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Comment by KerrAvon | Hacker News Reader

I wish this would get written up in mainstream media. Hypothesis being that if more people knew this existed, it would put additional pressure on Congress to simplify tax filing.

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The number of possible inputs for Income is stunning: 15 types of income in total.

There are “only” 5 possible inputs under Deductions & Credits but 3 of them are categories with several subitems:

Itemized Deductions

• Home mortgage interest

• Deductible medical expenses

• Motor Vehicle registration fees

• Charitable contributions

• Casulty or Theft losses

Other Itemized Deductions

• Other state and local taxes

• Deductible medical expenses (preference share only)

• Miscellaneous expenses

Other Adjustments

• Alimony Paid

• Keogh and IRA contributions

• Foreign Income Exclusion

• Net Operating Losses

Because standard deduction is so high now, 90% of US tax filers do not have to worry about itemizing. According to IRS stats website, which I do not have handy on my phone.

Hat tip on the reference. I didn't consider the effect.

I found an article about it here: https://taxfoundation.org/standard-deduction-itemized-deduct...

This is kind of mental. In the UK we have nowhere near as many tax deductible things. An ordinary employed person will only ever get tax deductions for pension contributions or charitable donations. Almost nobody in the UK even has to file a tax return; data is returned automatically to the government by all employers and so there is no need unless you have certain uncommon circumstances.

There are some schemes through employers that reduce your taxable income (for e.g. a scheme to purchase a bicycle tax free) but these are handled by your employer and work by sacrificing some salary in exchange for the benefits.

A piece of politics that is radically different is that the UK does not have a right wing which hates the Federal government; the UK right wing is not only unitary-statist but monarchist.

This results in perverse pressures to make the Federal processes that people are exposed to, such as tax filing, as bad as possible so that voters also hate the Federal government.

Potentially interesting to note that the home mortgage interest and state tax deductions were long controversial as perverse incentives and got dropped during the Trump administration.

And for all the complexity of the tax code, it often pales in comparison to the version of the tax code we subject low-income families to: rules for means-tested benefits.

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