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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

TurboTax isn't "trying to kill" it they have successfully killed it. Intuit donated $1M to Trump's inaugration fund, and the Trump administation subsequently ended support for Direct File (which I'm assuming is why it was open sourced). The IRS will no longer accept returns directly. 18F itself was disbanded by doge, so even though the code is open source no one is going to continue to develop it.

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This isn't true - you can still submit through Direct File: https://directfile.irs.gov/

For the 2024 tax season yes. Funding bill removes it for 2025 onward.

Yes, but you may want to reword this part, since it implies that DF is already shut down:

  "The IRS will no longer accept returns directly."

> "The IRS will no longer accept returns directly."

Where are you finding that quote, I don't see it on the Direct File homepage [0]

EDIT: Ah, I see now, it was from paxys's original post [1], I assumed it was meant to be an official quote from the IRS somewhere.

0: https://directfile.irs.gov/

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44183593

This was in the post I was responding to.

I'm confused, the post you responded just says:

> For the 2024 tax season yes. Funding bill removes it for 2025 onward.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44183593

Sigh. How much did cutting direct file really save?!

Irrelevant. Those in power don't actually care about saving money. They care about doing what their deep-pocketed donors want them to do, as well as fulfilling their ideology, however misguided and backward it may be.

It was never about saving. The new budget literally adds $2.4 trillion to the federal defecit.

It adds $2.4T MORE than otherwise would've been added (which is already a lot) over a decade.

So it's adding an extra $240B in deficit per year (on top of an already ~6-7% of GDP deficit).

It makes it more expensive. But the important figure was the million dollar bribe.

It was cut because tax preparing companies pay the politicians to cut it.

Seems around 1M is the price for pardons or changing of tariffs in favor of the donor.

Disbanding 18F was a crime. This made it abundantly clear that the E doesn't stand for efficiency.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/intuit-inc/summary?id=D0000...

Interesting, thanks for reinforcing the point. I would note the two columns 'From Individuals' (which includes all employees) vs. the 'From Organization' column. Worth noting that the R-affiliated GOPAC is the only listed recipient that actually recieved funds from the organization.

Of course, this page doesn't include the $1M inauguration donation, so it's still incomplete.

I suppose we all see what we want to see and have reasons to explain away any dissonance. $1m to an inauguration committee for an already elected president might counterbalance the disproportionate donations to democrats during campaign season from execs, employees, and their family members. I mean, bet on the wrong horse, amends must be made, right? Money goes where the power is. If it hadn’t been Trump, Intuit would be working Joe Kamala. The data is the data.

> we all see what we want to see

Yup, and what I see is that Intuit, Inc. gave to exactly one PAC, that donates exclusively to R candidates. Tesla employees also overwhelmingly donated to Kamala Harris[0]; does this mean Tesla and Elon were backing Kamala to win?

> If it hadn’t been Trump, Intuit would be working Joe Kamala.

They didn't donate to him in 2020, so I'm not sure why I should assume this.[1]

[0]https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/tesla-inc/summary?id=D00005...

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20210110001759/https://bideninau...

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