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Comment by thegrim33 | Hacker News Reader

I guess it was originally done this way because in the past people actually had some semblance of privacy and the government didn't actually know a great deal about people's income.

Eventually, privacy was eroded away year after year to the point where the government now knows an extreme amount about each citizen.

I guess I'd refrain the question - instead of asking why do we need to do taxes when the government knows everything about us that they could do it for us, should we really have that little privacy? Maybe instead of changing the way we file taxes, we change the way the government is intimately entangled with our lives?

Of course, those ideas, liberty and privacy, small government, etc., isn't really fashionable with the latest generations and most people would gladly give up their freedom and privacy to save having to fill out some paperwork.

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> instead of asking why do we need to do taxes when the government knows everything about us that they could do it for us

They cannot do everyone's taxes since what they know about many individuals is incomplete.

> should we really have that little privacy?

Put that way, the answer is no. On the other hand, virtually everyone demands services from their government and very few people want those services to be transactional (e.g. most people demand roads, few people want to pay based upon their usage of those roads). That means the government needs some form of revenue. For various reasons, it has been decided that a person's income should be a portion of those revenues. In order to ensure that people are paying their dues, the government needs to collect some information. Are there other ways the government could get revenues? Sure, but all of them are going to be problematic in some form or other.

> Of course, those ideas, liberty and privacy, small government, etc., isn't really fashionable with the latest generations and most people would gladly give up their freedom and privacy to save having to fill out some paperwork.

One has to be careful about generalizations. Even though a desire for liberty and privacy may be universally appealing, we would find that people's views on what those terms mean varies from generation to generation and from individual to individual. Note that I said the meaning changes, not a person's desire for it. As for the desire for small government, well, some people want small government and other people don't. It is a far less universal ideal.

> For various reasons, it has been decided that a person's income should be a portion of those revenues. In order to ensure that people are paying their dues, the government needs to collect some information. Are there other ways the government could get revenues? Sure, but all of them are going to be problematic in some form or other.

No, just a singular reason: Prohibition.

Taxes existed before prohibition, right?

Sure, but before that most taxes were in the form of excise taxes and import duties, at least in the US. Alcohol taxes were a big portion of that. When the prohibition amendment was enacted in 1919, that money went away -- in theory because people were no longer purchasing alcohol, in reality because they were purchasing untaxed bootleg alcohol. The effect was the same: a big hole in Uncle Sam's revenue stream.

Enter the shiny new income tax, passed just a few years before (1916). This had been sold to the public using Bernie Sanders-style "millionaires and billionaires" rhetoric, but, as is the inevitable way with such things, it was soon being applied to thousandaires and hundredaires. :-)

> since what they know about many individuals is incomplete

No, for most individuals it is complete. Most people don’t own stocks directly (only an estimated 21% do)[1], and the ones who don’t are not probable to deal with complexly taxable transactions as the norm.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/10/18/percentage-americans-own-st...

Your comment is phrased as a disagreement, but it's not. The GP post said the IRS can't do everyone's taxes, and you replied that they can do most. I think we're all on the same page that people would benefit from having available information autofilled while still having the opportunity to review and make corrections as needed.

> They cannot do everyone's taxes since what they know about many individuals is incomplete.

For the vast majority of people they have all the info needed. Hardly anyone can take any deductions other than the standard deduction anymore, so that's covered. For income, most people have W-2 jobs so that's covered and all financial institutions send 1099s to the IRS with all your interest, dividend and stock transactions so that's covered too.

Liberty and privacy are fashionable. The problem is that our Congress passes hundreds of pages of domestic spying legislation in the middle of the night. It’s not exactly the School House Rock democratic process we learned about in 4th grade.

But that’s really beside the point. If you are like millions of other Americans filing W2s, the fact that you work for your employer isn’t a secret. Your salary isn’t a secret. Most people will take the standard deduction. There’s no reason why that can’t be the default. It’s not a privacy violation for the IRS to use that info to make peoples lives easier.

> the fact that you work for your employer isn’t a secret

I would prefer if it was. It's even worse than that, the government has entitled itself to be a party to every transaction over $600, so even the self employed have to shoulder this unseemly burden.

> Your salary isn’t a secret

It is. It's a shared secret. Again, I would prefer if I didn't have to do this. My salary is not at all the same as my "taxable income." It puts me in a position to have to justify my filings after the fact to an entity that only has access to half my relevant information.

It's not a secret if your company uses any of the large payroll services due the Equifax "The Work Number".

Don't you need to specifically authorize someone to use that to get your salary?

Not if that someone is Equifax itself or any of its hackers.

Sure, any payroll company (or their hackers) knows your salary.

There never was a point in the period of time when people filed taxes in the US that the government wasn’t entitled to know your salary. It used to take more time and effort to get the info, but better technology doesn’t change the game, it highlights that it wasn’t a « shared secret ». Your employer has a ton of paperwork to file related to your pay.

Did you not just explain how the game changed from technology in your own post?

Before all of this unconstitutional collection of Americans information the government had to have a target and go out and collect and tabulate the information.

Now it’s a select where citizen does thing x over y threshold. How is this not changing the game?

The government having this information predated electronic systems. In 1935! when Social Security came into existence companies needed to pay a portion of their employees income directly to the federal government. IRS didn’t get computers until the 1960’s.

Only if you're defining "filed taxes in the US" as "filed income taxes in the US," which would make your statement redundant. The first income tax in the US wasn't until the Civil War, and only existed for the length of it. The "first peacetime income tax" didn't come until 1894, only applied to income over $4000 (2023: $126,000), and thus only to the top 10% of the population.

Even the constitutionality of an income tax was in question until 1913 and the 16th Amendment.

People today assume the past was a lot more surveilled than it was. The government (at any level) often didn't even have a record of people's births until they needed to interact with the government for some reason, even in the early 20th century. That was largely changed by Social Security, and people at the time and since complained that its foothold would begin a slippery slope of government intrusion into every aspect of their lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...

If they got rid of all the deductions and loopholes most people wouldn't need to file as the only thing they'd have to put on their taxes is their W2 income.

I believe the IRS is even informed of things like 401k disbursement and stock sales. Meaning most people wouldn't have to submit for those either.

The gains of simplify the tax code are gargantuan, but unfortunately, the wealthy and powerful organizations benefit from the current system, and would be hurt financially by simplifying it. So, it will never be simplified.

Part of the problem is that the main way the government knows how to give people money is through tax deductions. It doesn’t have to be that way. Covid checks demonstrated that grants are possible. That in and of itself would simple things, since there would just be a list of things you can apply for.

>we change the way the government is intimately entangled with our lives?

I've lived in Sweden where taxes are not just automatically filed but every citizen can trivially look up anyone's tax returns and nobody ever saw it as the government being intimately entangled with anyone's life.

Privacy violation would be to look into how and on what you spend your money, not that everyone pays their share of taxes. That tells you nothing about what people spend their money on. Merely that they aren't avoiding paying their part. I don't see the problem with the government automatically doing my taxes or anyone being able to see that.

Swedish views on privacy don’t necessarily apply outside of Sweden.

Are income levels not deserving of privacy?

Is your address? Your ssn? Your phone number? In Sweden, anyone can look it up.

https://ratsit.se

of course your address, phone number, income, etc should all be private just because the phone companies shared this didn't mean it's a good idea; and they always provided a way to be unlisted

> of course

"Of course" makes it sound like it is obviously / objectively true, but it is a sentiment that is not necessarily true, either in the past, or even in the present everywhere on the planet.

> your address, phone number, income, etc should all be private just because the phone companies shared this didn't mean it's a good idea

This information was public in the past before the phone companies existed. May I introduce you to the concept of city directories:

> A city directory is a listing of residents, streets, businesses, organizations or institutions, giving their location in a city. It may be arranged alphabetically or geographically or in other ways.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_directory

> City Directories were created for salesmen, merchants, and other interested in contacting residents of an area. They are arranged alphabetically giving lists of names and addresses. These often list the adult residents of a city or area.

* https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/City_Directories

They can date back to (at least) the 1800s and continued into the twentieth century:

> City directories were published yearly. The Archives has them from 1834 to 2001 (except for a few years in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and in 1987, when they were not published).

* https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/accountability-operat...

> Are income levels not deserving of privacy?

... No? I don't think so, anyway. Maybe if people understood how obscenely unequal our society is, it would go part of the way toward fixing that.

The idea that they are is a construct for the benefit of employers, not workers.

Even your sense that you should hide it is in service of this and the effort to get people tearing each other down is also just a good way to depress salaries.

That you've "lived in sweden" implies you have the luxury of hopping to whatever country suits you most. Nobody wants to hear a cosmopolitan's take on how we have too much privacy and how the government should be more involved in our lives. If the government mistreats you, you can just go to a nicer country.

Your reply feels unkind. They just said they lived in Sweden for a time. I don’t think it implies luxury or that they’re a wealthy jet-setting cosmopolitan. It could be for one of many reasons.

I also don’t know what’s wrong with hearing the opinion of a jet-setting cosmopolitan anyhow.

Around 500 million people living in the EU have that privilege. It’s pretty common for people to exercise it and in no way makes you part of the jet set.

I see. I'm probably wrong then. In my country only the rich or elite have the opportunity to live abroad.

Uh plenty of Sweden see that as a huge invasion of privacy

Sweden also doesn’t have secret ballot

In Sweden, anyone can look up your address, phone number, social security number, your car registration etc etc

This is not cool or desirable

If you own property in the US, I can look up your address, your landline if you still have one, probably not that hard to find SSN, etc.

If you own property in your name you could look up your address. Some people do not directly own their house though.

Approximately 0% of people have property in a trust instead of in their own name.

The SSN is not something you should be able to find easily

Secret ballot was introduced 1866 in Sweden. I think we were the third country in the world to do so.

Sweden has never had secret ballot. The “Valmyndigheten” election authority themselves have criticized the lack of secrecy and general chaos with Sweden’s ballots. But what do they know? They only administer the elections.

Swedes have a highly developed superiority complex and ability to perform mental gymnastics about the flaws of their country and ways of doing things. No sane person from any other country in the world would consider a system where voters must, in public and under the active scrutiny of other voters and local election officials (who are themselves politicians and party members) pick ballots for the party you intend to vote for and then bring it into the “secret” booth. Any child or idiot can see that’s not secret other than in the most distorted and disingenuous sense of the word.

Can't you just pick ballots for more than one party before going into the "secret" booth?

This is the most common counter, but it doesn’t change the fact that the ballot is not secret. Again, you’re picking ballots in public and under the active scrutiny of other voters and election officials, and there is a strong and palpable disincentive to pick ballots from the “wrong” parties, and a strong and palpable incentive for showing your neighbors and friends you pick only the correct ballots before going into the booth. Smaller parties have to come up with nationwide ballots themselves, which is often impossible. People can and do also vandalize, hide, throw away and illegally modify the ballots such that voters who show up can not vote according to their wishes. I have personally experienced TWICE having to ask the election officials out loud to restock the ballots for the party I intended to vote for, and so have countless others. I could go on. These are all known problems that the election authority themselves have pointed out should be rectified, but they never will be, because the system is working as intended. (discouraging votes for the wrong parties)

Yeah, and blank ones if you want to write down the party of your choice. You could bring your own ballot if you so choose, or vote pretty much anywhere else than were you live during a ~ three week long period.

yeah... or you could just implement secret ballot like all sane countries have

> blank ones if you want to write down the party of your choice

this can and does risk resulting in the vote not being counted (due to alleged illegibility, a tiny spelling error or whatever)

> You could bring your own ballot if you so choose

same thing, your own ballot could be considered illegitimate + even in the best case that you obtain a real lawful ballot, only a tiny fraction of people are willing and able to go through the trouble of doing so + again, by requesting a ballot, secrecy is out the window

> or vote pretty much anywhere else than were you live during a ~ three week long period

the suggestions just keep getting more and more ridiculous - no one should have to do any of this! everyone should be able to just rock up and vote with secrecy preserved, without having to prepare or use all these hacks

Which country has "secret ballot" then ? Cause what you described as imperfect is the system that is present in all countries I've ever been in, and I've been in the majority of western europe...

Almost all actual democracies have secret ballot? There’s any number of ways to ensure secrecy is preserved at all times by default. (unlike in Sweden, where virtually no votes are secret because it requires hacking the process)

Can you point a country and how they ensure secret ballot?

France works exactly the way you have described Sweden so far.

Sweden doesn't even work the way he describes any longer. The changes he claims he wants are already in place.

I am at loss here.

As per my prior comment directed at you, you have been reminded that the improvement you asked for had been implemented into law.

As per the same comment, the situation for new parties have thereby become worse. You are sure to have experienced the same problems we experienced when getting the Pirate party into parliament when you got the Sweden Democrats through the system.

The government agency was tasked with finding ways of improving their work. One of the things they recommended was for the selection of ballots to be hidden, which has been implemented since then.

It will probably have a negative effect on the ability for smaller parties to get started.

Party affiliation, which is mandatory in some U.S. states for voters (e.g. Oregon) is available to anyone who wants to access the registration dataset from the Secretary of State.

I assume you can also be independent though maybe there are implication for voting in primaries. At least in MA being on voting lists puts your address in the available registration dataset.

It takes very little to deanonymize things like healthcare records with this information as was demonstrated going back to the 1990s.

You can be unaffiliated (or a member of the confusingly named Independent Party) but you’re right, you then can’t vote in any primary elections.

>> nobody ever saw it as the government being intimately entangled with anyone's life

Is that true? There's no one, not one person in Sweden, who sees that as government overreach?

Scary if true.

Except in Sweden, what this means in practice, is that you only see the income/cap gains taxes paid of ordinary middle class people.

Rich people in the Nordics hold their wealth in foreign companies as retained earnings, and thus that wealth accrues gains/dividends tax free and remains invisible until they sell off a small portion for the purpose of buying something.

It's "transparency" only for the plebs. Americans cannot do this, as they are subject to global tax and extra punitive taxation on foreign withheld earnings.

Also, Swedes don't have the same level of real estate transparency that there is in America (property tax assessments put a public value on everyone's holdings in the US). Wealthy folks holding real estate between different countries in Europe makes the whole situation more shadowy than you might think.

> I guess it was originally done this way because in the past people actually had some semblance of privacy and the government didn't actually know a great deal about people's income.

You still had to file taxes, though, so they would know about your income, if only a year behind. I read somewhere that tax withholding only started during WWII (and it was supposed to be temporary). It's really the withholding that would give the IRS the information needed to file your taxes in advance, so it's only a fairly recent possibility.

It's not just withholding. Cost basis info on all stock market transactions are also provided to the IRS by your brokerage...

What about expenses for those that are self employed?

What about rental income?

What about expenses related to rental properties?

Lots of things the government doesn’t know…

None of which apply to the vast majority of filers.

Nobody is saying filing taxes should never be necessary. Only that it shouldn’t be necessary for most people.

The flow should be… Employer and financial institutions send info to IRS (they mostly do already). Then, in January, IRS sends a “Is this correct?” notice to residents. If correct, no action is needed. If not correct, then make adjustments.

100% agree. These conversations always seem to end with lots of "what about"s, as if being easy for the average case was somehow undesirable.

How would the residents verify the amount on the notice is correct? It sounds like the residents would have to do their taxes to verify the amount on the notice....

It switches the labor from manual input of every line to cross referencing, which is significantly less work

They don’t just send the amount, they would also send their work

free-file is entirely voluntary. You can still submit the forms yourself if you want.

free-file is estimated to cover 47% of Americans. we fund public schools even though a significantly smaller proportion of Americans are children. you would have a hard time finding any government service that applies to 100% of people

This is solved by:

- IRS pre-fills all it knows about you

- you log into to IRS web site to check if everything is correct, and provide additional data or correct invalid data

- submit

Oh look. By implementing this you may join Sweden and a bunch of other countries in the 21st century.

Gotcha. I was under the impression that what the government showed you was 100% final

Federal individual income tax wasnt a thing until 1916, so it just wasn’t an issue. I believe state income taxes only started shortly before that.

It was the older generations that gave up freedom and privacy for convenience, making that choice for everyone.

Up until WWII most working class people didn't pay federal income taxes.

In Australia, when doing the yearly tax filing, the ATO website already prefills all/most of the amounts because they already know those anyway

Your job is it then to correct things, fix wrong ones and submit what they couldn’t get automatically

The ATO website is also veeeery nice! I was surprised how simple of a task doing taxes was

> liberty and privacy, small government, etc., isn't really fashionable

Your negative freedom and ownership of property is recognized and enforced by the tax-funded awesome power of the state. If you like small government there is no lack of countries that you can emigrate too where the internationally-recognized government is too weak to enforce its protection over much of its society. These are usually places that are too unstable to be palatable to someone from a developed nation.

> should we really have that little privacy?

As someone else mentioned, the government already has to know that to know that you are paying the right amount of tax given your means. Alternatively, consider simplifying tax laws so that it needs to know less. Also, look at regulation that limits what the government can do based on the information that it has on you; for that matter, businesses too, for privacy's sake.

The two aren't really related. A implies B does not mean B implies A, ie negating B won't negate A, ie not having automatic tax filing won't remove the loss of privacy

Might as well say "Maybe instead of changing the way we file taxes, we solve world hunger"

(I say this while voting for small government & making efforts to preserve my privacy)

You are more than welcome to go off grid and enjoy your privacy.

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