Hacker News Reader

Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com