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Comment by _ihaque | Hacker News Reader

For anyone interested in why the system looks the way it does, I recommend patio11's insightful recent blog post, which is nominally about payroll systems but ends up discussing the history of taxation in the US because that's the origination of many of these systems: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/payroll-providers-pow...

A relevant quotation for much of the discussion here:

> And, relevant to the question of whether Intuit controls U.S. tax policy: it can’t, because that would imply they have wrested control from Norquist. Norquist considers a public filing option a tax increase by stealth and opposes it automatically.

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patio11 has a huge and well known bias here, which is that he wants to claim, not necessarily with evidence, that all inefficiency is caused by governments and not by the private sector.

A comparison of tax filing in the United States with other countries, including those where governments are much bigger and more interventionist, leads to a different conclusion.

Indeed! Japan’s system is very efficient, and he has lived there for some time, so he should be familiar.

Similarly, it took the US forever to implement an instant payment system (commercial banks built Zelle via Early Warning Systems and RTP via The Clearinghouse, and the Fed finally built FedNow after Congress directed them to in order to ensure universal access) while India and Brazil rapidly rolled out their implementations (UPI and Pix, respectively).

These are intentional choices.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/opinion/filing-taxes-in-j...

Really? I live in Japan, last month I had to fill my taxes, and I found the process to be really convoluted and annoying compared to my home country (Spain). Likewise, banks feel really obsolete and inefficient here.

I shudder to imagine how bad the American system is to make Japan look good :/

My wife calculates and submits our taxes (here in the US). It typically takes her 40 to 60 hours to complete, and that's after spending around $100 USD on tax preparation software to make it easier.

To be fair, our taxes are more complex than many people's (I live in a different state than my employer and we have some stock market investments), but it's still ABSURDLY difficult.

And I'm not counting the time needed to respond to Federal or State follow-ups 9 months later where they question the values we provided. That happens to us about every 2-3 years. So far it has only once found a minor error on our part.

What?!

I do my taxes myself for my family. I have W2s, K1s, various 1099s for investments, own a home, and deal with carry overs from the previous years.

It takes me about an hour to do it. And then another hour to amend them many months later when I get my actual K1s.

How hard is it to answer 100 questions and copy numbers over from one place to another? W2 box 1 goes to W2 box 1. No I don't own a corn farm. I donated this much to these organizations. I would consider 25% of my rent for my home office.

Both turbo tax and tax hawk will connect to your investment bank and populate all the obscure 1099 stuff there. Dealing with international investment was definitely confusing the first time around, but definitely not 40 hours worth.

40 hours is 8 hours a day for 5 days straight. I don't know what you value yours wife's time at, but if it really takes that long you might be better off paying a CPA a few hundred dollars.

Same. W2s across 3 states, K1s, 1099s, LLC and Schedule C - takes a few hours, incl. state filings. Usually complete it in one day.

Yeah, just taxes alone doesn’t seem like it should take that long—but doing accounting for taxes can take a long time, especially if you’re self-employed and taking deductions, or have employees for your schedule-C business, etc.

Perhaps the poster is including the accounting in the tax prep.

>Japan’s system is very efficient,

Yes, because there is only one tax authority (国税庁, Kokuzeichou, National Tax Agency).

Here in the US, we have more than one tax authority:

We have the IRS, which is the federal tax authority.

Each state then has their own tax authority.

Each county then has their own tax authority.

Each city then might have their own tax authority.

And we must submit filings and returns with and pay taxes to all of them as applicable, and they all operate on their own laws, regulations, and taxes.

To reframe this, let's talk about sales tax. In Japan, there is only one nationwide sales tax; because there is only one tax authority.

In the US, sales tax might be levied at the state, county, and city levels as applicable (federal doesn't levy sales tax, as far as I'm aware). Some might not have sales tax, others might, and they are all different rates. The sale tax in one city will be different from its neighbouring city.

TL;DR: Paying taxes in the US is complicated because everyone wants their taxes.

> Paying taxes in the US is complicated because everyone wants their taxes

Everyone wants their taxes and refuses to cooperate. Most countries have some kind of local or regional taxes, and the single tax authority is responsible for collecting and distributing them all.

I get that the federal level in the US is a bit special (EU for example doesn’t tax citizens directly, instead the member states pay fees from their tax revenue). The local tax authorities per county surprised me though - what a mess…

>Most countries have some kind of local or regional taxes, and the single tax authority is responsible for collecting and distributing them all.

Most states operate this way. Counties will often collect city taxes, and in some states the state will collect the city and county taxes. There are obviously exceptions but within states there's a lot more cooperation than you might think

And most individuals are not paying income taxes to cities or counties, they're paying property taxes and that is typically automatically handled via their mortgage company

>>I get that the federal level in the US is a bit special (EU for example doesn’t tax citizens directly, instead the member states pay fees from their tax revenue).

the US Federal government was not suppose to tax citizens directly either, thanks to the 16th Amendment that was passed under the lie that it would only ever be a "Tax on the rich" of 3% and only apply to 1% of the people, now the federal government takes nearly 25% of all citizens incomes,, and uses that money to bribe people for votes and extort states for policies they desire...

Maybe you should be more pissed about that 1% who are using every trick in the book to avoid paying taxes.

Also as a side note why you think economic policy from hundreds of years ago is the pinnacle of excellence is a more than a but confusing.

Japan also has prefectural and city taxes that vary by prefecture/city, and get charged separately (the bill comes later in the year from the national tax), they still get their taxes. Just in a less convoluted manner.

I'm curious percentage wise how many people are having to file returns with their city or county. I've lived in two states (Alabama and Georgia) and even in a city with an "income tax" at the city level and have only ever had to file federal and state taxes

In Alabama the county and city I lived and worked in both had what they deem occupational taxes which are effectively an payroll tax, but there was no system of exemptions or refunds, it operated as a payroll tax only. My employer had to file the taxes, not me

I suspect the vast majority of people in the US only ever file state and federal returns, although a lot of people live in small states or along state borders so a lot probably have to file two state returns

For most individuals (as opposed to businesses), the only relevant taxes for the tax return are federal and state income taxes. Even then, there are several states in the country that have no state income tax, so you end up filing only the federal return. I live in such a state, and I still find the system very convoluted compared to what I've seen elsewhere.

Most crucially, it's still unclear to me why a return has to be filed at all for any tax that is already paid (from wages), and why it has to be manually compiled in cases where the agency has all the information about taxable income. If I don't owe anything, I shouldn't even need to file anything. If I do owe taxes, send me the forms prefilled and let me either sign off on them or add any missing info as needed. Anything over and above this is just pure waste of everybody's time and an opportunity for parasites to profit.

>that all inefficiency is caused by governments

Forget about the evidence of other countries (which is completely valid), I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective

In the US half the people in charge of the government hate it and want it to fail. Of course it's going to be bloated, inefficient, and costly. It's being sabotaged from the top. If everyone agreed that, once we make a choice on what the government is going to do we should do it well, we could have government services that are just as effective as whatever private enterprise example people always like to cite (being from the South it's usually the Chick Fil A drive-thru)

And that's why our west coast cities, which are not run by the half that hates government, are shining beacons of just how effective and successful governments can be.

There's this idea that west coast cities are shitholes, and honestly it's BS. I live in the Seattle suburbs and I'm downtown regularly, and the only obvious problem is the public disorder visited on us all by Martin v. Boise. It's pretty clear from housing prices that wealthy people are still happy living in Seattle: the market is speaking loudly. Don't get me wrong—I live in the suburbs for a reason, you couldn't pay me enough to live in Seattle—but as cities go, it's fine. Republicans who hate big disorderly cities like I do should just enjoy their suburban parking lots and breathing room, and quit pretending city chaos equals Democratic mismanagement.

I agree that in many cases there isn't any substance behind the talk. Yet the single largest state-to-state flow of people is from California to Texas, not the other way around; surely there's something objective that is driving that. And, given the time and effort required for such a move, it's not something most people would do on a whim without doing at least some research.

An even better comparison in California to California. The year Apple IPOed, Reagan handily won California. Santa Clara County only voted a democrat for President twice between 1948 and 1987–LBJ (who won 20 points nationwide), and weirdly enough Hubert Humphrey. In the founding and golden ages of Silicon Valley, it was a red suburb in a red state. It was like what Florida is now.

Yeah, no. GOP today has very little semblance to GOP of Reagan times (although the seeds of the present insanity have been sown then, and even earlier - Trumpism is a perfectly logical end result of Birchers, "moral majority" etc). And there's nothing "golden age" about Florida today; certainly not when it comes to quality of governance.

In terms of tone, it’s quite different, but in terms of governance Trump’s term was a pretty standard GOP term with the exception of immigration and foreign policy—which aren’t issues at the state level. Tax cuts, bootstraps, etc.

Calling Trumpism an extension of Bircherism is a coping mechanism, seeing as how the GOP is winning record shares of minorities under Trump. Instead, the Trump GOP is a hybrid of the Reagan GOP and Jacksonian/Jeffersonian populism. The opposition to immigration given the prospect of cultural change also appeals to many immigrants who left those places for good reasons. My parents immigrated to Ronald Regan's America, not Kamala Harris's America.

Florida is a tremendously well governed state. It has great schools, low taxes, low debt, a booming economy, etc. I know multiple families that moved there from Illinois and New York in the last couple of years.

>great schools

So, letting any veteran be a high school teacher without any further qualification makes it great schools? The governor purging state universities makes it great schools?

Letting veterans teach while working on their degree, which is what that law does, is a great idea.

And curating the education offered in public universities is a great idea too. Public universities must serve public purposes. CRT serves to undermine the society, not reinforce it.

It’s especially important to get rid of it in a majority-minority state like Florida. CRT education is racism. It teaches minority kids a different worldview and values from white kids—and an inferior one. My mom was born during British colonization, but she was educated as an equal person. She can tell you about Plato and Tolstoy. My kids—thanks to living in a blue state—are learning how to whine about “white men” and see themselves as different, and aggrieved. They will not be equal citizens when they grow up, because they are being socialized to be a lower, dependent class.

It wasn’t the British running east Pakistan from 1947-71. I’ve actually posted an column in Bengali from Prothom Alo here before about the pre-71 education system (which does praise its high standards and quality from the British but also says that Pakistan federal government invested a lot. And then goes on to say after the 71 war the rate of people getting first division in BA exams, went up to something above 50%, which it then compares to Bankimbabu getting a second division only and leaves you to draw your own conclusions from that)

Another important point is that in 1947 right before independence the Muslim League in Bengal (remember AIML was founded in Dhaka and sponsored by Nawab Dhaka!) was demanding parity of representation (professors, etc) in the education system with Hindus and the Hindus were refusing and telling them to set up their own educational establishments.

I don’t know anything about the education system back then. My mom had a British tutor.

> Another important point is that in 1947 right before independence the Muslim League in Bengal (remember AIML was founded in Dhaka and sponsored by Nawab Dhaka!) was demanding parity of representation (professors, etc) in the education system with Hindus and the Hindus were refusing and telling them to set up their own educational establishments.

Is your point that CRT is a good way to turn America into a third world tribal society?

My point is that era wasn't all puppies and rainbows educationally.

I understand, and it still isn’t. I’m just focusing on a narrow point: my mom perceived herself as equal because she received the same education British kids. Separate but equal doesn’t work. Kids must learn to view themselves as similarly situated, or else they will not be.

In my view, this is a big problem with the Muslim world. We have this tremendous victimhood complex. Contrast the East Asian countries, who have just sucked it up and focused on getting rich.

Abdus Salam tried to get the OIC to commit to spending a certain % of GDP on education and research and they basically told him to pound sand. It didn't help when Pakistan (Zia) didn't back him for UNESCO chief.

Hm. We have plenty of Washington-to-Texas migration from the suburbs, and there's no serious contention that, say, Auburn and Kent are mismanaged by Democrats. I know multiple families who have left for Texas in the last few years, and it wasn't "this place has crap government," it was "this place is woke." That is, they wanted more "traditional values" in their kids' schools and fewer BLM and pride flags. To me that's a valid and objective reason to leave (and honestly they're welcome to go, I don't want them running for school board even if we are friends) but it doesn't support the contention that government here is incompetent. It just means government here is socially liberal, which it unquestionably is.

There are certainly people leaving for these reasons. Yet polls also show that there are also plenty of left-leaning folk who move.

"why is the largest single state transfer from the largest state by population to the second largest state by population" is perhaps not that surprising a result.

Perhaps, but look at the entire people. California is losing people; Texas is gaining them. And it's not just California that has a net outflow to red states; New York and Illinois are also seeing an outflow.

COVID.

Return to office seems to be changing that flow.

That doesn’t really respond to the point, though. Is Seattle’s government efficient and effective? To my recollection, Seattle doesn’t have great public services.

It doesn't look to me (from 20 miles away) as if Seattle's government is notably efficient or effective, and I'd even say one-party rule is partly to blame: opposition parties serve a useful purpose. But I don't think the standard Republican sneer of "look what a crappy job the Democrats do of running the big cities" makes any sense, either. The things Republicans are pointing at as symptoms of bad Democratic government are mostly just side effects of what people in American cities like.

Seattle's 2021 budget was $5.5B against a population of 734k or about $7,500/head. Bellevue, WA's 2021 budget was $1.7B for a population of 149k, or $11,400/head. To pick a random DC suburb as a comparison, Alexandria's 2021 budget was $955M for a population of 155k or about $6,200/head.

I think there is a correct perception that many west coast cities are shitholes relative to what their per capita tax expenditures buys in most other cities. It is an argument about relative ROI, not absolute quality of life. If I spend $150k on a car, I don’t expect a used Toyota Corolla.

Cities like Seattle generate inexplicably little public value for the extremely high per capita spending. It should be much nicer for the amount of money it spends. The quality of services relative to expenditure is not defensible. Many cities do far more with far less. I’ve lived in Seattle around downtown for a long time, but it is far from the only city I spend time in. If per capita spending was correlated with quality of city experience, Seattle should be one of the best cities in the world to live in, but I don’t think anyone would make the argument that this is the case. As with San Francisco, most of that taxpayer money is lit on fire with no accountability and no contribution to the public good.

This is similar to the observation that on the same stretch of highway, California somehow manages to spend 10x per mile as its neighbors for visibly and audibly worse roads. People have made jokes about it for decades because the contrast is so stark if you drive on those roads.

It is not unreasonable for taxpayers to expect better than what is available in other cities when they are spending several-fold what those other cities are to achieve, at best, the same results. It doesn’t have to be a total shithole to be grossly mismanaged. People in Seattle spend enough tax money per capita that their city experience is far worse than what they have a right to expect.

It isn’t a political issue.

I agree with almost everything here, but this isn't what I'm referring to. What I hear ad nauseam is not that SEA/PDX/SFO are used Corollas but that they're Pintos with fire coming out the tail end. If what you're hearing from Republicans is "Seattle is an ok city but should have much lower taxes for the services they get" then I want to know what media you consume, so I can recommend it to my right-wing acquaintances.

I'll bite. In what ways are non west coast cities is more efficient than west coast cities?

Look at budgets per capita.

I'm not sure they would be. I limited to "west coast" cities because other cities' issues are sometimes blamed on Republican governors. West coast cities typically aren't.

"shining beacons" The same cities in states that are now in massive deficits? or covered in feces? with massive increases in drug and homeless problems? The same cities that have people feeling from states because of overregulation and overtaxation?

Those are the shining beacons of success?

All cities worth mentioning are run by the half that doesn't hate government.

> I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective

The more general argument is that monopolies are inefficient, and most instances of government programs are monopolies.

> In the US half the people in charge of the government hate it and want it to fail.

This is uncharitable. It's more accurate to say that they expect it to fail and hate government programs because they regard them as inefficient and net harmful on average.

> If everyone agreed that, once we make a choice on what the government is going to do we should do it well, we could have government services that are just as effective as whatever private enterprise example people always like to cite

The inefficiency is caused by the principal-agent problem more than anybody's ideology. Even if every politician wanted and expected the government to be effective, you still have the problem where a government program is providing a service consumed by e.g. 5% of the population and is serving 20% of them poorly. This is only 1% of the voters, who themselves have to balance their vote against their positions on every other issue on the ballot, whereas in a competitive market the company doing that would be losing 20% of their customers to a competitor and a competitor would be available to satisfy that 20% of the customers.

Meanwhile if a program is inefficient but its total cost is <1% of the total government budget, nobody is paying attention to it, but the same is true of most other programs which causes the average efficiency to be poor. Whereas the proprietor of a small business which is <1% of the economy is going to care quite a lot if it's wasting money and be paying attention to that business in particular, because it's their business and it's their money.

We don't have great solutions for these in the public sector. The best you can say is that sometimes it's worth it. For example, every taxpayer can use tax filing software and it has no unit cost, so even if the government is less efficient than a private company, that could still be worth it because you can spread the fixed cost of developing it over so many people. This is a general argument for the government to create and publish open source software whenever there is a reasonable expectation it would be widely used.

What it isn't is a general argument for government programs, because products with zero unit cost are relatively uncommon and so are software products that are both widely used (as opposed to having a particular niche) but not already well-served by existing free software. Software in the service of regulatory compliance is unusually well-suited to being published by the government. (And they should definitely be publishing the source code.)

> The more general argument is that monopolies are inefficient, and most instances of government programs are monopolies.

Even more general, markets where it is hard for new competitors to enter are inefficient. It's perfectly possible for a market with 10 or 20 competitors to stop competing for mutual benefit. I'd even argue a monopoly (a single dominant company) is fine, so long as it's easy for competitors to enter the market.

Consider the WW1 Christmas truce and other fraternizations. If the same actors are together long enough, they'll act for mutual ease. That was a good thing in WW1, but it's not a good thing when companies stop competing in a capitalist society.

> It's perfectly possible for a market with 10 or 20 competitors to stop competing for mutual benefit.

As I remember it, the empirical research says two competitors can keep a stable monopoly cartel going for a long time. three can maybe do it for a while. With larger numbers things get very unstable.

Source? I would enjoy reading more about this. I wonder if this was a simulation or an observational study of real markets?

I'm not an economist, but I read a lot of what they write, and it seems like an established fact in the field.

> I wonder if this was a simulation or an observational study of real markets?

It's kind of both.

Try to name a market where the largest company in the market has <15% market share but they still have a successful cartel going. They exist but you're going to keep finding that their enforcement mechanism is some kind of violence or (equivalently, through the government's monopoly on violence) regulatory capture.

Drug cartels can have lots of members because they murder you for defecting. Landlords collude through zoning boards. OPEC is literally a cartel of governments.

You can also kind of reason this out.

Suppose a market has two companies and the smaller one has 40% market share. If they could increase their market share to 60% by cutting their margins in half, that's losing money, so screw that. The bigger company doesn't even have to buy them off.

Suppose a market has eleven companies and the smallest one has 1% market share. If they could increase their market share to 20% by cutting their margins in half, they're making 10 times more than they do now. The other companies would have to buy them off. But how? More market share without lowering prices? Even if they could arrange it, any company with less than 10% market share would rather have 20% at half the margins, but in a market of eleven the smallest company can't have more than 9% without making someone else the smallest company. And that's if having the lowest price only gets you 20% market share and not more.

Now, you can make up numbers that allow coordination with arbitrarily many companies. Maybe lowering your margins to zero doesn't get you any more customers at all and then no one would have any reason to do it. But how many real markets work like that?

You're suggesting the half that wants smaller government impedes the day-to-day productivity of the half that wants it bigger?

Some things work well in government given limited resources. Other parts of government seek bigger and bigger budgets to implement ideological goals, no matter their efficiency.

(Any amount of money spent is justified by the end goal since the purpose of government is to print however much money is required to ensure complete social welfare.)

The half that wants it smaller, when it succeeds, guts the government, with the result being that whatever remains is incapable of properly carrying out the duties it is still assigned.

> I just hate the argument that government inherently because it's government is inefficient and will never be effective

The big incentive problem here is that democracies reduce the power held by private individuals. So (primarily wealthy, powerful) private individuals have an incentive to market the idea that government is inefficient to reduce the impact of decisions made by democratic choice.

This same conflict occurs throughout history. For example, the Magna Carta was a major concession of the power of the English King to lower nobility. There are always going to be people who dream of running their own fiefdom and see democracy as at best a nuisance and at worst an active impediment.

> For example, the Magna Carta was a major concession of the power of the English King to lower nobility. There are always going to be people who dream of running their own fiefdom and see democracy as at best a nuisance and at worst an active impediment.

...what? Are you seriously trying to claim that absolute monarchy is a form of democracy?

The opposite. Absolute monarchy is essentially when an individual (the monarch) has absolute power over a fiefdom. Similarly to how slave-owning plantation owners wielded near-absolute power over their plantation.

What I'm saying is that there has always been this conflict where (some) private individuals want absolute reign over others, and democracy limits this power. The Magna Carta is just one classical example of that.

The distinction between private and public is a little blurred when it comes to absolute monarchs, but the general trend is that the more absolute power a monarch has, the more they're running it essentially as a private estate. That's why lists of the wealthiest people in history often include rulers with absolute power.

Due to the conflict, the private power of monarchs has weakened. That's why, for example, in The Crown we see a monarchy that has to concern itself with public perception and the Prime Minister. But William the Conquerer essentially owned much of England.

> In the US half the people in charge of the government hate it and want it to fail. Of course it's going to be bloated, inefficient, and costly. It's being sabotaged from the top.

How are republicans sabotaging New York City, San Francisco, etc? Historically, half of all governmental spending in the country happens at the state and local level—-and that comprises most of the services that affect people’s daily lives the most. Blue states could have big, active, well run governments if that were possible, and republicans could do very little to “sabotage” them.

In practice, the most well-run places in the country tend to be moderate red areas where government has limited objectives but does it well. I grew up in red state Virginia and it was very well run. When California was well run, it was a red state. Florida is a well run state. I live in a Romney ‘12 county in a blue state, and it’s really well run, unlike Baltimore, where I used to live. I actually love going to the county landfill/recycling center, because it’s so neat and orderly and well run.

Having worked in IT with both the public and the private sector, my opinion is there is no difference in 'efficency' between them at all.

Efficiency seems inversely correlated with the size of the organization. Public sector usually has large orgs, but they are not run less efficient than equivalently sized enterprises.

You might jump to the conclusion that smaller entities would be the efficency solution, and even observe how this allows sometimes for a smaller entity to outcompete a big enterprise. However, if you approach it from a more systemic analytical point of view you have to take into account that surrounding the 'small' efficient business, there are dozens if not hundreds of unsuccessful competing small entities vying for the same niche. Taken together and purely looking at aggregate efficiency, this collection of competing businesses is even less efficient. The strenght of an openly darwinian struggle lies in innovation and adaptation, not in aggregate resource waste reduction.

> Norquist considers a public filing option a tax increase by stealth and opposes it automatically.

When phrased that way, it sounds ridiculous. But those are the author's words, not Norquist's or ATR's.

What Norquist and ATR want is for people to be aware of taxes. In their words (from the article): "More than any other public policy, the way the government raises revenue—how much, at what rates, under what circumstances, from whom, and for whom—has the greatest impact on our economy’s performance."

And even the article admits that making taxes easier to file has the side effect of "decoupling public sentiment and policy changes" (that is, making "tax increases by stealth" easier):

> ATR [Norquist runs Americans for Tax Reform] is institutionally skeptical of withholding, because they believe that withholding allows one to increase taxes by stealth. I don’t think it is excessively partisan to say that, if one phrases that claim a bit more neutrally as “withholding increases tax compliance by decoupling public sentiment and policy changes,” the people who designed the withholding system would say “I’m glad the National Archives makes our design documents so accessible. We wrote them to be read!”

> "More than any other public policy, the way the government raises revenue—how much, at what rates, under what circumstances, from whom, and for whom—has the greatest impact on our economy’s performance."

A perfect world would have people writing a check for their entire annual tax just before stepping into the voting booth.

> A perfect world would have people writing a check for their entire annual tax just before stepping into the voting booth.

That would definitely be a horrible idea. No, I won't vote for drivable roads because I just payed my taxes, potholes be damned. And afterwards complain about the potholes anyway.

I never said you don’t get to vote if you don’t pay your taxes. Nor that you have to pay taxes to vote.

I’m saying those that do pay taxes should have the totality of the amount of their income that is going to the government in mind when they head to the polls.

I think most people would still vote for drivable roads, and that there are a lot of government policies that could be eliminated before drivable roads are even on the table.

My experience in Omaha suggests drivable roads get sacrificed much sooner than one might expect. (And no, not for something nice like bike paths or even like, functional sidewalks.)

There are places in US where the firefighters won't respond to a fire in buildings where owners haven't specifically paid the bill for their own coverage, because the local voters like it that way (those that haven't had their house burn down while the coverage lapsed, anyway).

> No, I won't vote for drivable roads because I just payed my taxes, potholes be damned.

I honestly think the issue would instead be people not wanting to pay for the public service pensions for the former pothole-fillers.

What in the libertarian nonsense is this? Why not make people ride public transportation or use a public restroom or sit in a park or read about the history of the interstate system or visit a national park just before voting?

We should do voting at the annual BLM mustang round-up so voters can get a free pony.

And the large number who get a net payment instead would get a check right then?

I don’t think that will accomplish what you expect.

One of the main reasons conservatives and libertarians want filing to be hard is to confuse people into thinking the income tax hurts them, when in reality it benefits many of them.

Taxes in the US are not due annually. They are due on an ongoing basis.

You do not get a net payment. You paid your taxes throughout the year every paycheck. Your employer likely files quarterly.

At the end of the year, if you tally up your taxes and figure out you’ve given too much of your money to the government, you get some of your money back.

It’s called a refund. Not a payment.

I’d put those ongoing taxes throughout the year into the bucket of “shadow taxes” GP refers to. I suspect many people do not view their refund checks as a no interest short term loan they floated to the government. Their refund check came from their paycheck.

Some very low income workers that get the EIC end up with a net payment.

TIL!

Every tax form I’ve ever filled out has an instruction like:

> Enter the lesser of lines X and Y

when applying deductions and credits to prevent them from exceeding some value.

I’m surprised to learn that the EIC isn’t clamped like this.

It is a refundable credit

As noted elsewhere, the EITC is a so-called "refundable" credit. It wouldn't serve its intended purpose if it wasn't refundable.

> And even the article admits that making taxes easier to file has the side effect of "decoupling public sentiment and policy changes" (that is, making "tax increases by stealth" easier)

How on earth is this possible? Instead of not having any clue, you actually get to see everything. My taxes have been automatic for years and I still have to approve every step of them along the way and I get to see and approve everything which had been filled in. The big difference is I now not have to spend hours researching everything if it remains the same as it was last year and only check if it changes.

Two psychological mechanisms I can think of for this:

It's one of the reasons why every company in the world wants you on auto pay. It's a lot easier to keep you as a customer through the price hikes if it's only a line item on your bank statement rather than an explicit payment you're making every month. If most people are the same every year, then a small increase from one year to the next barely gets noticed because people are going to be looking for changes to their records, not changes on the bottom line, so the fact that the bottom line is 0.5% more this year will be more likely missed in the face of answering "are the records the IRS claims they have about me the right ones".

The other is related to the concept of "price anchoring". Approving pre-filled numbers becomes more about validating that your information is correct, rather than determining (and looking at) the tax value for the year. It pre-assumes the amount owed is correct (in both the calculated and the policy sense) and sets the expectation that you probably owe whatever the pre-calculated amount is.

Whether it actually plays out in reality and tax payer behavior is up for debate. but certainly there's a reason why so much of sales and financing tactics throughout commercial world tries very very hard to steer you away from the actual math when you pay for something.

> It pre-assumes the amount owed is correct (in both the calculated and the policy sense) and sets the expectation that you probably owe whatever the pre-calculated amount is.

Considering the penalties for getting it wrong. Simply no. You assume it is correct if it matches the data you have, not by default.

What it does do is stop you from having to calculate the nitty whitty parts of the statements when the data from the tax agency matches the ones you got from the bank, your employer etc and you have the partial coverage of having been provided wrong data. You are still wrong but -most likely- you can amend if there are discrepancies outside of your control.

You get an extra point of reference, not a -get out of filing for free card-. Since the system I'm part of also forces companies to provide specialized summaries it's a lot easier to get the right data as well. Correctly filing (which includes ALL deductables) should never be so complicated you require a special degree or a leeching company to do it for you.

>Considering the penalties for getting it wrong. Simply no. You assume it is correct if it matches the data you have, not by default.

We live in a world where people routinely borrow from "tribal lending services" at 500% APR. Where they buy a car on the monthly payment value without consideration for APR or loan term. Where an entire financial crisis was caused in large part by people taking out bad loans they knew (or should have known) were impossible for them to service properly despite the consequences. Where people don't review their own pay stubs only to discover their employer has been cheating them for years or has improperly withheld taxes. And a world where despite the existence of both the 1040EZ and e-filing people still find tax paperwork confusing and too hard.

Forgive me if I don't share your optimism on whether most tax payers would assume the answer the government got was correct or not, regardless of the consequences. It's also not an unreasonable assumption either, why in the world would you want a system where you couldn't assume the result was correct most of the time?

> [...] I don't share your optimism on whether most tax payers would assume the answer the government got was correct or not [...]

Rephrasing your response, it sounds like you would say you expect most tax payers lack the ability (or interest) to compute their taxes correctly under any circumstances.

Review has nothing to do with it.

I believe that providing people the correct numbers is just going to increase compliance. They don´t want to audit anything. They want to pay what they have to pay and get on with the rest of their lives.

I can't speak for "under any circumstances" but I suspect the vast majority of tax payers already outsource their tax computations to either one of the major software vendors, one of the major tax services or their own financial institutions / private accountant. I assume this because otherwise I would not expect "IRS makes a self service portal" to be headline news or a game of politics.

Beyond that though, the thread discussion was about whether there are any mechanisms by which the government pre-filling people's taxes could '[make] "tax increases by stealth" easier'. I proposed there were, though with no claims to the degree to which that actually had real world impact on tax payers and their behavior.

If we assume as you say that people "want to pay what they have to pay and get on with the rest of their lives", then it seems reasonable to think that anything which reduces the amount of effort and thought necessary for the process also has potential to '[make] "tax increases by stealth" easier', simply by the fact that it reduces the amount of thought one needs to afford to the concept of taxes in the the first place.

The alternative would be to propose some mechanism by which the government pre-filing people's taxes would increase the degree to which they pay attention to their taxes. Or at a minimum one needs to argue that people would pay exactly as much attention as they do now and thus it would be a net-zero change in focus on taxes, but if that's the case, then any compliance increase would be a function of making it easier to be in compliance at all, which is tangental to whether or not it '[made] "tax increases by stealth" easier'

> The big difference is I now not have to spend hours researching everything

I think you've answered your own question. If it weren't automatic, you would spend hours learning about tax policy, what is taxed, what is deductible, and what credits exist.

Personally, I learned most of what I know about taxes while preparing my own.

Consider the number of people who think having a bigger withholding and receiving a larger return is free government money.

Norquist don't want people to be aware of taxes. They want to not pay taxes; and believe that if taxes would be citizen friendly, people would be more welcoming to pay them. By making it as obnoxious as possible, they hope to have a society that provides them services by the magic of fairy dust.

> What Norquist and ATR want is for people to be aware of taxes.

Norquist is entirely disingenuous. Nothing would stop a tax payer from looking into the details of taxes assessed just because the government prepared something for them. (In fact, nothing would prevent a tax payer to continue to use TurboTax to verify and understand the taxation.) On the flip side, nothing about the current system actually makes tax payers more aware of the taxes they’re paying. Half the marketing of TurboTax is to allow you to finish your taxes quickly by basically just clicking through and adding basic information.

Speaking for myself, I would definitely be _more_ aware of taxes I’m paying if the government would prepare taxes for me. When comparing my filing of taxes in the US to the filing in Sweden that’s definitely the case. Sweden sends me information which I can then verify and correct if necessary. The grunge work is done and I can focus on details. In the US, I need to waste a bunch of time duplicating work and the go through the details later (and hopefully have enough time and energy to do so).

P.S. I keep using TurboTax as an example but they’re obviously not the only one. I chose them since they’ve parasitically attached themself to the current system and lobbied government to keep it from making things more efficient at a detriment to their bottom line.

Norquist is so flipping ridiculous.

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