The current system costs billions of dollars in taxpayer money, it’s just that today those dollars flow to Intuit. The IRS one should end up costing less overall, even at govt contracting rates.
But to your point: if there were a legit objection we’d have heard it by now.
The actual article is about something more interesting: that they are piloting it with states that have state income taxes as well, and that they will be rolling it out in phases (the right thing to do). The response to Intuit isn't about the meat of the topic.
But sure, it’s likely that he would vote against a candidate who supported the IRS’s program.
Therefore, the most likely outcome is that the IRS taking this on will most assuredly result in saving tax payer money.
There's no need for wagies with low net worths to go through the full process.
I don’t know how we can possibly not have complex taxes for the rich short of taking all their money.
This is why they can't get Trump on tax issues. Trump pays the best tax people to cover him. If they nailed Trump on anything they'd have to nail a lot of other people too, who are otherwise untouchable.
A flat tax would work just fine, except for all the people in the tax industry that is. You just level the flat tax until you get the equivalent revenue from the current scheme.
Whatever your feelings are about single payer healthcare, it’s incredibly disingenuous when politicians debate against it by bringing up the cost of such a system, without comparing it to the current cost of the private system it would replace.
Intuit and HR Block are too small to present that level of opposition.
If a big sector from the S&P sank it would drive an apparent large secular reduction in the overall market, and in particular in the index funds. And opponents would seize upon it and beat the drums.
Most of the financial news is incoherent and lazy — this would be just another example.
1. https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
I don’t get how “big” became a persuasive argument when it comes to the public sector, rather than “ineffective” or “inefficient”. Raw “size” isn’t a good target on its own.
At the end of the day all I care about is that things are done effectively and efficiently, and sometimes maybe we trade those things off so that they can be provided fairly and equitably (such as fire departments, I don’t care if a private sector solution would be more cost effective, I don’t want private companies selectively putting out fires).
In the US a lot of things are inefficiently pushed into the private sector, health care being a good example. Taxes + private health care costs in the US are a higher percentage of GDP in the US than in any developed nation yet the results are the worst of the same cohort (OECD).
(This isn’t to say that there aren’t things done inefficiently in government that might be better in the private sector. Just saying that single figures are worthless alone).
It was ~32% pre-pandemic, and excepting for the Great Recession, looked to be stable at ~30%. Considering the governments revenue over that same period, again according to your own source, is also ~30% we're at less than 1/3 of GDP expenditure.
I think that is a reasonable public expenditure for a representative government, especially for the third most populous country on the planet and the largest GDP.