Hacker News Reader

Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

The software is nice and all... but the real problem is that the tax code is just way too complex. If you have properties, RSU income, other investment income, W2 income, and have to deal with multiple states you can have three different CPAs come up with three different numbers.

At the end of the day, if you're a billionaire earned income is a teeny tiny part of your earnings and most of it is kept unrealized for tax purposes. As a result, the doctor or software engineer ends up bearing a 50+% tax burden while ultra high net worth individuals are lucky to pay even close to the LTCG rate on all their income.

The tax system is oppressive under the guise of being "progressive" but really it prevents social mobility.

View on HN

The lower hanging fruit is to fix the filing method.

The government has all of the data available to them, they should be able to send you a pre filled tax return that you can amend for whatever reason. In 98% of situations their numbers won't need changing and filing can be a 30 second process. I believe that's how it works in most other countries.

Of course there are powerful lobbies who want the tax process to be painful and that's why it doesn't work like that currently.

> properties, RSU income, other investment income, W2 income, and have to deal with multiple states

That's a problem but not the main problem. That's less than 20% of the tax paying population. The majority of the population is mostly 1-2 jobs & may be a house.

Paying 50% is a complaint about the tax rate, not complexity.

Billionaires not paying tax on unearned gains is a complaint about the tax policy and its basis in $ not assets, not complexity.

Doctors and Software Engineers earning >$500K/yr and paying 50% of it in tax proves that social mobility is quite enabled.

The number of engineers making 500k USD per capita is a rounding error. Social mobility in the US is not great despite the purported American dream. Just because one can be wealthy from any background, the statistics prove you're unlikely do do so. The needle for social mobility has moved significantly globally since the times of kings and aristocrats.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com