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Comment by __derek__ | Hacker News Reader

Many Republicans have signed Grover Norquist's pledge, and he explicitly opposes making it easier to file taxes on the belief that doing so would make it easier to raise taxes in the future.

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> explicitly opposes ... on the belief

Do we know that's a truly-held belief by this politician, or do we only know that it's an assertion or claim?

TurboTax has already made it easier to file taxes, so the cat is out of the bag. Maybe Norquist didn’t know what computers are capable of.

Needing to do your taxes at all on TurboTax is the whole point of the argument. It's a yearly annoyance everyone has to do AND often times you have to pay money to a company. Where in many countries you just get something in the mail already done for you since the government has the information already for most people. You can still file yourself if you want to amend something or have a special reason. That's how it should work.

Then why do I still dread doing my taxes every year? I literally only have a W-2 to file and I don't know why.

My tax return was 20 pages last year, and I expect it to be longer this year because I sold/bought a home. Tax return software does make it easier, but it's still not easy, and there's a good reason that everyone dreads it, even if they just have W-2 information.

OK, my taxes have to be hard to process because other people occasionally have hard to process taxes. That makes sense. Fair is fair; when people are struggling we make the entire country feel the same pain.

Right, but the IRS likely already knows all the information that goes on those 20 pages (or at least most of it), and could prepare your return for you, and just send you an email that lets you approve or amend it.

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