You’d think that simplifying tax returns and reducing costs in the taxation system would be something the right could get behind?
The real kicker of course is that if you don't file your taxes, they actually do calculate your taxes for you, and send you a bill. It just includes the non-payment penalty and doesn't include donations.
The fact that they are capable of doing that implies how much time we all have to waste doing our taxes.
For most people, taxes are more than the next 3 biggest expenses.
If you want people to visually see where their money goes and when taxes are increased, you do a better job breaking down where it goes when described on a paycheque. Think "$0.82 for military spending; $0.05 for road maintenance" instead of "Federal tax: $317.02"
If you want the people to misunderstand and hate the government, then you make the people do math every month with numbers that change throughout the year and have financial penalties for getting wrong.
EITC eligibility, for example, depends on the aggregate employment and spending patterns of your household. The IRS does not (and shouldn’t) track when you moved in with your boyfriend.
The home mortgage interest deduction depends on your primary residence; if you have more than one, that means tracking how much time you spend at each.
Although you're wrong about the mortgage interest deduction, that is reported by the bank per address, and you have the list your primary address with your state tax authority, which the IRS gets a copy of.
I think you’re seriously underestimating the amount of data the IRS would have to proactively collect. “We get your tax obligation right 80% of the time!” isn’t an acceptable SLA. Kids are born, houses (and electric cars!) are bought and sold, community college classes are enrolled in, …
Re: Primary residence: Uhh, OK, so I report to my state tax authority who reports to the Feds. I thought the point of this thread was that somebody else would do all this for me, but for the evils of Grover Norquist and Intuit?
There is a reason TurboTax is popular -- because it's a better interface for asking those questions.
But look at other countries. They don't ask you to fill out a form. They send you a bill and ask if they missed anything. For 80% of taxpayers, they would send the bill and the taxpayer would say, "yep, that's right". And your taxes would be done.
The rest could keep doing it the old way.
> Kids are born, houses (and electric cars!) are bought and sold, community college classes are enrolled in
All things they already know about! Because when you claim those things on your taxes, they cross check that to try and catch you in a lie.
When the IRS audits you, they don’t come with their own evidence beyond the basic income reporting that yes, they could pre-fill into forms. It’s up to you to produce documentation that justifies your filing.
Our tax code is complicated. It relies on voluntary (but potentially audited) reporting and compliance. If you want to argue for a simpler tax code, great, but at the end of the day, either the IRS needs to collect a lot more data or we’re stuck with self-reporting.
So for 80% of people, they would never have to fill out a tax form at all. They could just get the tax bill and have it auto-pay (or more likely auto-refund).
And for the next 10% of people, who only take a small set of deductions that you can take on top of the standard deduction, you don't need even a two page form, you just need a wizard that asks a few questions like TurboTax.
And then for the rest they can opt to fill out the regular forms if they don't agree with how the IRS calculated their bill. This is how it works in pretty much every other civilized country (and a lot of uncivilized ones too).
Taxes are in hindsight so you've already made whatever donations you did by the time you paid taxes.
Donations either lower your tax bill or have no effect on it. So, by not filling taxes (_and getting caught_) you're just increasing your tax bill.
...but then tax you on the interest they paid you if you claim it.
Do you have a source handy? My Google-fu is failing and only bringing up interest on unpaid taxes.
As a non-American whose country break out the VAT into a separate line item, with the explicit intent to inform consumers how much tax they are paying, and who has shopped in countries where they roll it all into one, I can say that this 'claim' is absolutely what happens in practice.
Pretty much everyone does, of course, know that the VAT rate is 20%, but still you always get people complaining that we’re being ripped off when something which costs $1000 ends up being sold here at £950.
Meanwhile, you can simply check "VAT rate 20xx" and find that. It saves time doing the math for your state sales tax and then doing mental math to figure out what you leave the store with.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/search?q=TurboTax&type=site#gsc....
Using OpenSecrets in particular is misleading because it shows you donations fron "employees of corporations" to political campaigns and then people pretend it's donations from "corporations", which is obviously not the same thing. (and not allowed either)
No they don't. Corporations can't give money to representatives. That's exactly why I just said OpenSecrets is misleading.
There's zero reason why taxes, for the majority of citizens, isn't just a postcard you get in the mail and confirm against your own earnings records. It should not cost me hours of my own life and/or dollars of my own money to file my taxes. I don't mind paying them (if they're used for something actually constructive like public infrastructure) but gosh they sure make it hard.
* Eliminate all taxes
* Eliminate all regulations
* Use the government for financial gain (by the "right people")
* Use the government to oppress all "others" (those who are not white christian men)
* Crown a king and ensure that crown stays within their select groupEverything they say is double speak, you have to look at what they say and what they do.
Indeed if taxes are too difficult or painful, a reasonable person would demand that the government simplify taxes, and that's not the same as reducing taxes. But then again maybe they are banking on the masses conflating simplifying taxes and reducing taxes.
That’s not accidental: the rich have been funding anti-tax messaging since the introduction of the income tax, and it’s heavily promoted by the media voices they fund. The tax preparation industry is similarly biased since it’s with so profitable for the median voter to think that they need to pay hundreds of dollars every year to fill out a couple of forms.
Sure, if you only have a W-2 then it is pretty simple. The issue is that over time people have a tendency to accrue other tax reportable activities as a function of age. It actively discourages people from making some types of potentially productive investments because of the additional tax complexity.
Enough 401k, mild investments over time with disposable income, or transfers from friends / family / inheritance, that the process becomes quite challenging. You make a couple thousand on a decent year in capital gains or dividend distributions, yet end up with rather confusing paperwork piles to deal with at tax time. Finding out it was necessary to note each buy / sell and the holding time individually for the entire year just seemed crazy in the detail necessary.
Mild awareness of why the actual wealthy hire accountants and firms with specialized teams and software to deal with those issues.
The part that's also not dealt with, at least in terms of those deductions, is that usually they're related to businesses and expenses. The deductions are available, yet often you have to be treating almost your entire life like a business expense every moment. Business cell phone. Business internet. Business supplies. Business ads, website, and marketing. Business travel. Business property depreciation / amortization. Business legal and accounting. Business mileage. Business loan interest. Business meals.
A (personal opinion) funny one is "Hire your own children as workers." You can write-off the payment you make to them which reduces your taxes and the income they earn can be tax-free if you pay them less than the standard deduction.
You're an exception and, yeah, it sucks. For somebody who has W-2 income, maybe a 1099-INT, and takes the standard deduction filing taxes is painless and simple.
I've just accepted the $800 - $1,000 cost per year for preparation of my LLC K-1 and personal taxes as part of the cost of being an exception. It sucks, but I just roll it into my rates.
But also, Intuit spends a lot money lobbying.
Hell, I have a fairly complex return. It takes me <90 minutes with a $40 software package.
It just does not believe in a federal government that it is not in control of.
For example: the perennial fight over "net neutrality" was because Congress absconded their duty to write regulation and handed it off to the Executive to figure out in a vague way that allowed for flip flopping policies with the force of law every time the administration changed.
You know what would stop the Executive power grab currently happening? If Congress would do their damn jobs. The Republicans in Congress are more to blame for this mess than the White House. This is supposed to be their power that they are just sitting and watching get taken away.
But the Democrats aren't guiltless either. People who care about this sort of thing have been complaining for decades, right through Democrat majorities and administrations. They had plenty of chances. The whole beltway fucking sucks and we are so cooked.
The fact that Congress is ineffective in no way absolves the executive branch of irresponsible or illegal behavior. The president took an oath.
That's what makes it illegal.
31 USC 1535, The Economy Act, authorizes Federal agencies to purchase from each other in the interests of economy. Obvious application is that rather than have the Social Security Administration lease an office or build a building, they sublease or lease a facility owned by the GSA so Federal demand can be aggregated. 1 big lease is cheaper than 12 little ones.
In the case of 18F, having a consultive entity within the GSA maximizes the value of procurements made by GSA and other agencies. When congress appropriates money to say, the Department of Labor to perform a function, DOL may choose to engage 18F to deliver or assist, avoiding additional procurement and taking advantage of investments and capability already built.
Congress in 1949 recognized that basic concepts like shared services, aggregation and mission focus deliver value and promote efficient operations. The current regime's corrupt interest is obvious to anyone with a brain.
The current iteration of USAID was created by an act of Congress. Unless the President's office has been given the power to create and pass legislature at some point in the past five weeks, only Congress can unmake it.
So was the CFPB, which is also being shut down.
So was the Department of Education.
People have been warning for a long time that this concentration of power in the executive is ripe for abuse. And here we are.
The legislature could stop this, yes. But it won't, because he is carrying out the program the GOP always wished it could have done, but couldn't. Once this all goes to shit, they will of course, blame him, while keeping their own hands clean.
And given just how fucking fast a dedicated executive can destroy anything it doesn't like, there's literally nothing the Dems could have done to prevent this. It doesn't matter what laws they passed when they had control of government, when the current executive simply doesn't follow the law.
And the only people who could compel it to follow the law don't want it to.
The only cure to this is never voting red, under any circumstances, for any position, in any race. It's been fully compromised, and is unsalvageable.
Oh yes there is. It's just more radical than they were prepared to admit was necessary. It's things like ramming through thousands of new federal judgeships, packing the Supreme Court, passing anti-gerrymandering laws with jail-time penalities for state officials that violate them, and ultimately packing the union (https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/pack-the-union-a-...). The things that needed to be done were not "make things so no president can do this when he gets elected", it's "fix the system so these kinds of people cannot ever be elected".
(We can also blame them for not imprisoning, quicky and fairly trying, and executing Trump for sedition and treason when they could.)
What do think would really happen in that case? They'd change their platform slightly in a way that allows them to get 5% more of the vote and then still get in half the time. They're one of the parties in a two party system and it's a two party system because it uses first past the post instead of e.g. STAR voting. And the reason court packing doesn't work is obviously that as soon as either party actually did that, it would become the norm and happen every time the party in power switched, and nobody wants the courts to become fully partisan and the number federal judges to double every 4-8 years.
If you actually want to stop them from fucking everything up, figure out why they're doing the things they're doing. "They're evil and corrupt and have entirely impure motives" doesn't explain why ~half of voters voted for them.
Instead you have to look at the actual reasons and do something about them. Why do they want to expand oil production? Because people want cheap energy. If you don't want to expand oil production then you need to cause energy prices to go down in some other way, e.g. by not actively opposing the construction of nuclear reactors so their costs don't balloon as a result of lawsuits and a capricious regulatory environment, or provide more tax incentives for renewable energy so the transition happens faster and people stop caring about the price of gas sooner. Use diplomacy to e.g. encourage Germany not to shut down their nuclear reactors and raise global energy prices by switching back to fossil fuels.
Republicans keep getting elected by saying they're going to do something about burdensome regulations. Maybe consider whether there's something there? Look into what it's like to operate a small business. If you're making $9000/year selling stuff on Etsy and you invest in a postage meter, should you now have to know what MACRS is? If you don't, is it because it's somehow illegal to own one? How does property tax work on unsold business inventory stored in an out of state third party warehouse? If you have a question about any of this, why isn't there anyone in the government who can give you an official answer? Does the law create a good way for you to accept digital payments without getting locked into an overpriced payment gateway that can capriciously disrupt your business by dropping your account at any time? If you get an electric vehicle for your business, can you take the tax credit if you have enough income to be eligible for it personally even though the business didn't make a net profit this year? Why is the tax credit aimed at making it easier to afford one limited to people who make enough money that they already can? What can happen if you get some of these things wrong?
People keep voting for Republicans because interacting with the government is slow, frustrating, complicated and dangerous. The best way to take that away from them is to solve those problems yourself instead of insisting that they don't exist.
It's true that to some extent both parties participate in propping up that system, but Republicans clearly do so far more. There are a lot of problems with the Democratic party as well, which is precisely why radical change is needed rather than just "pass some garden variety Democrat measures".
I agree that there are important changes to be made that Democrats are lamentably unwilling to engage with, but I'm not talking about a world where Republicans need 51%. For most of the Republicans of national prominence, we should consider ourselves as a failure as a nation if they can even get 5%.
Which in turn works because, even if they don't solve those problems, the problems are real and people experience them. So if you would make the problems actually go away, they would lose the ability to run on them.
> But they also get elected in large part because of the highly unequal and unrepresentative system that they perpetuate
This is what I mean by 46% vs. 51%. There are way bigger problems than the electoral college or district lines, which would only change how and where both parties campaign rather than making anything obviously better.
> including a media system built on feeding people falsehoods utterly disconnected reality (which is another reason ~half of voters voted for them).
This was never great but the thing that really seemed to turn it into a tornado full of broken glass is the interaction between Trump and the traditional media.
Major media outlets were used to politicians fearing them, and then Trump didn't, so the media got more aggressive and less cautious. Which was only effective for a minute until people started to realize what they were doing and that set the media's credibility on fire and made things dramatically worse.
Meanwhile the right-leaning media outlets, which were traditionally more partisan but only a little, saw this and their conclusion was basically "oh, so we can just do whatever now?"
> There are a lot of problems with the Democratic party as well, which is precisely why radical change is needed rather than just "pass some garden variety Democrat measures".
The most significant thing you could actually do is replace first past the post with one of the cardinal voting systems (STAR, score, approval), because it would allow for more than two parties. Which in turn would upend the the entire partisan apparatus of both sides which has evolved in that environment and would be maladapted to defending itself and therefore vulnerable to positive change. But it's also a subtle enough change and distinct from any of the usual battle lines that all of the villains you'd be disrupting might not recognize the implications until it has already gone through.
But the fact that they run on them without solving them shows that it's possible to run on a vaporware platform and never do what you said you would. So they would just find some new nonsense to run on. Also to a non-negligible extent the "problems" they run on are already illusory or unrealistically exaggerated, like demonizing various groups, or capitalizing on people's lack of understanding of how regulations can amortize risk.
I think we agree that structural reforms are necessary (like changing voting systems), but I think it's more than just that. There is a very real movement that is based in getting a large mass of non-wealthy people to reject reality in order to capture their votes to support the goals of a small number of wealthy people. Switching to STAR voting isn't going to fix it. That entire phenomenon has to be actively purged from society in the way that Nazism was purged in post-WWII Germany.
People care about the things that are causing trouble for them. You can promise to fix their problem and then not fix it, but if there's nothing they need from you then there's nothing to promise them.
> Also to a non-negligible extent the "problems" they run on are already illusory or unrealistically exaggerated, like demonizing various groups, or capitalizing on people's lack of understanding of how regulations can amortize risk.
Nah, that's just confusing the problem with the rhetoric.
Republicans hype immigration because the Democrats have an immigration problem:
a) "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". b) Generous social safety net.
You can't have unlimited immigration of the world's poor and then give them all welfare; you have to pick one. But Democrats can't choose, so we end up with this nonsense where immigration which is formally illegal is still happening at scale and they're neither willing to formally legalize it nor enforce the law against it.
Which means Republicans get to beat them over the head with it because the Democrats have no response to it when they're legitimately caught in an inconsistent position. To stop that from happening they need to pick which one of the two incompatible things they want.
Likewise, the US really does have a lot of regulatory overhead, and many of the rules are needlessly complicated, inconsistent, blunt, poorly considered or obviously corrupt. The people who actually have to interact with them -- mostly small businesses -- are intimately familiar with it and find it infuriating. Now, some of the rules are net positive, but even those are often still needlessly complicated or in conflict with other, stupider rules. To fix it you would need large teams of smart people go through all the rules, throw out the bad ones (even if they're corrupt and someone wants them that way), simplify the needless complexity, do a cost/benefit analysis that includes the administrative cost of implementation and have the ability to actually modify them. Which requires fastidious people to do something expensive and boring at large scale. But until that happens -- which it hasn't -- there is still a problem.
And in the meantime the Republicans get to say "regulations bad! less regulations!" and have a bunch of people cheer because they know how much the status quo sucks.
> There is a very real movement that is based in getting a large mass of non-wealthy people to reject reality in order to capture their votes to support the goals of a small number of wealthy people.
Eh. That's kind of one of the things a cardinal voting system does fix.
You're defining the problem too narrowly. The general issue is, in a two party system, both of the parties are big tent parties. Which means that if your party wants both X and Y and you need a majority to get either, the people who want X can go drum up support from people who want Y so their party gets in and they get X, because by nature the other major party will support both not-X and not-Y, so more support for Y is more support for the party that wants X.
If you have a voting system that supports arbitrarily many parties and your party supports both X and Y but X is stupid or unpopular, you can't win by getting more people to support Y because then some other party would come in and support Y but not X and then win because you've convinced people to want Y but not X and now that's actually one of the options on the ballot.
But that sounds like you're saying the solution is to just fix all problems. That's never going to happen. There will always be problems of some sort, which means there can always be someone claiming to have solutions.
If the democrats grow a pair and shutdown the government by filibustering the budget, Trump will fire (or worse) Elon, scorched earth whatever is left and blame the democrats. They are all about the big lie -- they'll float the idea that Elon was secretly working with the democrats the whole time. If Trump is lucky, there will be an early hurricane or an earthquake in California and the devastation will be Chuck Schumer's fault. Long live the king.
(Disclaimer: I don't live in the US and don't want to take any political stance with this)
I don't think that is average for US tech workers. I don't believe the vast majority of US tech firms have such a thing.
I wouldn't call that "far left" myself – although "far left" as used by American conservatives is a pejorative colloquialism whose meaning has shifted from its traditional definition (Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, etc). Not slang I'd use myself but I can understand it.
P.S. If you don't trust a tweet from a right-leaning journalist, here's a page from their own GitHub repo about their bot: https://github.com/18F/charlie/blob/main/InclusionBot.md
Some of the terms are genuinely offensive or unprofessional. I'm not sure about some of them, but I'd expect a government agency to show a higher level of sensitivity and professionalism about their language than a private start-up.
I also note that the bot "lectures" people as a private message.
Maybe a new administration want to to change the culture at GSA/18F. Fine, they can do that.
Nuking an entire department and chucking out a significant chunk of work they've done because of a Slack chatbot and a few minor documents/policies is just mental. It's vindictive score-setting and an ideological purge.
It is unclear how much of the actual work they've done is being "chucked out".
18F did work for various federal agencies, and whatever code 18F wrote for its client agencies would still be in possession of those agencies.
What happens to that code going forward – whether it continues to be maintained by other resources, or whether it just gets archived – is going to be an agency-level decision. Probably some will be kept, others will be thrown out – keeping or abolishing 18F is a separate decision from keeping or abolishing the agency-level projects/initiatives 18F was working on. (And even if 18F had survived, probably some of that code would eventually have been thrown out anyway, since government IT projects frequently end up failing and being cancelled, and 18F involvement is no guarantee against that outcome.)
Obviously, if those projects are going to be kept, removing 18F resources is going to cause a delay to the project – but maybe other resources will be found. It also depends on what percentage of the project resources were from 18F. If a project was 18F-heavy, it may take a big hit, if 18F's contribution was smaller, the negative impact might be smaller.
18F was funded out of the Acquisition Services Fund (ASF), managed by the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) within GSA. FAS is legally obligated to spend ASF funds on federal technology modernization projects. Without 18F, FAS will have to find some other mechanism to spend those ASF funds on technology modernization. So, while of course there will be a delay, agencies which were relying on 18F may still end up getting help from GSA TTS for their modernization projects. I wouldn't be surprised if ASF funds were redirected towards DOGE, and DOGE was then tasked with working on those projects.
What is going to happen in four years? Is every administration forms to fire each others federal workers?
Building a bot to harangue people about pronoun usage seems like a giant waste of time and resources to me. Those sorts of cultural preferences are a feature of only a very very small portion of the US political culture. Maybe nuking the whole department was a bit strong, I don't know, but if I worked at a place that had tools like that I'd quit, and I think a lot of other people would too. Which suggests that the overall culture of 18F was far from the mainstream of America. It should reflect the middle, no?
Traditionally how civil servants handle this, is to be aware of the political sensitivities of both sides, and try to avoid language which overly triggers either. But people seem to be forgetting that tradition, or even intentionally discarding it
I think there was another possible reason for getting rid of 18F, separate from any concerns about its political culture – there was a lot of overlap in the mission statements of 18F and USDS, and it wasn't clear why both existed. Yes, I do understand that they differed somewhat in their working methods and area of focus, but I don't think anyone can deny that they were both ultimately trying to do the same thing. In fact, at one point 18F was even going to be called USDS, until GSA was forced to pick a different name when they discovered OMB was already using it. Abolishing 18F can be seen as a way of rationalizing federal technology modernization efforts.
18F hasn't been without its share of controversies, including an OIG finding that GSA leadership retaliated against a whistleblower who reported doubts about 18F's legality: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-GS-PURL-gpo134276...
And 18F wasn't formally speaking a government agency – it was just a team within GSA. It hadn't been established by law, just by an internal executive branch policy decision. Hence, abolishing it is just an internal restructure within GSA, it isn't a genuine case of "abolishing a government agency".
I believe laid-off 18F workers are still allowed to apply for open positions in the US government, including DOGE positions. So if they are still keen on contributing to 18F's mission, they may have the opportunity.
> there was a lot of overlap in the mission statements of 18F and USDS, and it wasn't clear why both existed
And now neither of them exist (the vast majority of what once was USDS is gone, and what remains has been converted into "DOGE").
I don't know what the quotes around "abolishing a government agency" indicate -- those words weren't used previously in this thread.
Do any of the old USDS staff survive? I don't know. USDS acting administrator, Amy Gleason, used to work for USDS under the Trump and Biden admins, so it sounds like there is still room for "old USDS" staff in "new USDS" – if they are happy to be there, and if the new administration is happy to have them.
And I don't think DOGE's remit is completely distinct from that of USDS. Of course, DOGE is a lot broader in scope than USDS, but according to Executive Order 14158 which established it, a big part of its mission is software modernization–same as old USDS was–and DOGE staff appear to include a number of software engineers, which also aligns with that mission.
> I don't know what the quotes around "abolishing a government agency" indicate -- those words weren't used previously in this thread.
You asked the question "Which government agencies have been targeted by Democrats for being too conservative?" – which seems to put 18F in the category of "government agencies" - if it isn't one in some sense, then the question isn't asking for a relevant comparator. And the title of this thread is "GSA Eliminates 18F", and "eliminates" is a synonym of "abolition". So, the premise of your question implies "abolishing a government agency". Which in a sense abolishing 18F is, since it was sort-of-kind-of a government agency – but strictly speaking it isn't, since strictly it wasn't – hence the quotes.
40 were laid off and 21 resigned (and Musk claimed that they would have been fired for being Democrats, regardless). That's approximately 60% of the total.
https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government...
As for "government agency", I was using your language:
> If a government agency has a culture [etc]... the agency becomes a target
Again, your claim here is that it's typical and predictable that new administrations conduct ideological purges on the civil service. So far, you haven't actually been able to name a single example of a Democratic administration doing that, and instead you're saying that maybe 18F was bad anyway, etc. Would you consider just admitting that your claim is false rather than resorting to this "by definition, strictly speaking, the premise of your question implies" ink cloud?
No, I'm not denying this is reaching a level which hasn't been seen before.
But, perceptions of political impartiality of civil servants have been greatly eroded.
Imagine if the situation were reversed, if Democrats had a widespread perception that the federal bureaucracy had a pro-GOP/anti-Democrat bias – can you be so sure they wouldn't do similar things?
The ICE union endorsed Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024 -- the only presidential endorsements it has ever made.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/immigration-customs-e...
The FBI has traditionally leaned Republican (it has never had a Democratic director), as has the US military (especially the Air Force).
Biden did not purge ICE, nor did he replace Trump's FBI director, etc.
The right is deranged with intolerance. All the talk about "free speech" and they can't stand that someone might not think or act like them.
The "anti-woke" crusaders are honestly more unbearable than any social justice warrior type I've met because they will not shut up about it and it colors their whole life.
It's just another flavor of identity politics with in and out groups.
I'm the complete opposite. Swap "anti-woke" with "social justice warrior" and you have my experience across multiple years, both inside and outside of companies.
What we need is a center. Just stuff that makes sense. The problem is our "sense" has been under attack we've basically collectively lost it.
Citizens need to understand the tax code themselves, they shouldn't need an entire government division to write software that is the only way to understand it.
And until that happens, helping people file their taxes for free is a benefit to everyone (except tax prep companies).