One economist went on a long whimsical journey to pay his taxes with cash

The article mentions that they were "lucky" because in many places throughout the country, the physical location they would have needed to visit would have no available appointments until after taxes were due. Further, it wasn't a 30 minute appointment, it was a 30 minute appointment made well in advance, after which they (illegally?) _refused refused cash payment_, followed by another 30 minute appointment a week later. Except it wasn't timeboxed to 30 minutes because they didn't bother to tell them (or didn't know) how long it would take to make this simple transaction. Notice your options are to 1) have a bank or 2) use non-traditional digital means which all charge some form of "convenience fee" or 3) suffer major hassle to pay cash without surcharge.

W2 withholding is set at a fixed rate at the beginning of the year. If you get a raise mid year, that typically isn't adjusted to zero out at the end of the year and you end up overpaying. Add in all the potential deductions the IRS can't anticipate and isn't really possible to make tax payments exact.

> IRS easily has the information available to estimate and deduct taxes as they are due automatically or via an easy online form. Turbotax and other providers lobby against this for good reason

It's funny how people accept this lowered quality of life despite it being common knowledge that the IRS is purposely worsened to benefit private corporations.

My Canadian tax app has an AutoFill button that does 90% of my taxes for me by getting all the data from the government servers.

The other 10% is just inputting donations I made, and making decisions about various things.

I’d say it saves me 10 mins of data entry and is super convenient.

Estimate, but not calculate exactly. If you're deducting say, taxes for employment throughout the year, and then I carry out some trades that result in capital gains or losses that change me to a different tax bracket, the amount you deducted is now too much or too little, meaning someone's got to pay something at the end.

We DO have withholding measures in place to minimize payment necessary at the end -- but the idea that this can be done as we go fails to take into consideration factors that simply can't be foreseen with certainty.

Never mind the fact that while many people are happy to give up time value in favor of convenience, paying your taxes early means not having that money working for you, in, say, money market funds, or treasury bills, or some other such safe place where it can be held until it is due. Especially with interest rates on the rise, it's not clear that everyone would be particularly thrilled to give up this time value.

> Interesting article but it sounds like all the author had to do was schedule an appointment and wait 30min.

Two appointments. They stood him up during the first one, and wouldn't take his money.

It's also interesting how much effort they put into dissuading, people to pay in cash to the point of encouraging actions that would waste money on all kinds of fees:

> For people without bank accounts, their only option for paying taxes shouldn’t require paying fees to credit card processors or retailers—especially since they are likely among the poorest taxpayers.

Filing taxes in the UK literally takes 20 minutes online and requires no special software, and like 95% of people will never have to do it.

It seems they already calculate your taxes, but they require you to file them anyway.

"Whimsical" now means "making pointless work for yourself and everyone else" and seems rather close to "speed-running" ("slow-running"?) a bureaucracy for social media clout. Really, really pitiful social media clout.

That and massive lobbying from TurboTax and similar companies. There is also concern that millions or at least hundreds of thousands of accountants would be out of work.

I really want to see what would happen if the "taxes are theft" crowd actually lived in a society without taxes.

I suspect they'd go maybe a couple months before they were like "hey we should pool money together to fix the potholes in the roads". And eventually they're going to form something that looks a hell of a lot like a government, and they're going to have to collect something that looks a hell of a lot like taxes. And then give it a couple of generations and you'll have a brand new bunch of human house cats crying "taxation is theft".

Which is why the only practical thing to do with libertarians is to ignore them.

> one reason VAT/GST has been repeatedly rejected in the US

the other being, it would not be instead of other taxes; it would be in addition to them.

It's the same in Germany, the only difference is that the government made a deal with major banks so you can pay your taxes at their ATMs. Actually paying your taxes in cash at your government tax office practically never happens.

> Various people in congress want it to be complicated so that people will be even more unhappy about paying taxes.

I am like this. I am not opposed to taxation generally, it is necessary for society—but I want to be reminded how much I am paying, and what I am getting in exchange for that

The Federal Reserve is rolling out FedNow in July[0], which should enable instant payments, so instant transfers between accounts will be possible as more banks adopt it and more systems prefer it over ACH / wire. It still requires exchanging ACH credentials (routing and account number) so you won't see things like card terminal payments using it anytime soon.

0: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/othe...

They talk about this in the article. There's a fee that you pay, and apparently it isn't as simple a process as depositing cash into your fintech bank account via CVS/Walgreens/etc.

Not everybody is allowed to have bank accounts.

In Brazil:

As a person, it’s super easy to pay your taxes: download the government app, double check the data and send it (it’s more complex to a few people, of course).

As a company, it’s the hell on earth.

We totally do though...

https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/03/30/boston-massachusetts-pf...

Yep. Middle class people don't really get all the ways that being poor is a detriment. You often don't have credit, and you may not have a bank account, so you get paid in cash, or at the last minute by check, forcing you to use a check cashing store, which will rape you on unnecessary fees, siphoning any cash you might have saved, keeping you poor.

California also has the reverse limit on electronic filing. If you make more than a certain amount, you have to mail in paper forms.

Having to make 1 appointment is unacceptable, let alone 2.

Really? Multiple appointments and different people refusing to take the payment isn't onerous?

Sure, it's fine for an economics professor who has lots of time and can take off in the middle of the day to schedule and then drive and then get rescheduled and then ...

This is hell on Earth for someone who works hourly from 9 to 5.

And it's absolutely stupid. Either banks should be authorized to take such payments or the post office should be authorized to take such payments.

With cheques.

Write a check and mail it in.

Others have already mentioned cheques, and those were standard for most non-urgent matters. But in a loose sense, electronic payment has been around for quite a while. 50 or 100 years ago, a business with a large, outstanding tax debt might well pay it by wire transfer. Basically a cheque done quickly by telegram, later telex, then computerized. And it's still around apparently -- the Canada Revenue Agency says I can pay my taxes from abroad by wire transfer.

Maybe the answer is more interesting in Europe, where electronic payment systems existed long before smartphones and the WWW.

You would probably pay by giro, very commonly used to pay utility bills etc. The tax office provides a pre-printed machine-readable giro slip, which looks similar to a cheque but includes your tax number and amount owed (or electric company account number etc). You take that to your own bank, and they transfer the money from your account to the tax office's account -- originally this might be partly by post, but at least the printed slip is much more machine-readable than a cheque. I think by the 1980s the slips were no longer posted around, the payment was electronic. Of course, you could take cash to pay in to your account at the same time.

You could also take the giro to a post office, and pay in cash.

Or you could write a cheque and post both the cheque and the giro to the giro processing centre. I think postage was free.

The in-person parts of the system still exists, though I think the post-a-cheque bit has gone. It remains the default way to pay a bill (including a tax bill) with cash or without using a computer.

Before that, I don't know, since before the giro system most people in the UK didn't have bank accounts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giro_(banking)

Picture of a current giro slip, at the bottom of the bill: https://bionic.co.uk/business-energy/guides/business-energy-...

The MP proposing the system in Parliament in 1965, noting it already existed in most western European countries: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1965/jul/... -- "this is a simple system of credit transfer which can be operated through our network of 23,000 post offices throughout the country ... All these giro clearing houses are linked together by Telex machine".

It did read like a very short treadmill session, with lots of ancillary info to fill out the exercise.