e.g. http://reason.org/files/ba148cd5babdda39f9ebb43b336b01d4.pdf

Republicans and the Liberal party in Canada are both neoliberal when it comes to their economic policies, they mostly only diverge on social issues and social services.

I wouldn't say its not a republican thing, just also a many other people/groups thing. You're right, just wanted to emphasize that.

It kinda already had been addressed. SimpleTax was released as donationware and the CRA introduced NETFILE and Autofill. Filing a return today is way easier than in, say, 2011. Buying TurboTax has been unnecessary for a decade.

Your counter to is that the politicians in a different country with an entirely different governmental evolution didn't arrive at the same thing?

That's why I do my taxes manually and mail them in. I want it to be as painful as possible.

At some point the tax system will be so painful that filing your taxes manually will be considered to be as severe as physical assault.

haha, have it done all automatically in SimpleTax, then download the PDFs, run a custom character-to-messy-handwriting transformer on all filled fields, then print out the paper forms and mail them in

nice one, letting the government hold onto your refund for an extra month is really sticking it to the man!

I missed including my T2202 one year and thought I owned a ton. They then sent me a letter saying lol, no we owe you. So pointless.

What annoys me now is that if you want a paper booklet you have to request one in advance if you did not use one previously but otherwise there is no free to everyone option to do it. You either request a paper booklet or use 3rd party software.

In México if you are an average employee earning less than around $50000 usd (I.e. most workers), your employer can "do" your taxes (very simple, they report what they have withheld from you).

If you have some amounts you want to regain from losses, etc., you can still do your taxes manually.

That means logging into the free MEX IRS platform, which shows all your tax info preffilled. Most likely the stuff you want to input is already there (all invoices in mexico are signed by private/public keys through the IRS system).

So you just enter your bank account to get your money back. Or get your reference to pay your taxes.

The system is really beautiful.

UK has PAYG tax, Australia is similar, if you have a job, perhaps some shares it is zero work. No max salary to worry about.

What would be required for the US to adopt this solution?

Congress passes a law to amend the Free File program.

https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...

Does this system pre-populate the forms with everything the IRS already knows about me and then I just modify the things that are incorrect? Can people upload their tax documents from all the financial institutions in some standard format that automatically figures out what form to use and populates maybe 95% of the fields and marks the empty required fields with yellow? I ask because I have an id.me/IRS login and they do not appear to have this data until I give it to them.

This is the system I am looking for. I think it would make the lives of the IRS employees better and would save me time and money.

> I know that ship has sailed, but I really wish politicians would go back to making promises that have an impact on everyone like abolishing tax fillings.

I'm not a fan of Trump, but the Trump tax changes made it so it doesn't make sense for me to do itemized deductions, because I won't beat the standard deduction unless I have a lot more things to deduct than I normally do, which greatly simplifies my tax filing and record keeping. Since I know I won't be deducting donations, I don't need a receipt when donating them, and that saves paperwork.

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