Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

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Not sure why it makes sense to have a group with a financial incentive to take more of your money be the ones doing the calculating. The IRS can be a nasty, evil organization — In 2013, then Acting Director of Exempt Organizations at IRS, Lois Lerner, apologized to a room of tax lawyers for the IRS’s inappropriate targeting of conservative political groups.

If the IRS is in charge of doing people’s taxes, there is a non-zero chance that the IRS will not be completely trustworthy.

The real conversation should be about moving to a consumption tax and eliminating the political power that comes from income taxes. The current system is intentionally complex — designed to give politicians power to favor and disfavor behaviors and industries.

The consumption tax is something that sounds like a great idea, but in practice isn't.

For taxes to be fair, people who have more means should pay more, as it's less of a burden on them than people of lesser means. If you think of someone who's not too well off, their entire paycheck is going to food and rent, and not savings. For wealthy people, some part of their paycheck is spent on consumption of things, but a larger part of it goes to savings and investments.

There's a reason why rich people go to tax havens that have no income tax and only sales tax.

Seems to work perfectly well in other countries, why should it not in the US?

Just make it so that it's only already 'prepared', you still have to sign them off or correct them if there's something wrong.

The IRS currently receives almost all the information needed to do taxes for most people. There are not technical reasons why they could not share their calculations with you and give you the option of accepting them or doing them yourself and submitting them anyways.

But I agree, the current system is intentionally complex and should be simplified.

Your example of the IRS being evil is their director publicly apologizing for overstepping the line? Wow, I wonder what you think of the other 3 letter agencies then..

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