They want to make tax filing as painful as possible so that the people associate "taxes => pain" and vote to lower/abolish them. Easy or automatic filing makes people forget about taxes and not care as much about them.
This is also why sales taxes aren't included in item prices, this forces people to be reminded every single day how much they're paying in taxes, motivating them to reduce them.
With income taxes being withheld from employees’ paychecks, taxes are already pretty invisible to a lot of people. When you become self-employed and have to hold back xx% of your earnings yourself, it’s an eye-opener!
If you want to make tax rates visible, just send a simple statement showing taxes owed divided by the tax basis.
Also, spending hours doing a tax return tells taxpayers nothing about what they get in return.
For similar reasons, companies prefer subscription pricing with auto-renewal. If customers had to look at a bill and manually pay it each month, more of them would realize they don’t need a particular service.
It just creates a lot of wasted effort across the whole population, people can't decide to stop paying taxes like a subscription if they so want to, the only power they have is to vote some people in that might (or might not) change the taxation based on their platforms, that's basically powerless and you support creating friction and inflicting pain in those individuals every single year with a loft notion that people will stop and reflect about what they are paying.
They won't, they will just hate filing taxes, while being on the hook if they send the IRS the wrong figure (which they already know about), it's simply insane that the USA does not provide pre-filled tax forms like so many other developed economies.
Create time? It uses up my time, leaving less time for reflecting on public policy, or anything else.
Not only that, I can give you a better way to make people conspicuously aware of the amount they're paying in taxes:
1) Stop requiring income tax withholding at all. Instead, require an equivalent amount to be contributed to an IRA and not withdrawn in the same year.
2) No withdrawal penalty for using money in a 401(k) to pay your taxes.
No need to make the filing process a bureaucratic mess. Also encourages people to have an IRA, if they don't.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the point of the American obsession on taxes links back to not tolerating bad leaders and the encroachment on freedoms.
In that sense, it seems here the goal is to make people aware of the ‘intrusion’ in their life and naturally will seek to reduce it.
Looking at the political rhetoric for the USA, there are many assumptions and conversations baked into that position.
For example, the assumption being that leaders are very likely corrupt, and the fewer resources they have to squander the better. Extending from this, it would be prudent to not work via government, and do so by private enterprise.
So on and so forth.
Why would people, logical people, continue to frame their RoI from government actions and public resources as a zero sum game? Yes, There is great space for emotion, team loyalty in our lives, however economics and resource allocation for the betterment of all can be assessed objectively.
I assume that this is the intent of reminding people of how taxes are used.
Having it framed that way - “painful”, “eye-opening”, “taking from paychecks”, puts you actively in opposition to the government.
Isn’t the point to encourage attentive, engaged citizenry, not biased citizenry?
This defeats the purpose does it not?
One of the biggest problems in the US is that federal taxes are so high, that there is barely any room for state and local taxes (where you’d get the most bang for your buck) to do anything useful.
The best theoretical outcome relies on a strange world where people are normal right until a magically-frustrating trigger event remakes them into homo-economicus which read government budgets for fun and spreadsheets out their personalized cost/benefit analyzes.
I don't think that happens. Instead of checking where the money is going--or having a similar epiphany about all the "free" results they take for granted--people just go: "tax too high somebody fix it somehow", opening the door for demagogues.
One could imagine another model, where filing is easy, but the government is required to show you where it all goes... But that's not usually in the interests of the "anti-tax" politicians, since it would highlight deficit-spending or programs they could not cut without putting themselves in an uncomfortable reelection position.
The last one though really just seems obvious from a competitive standpoint, you look cheaper if you can say that 5% of the price is not your fault. Didn't this just come up with airline ticket prices recently? Everyone wants to tack on fees and taxes at the end to make their product show up higher in search results.
FWIW, it's the official position of the anti-tax advocacy group "Americans for Tax Reform", whose pledge all but 13 sitting Republicans have signed.
The real reason is most likely the large variability of sales tax within most states. If sales tax were included in item prices you could not print the prices on packaging until you knew what place a particular item would be sold. And what price would you put in advertising when the ad will be seen by people in areas with different sales tax rates?
There is a much simpler explanation: It would make the prices look higher, which would reduce sales, which isn't to the advantage of the business or the tax collector.
Notice that they also do the equivalent for income tax from the other end -- the advertised salary for the job is the pre-tax number.
possibly misunderstanding, but the border between Oregon and Washington has an immediate sales tax change, and income tax change in teh opposite direction.
The fact that you want to cause extra pain to those who can't pay big money lawyers to simply make a point says more about your political leanings than anything else in this comment.