Healthy competition, the free market has resolved the issues of overpriced bribes. /s

Ah yes, the free market

Especially since they so often land jobs for themselves and their kids with the people that lobby them.

Kirsten Sinema got a job as a senior lobbiest after her short congressional stint.

this is just a more abstract "bootstraps" argument. schooling in this country has been systematically attacked and deconstructed, and as the burger reich's leader says, "i love the poorly educated". this is not "dum timmy votes for dum thing" it's "countless $ and effort and man hours have been devoted to making the american populace dumber" Why? look at any polling breakdown for how the educated vote vs the uneducated.

Try telling people you voted third party because of a deeply held conviction about not electing corrupt politicians. You will be told you are evil, that you've got an unreasonable/impossible purity bar, that you don't really believe in that deeply held moral conviction actually, that you are worse than the people who voted for the other guy, that you are a utopian idealist, etc etc.

Don't get me wrong, I did vote third party and I will continue to do so if the Dems put up candidates like Harris and Biden. But don't expect most people to be willing to weather the storm of vitriol they'll receive for holding a high bar for their politicians.

Or “politics” are too much of their identity and they always vote for “their guy” regardless of the merits. Education does not matter when the vote has nothing to so with rationality and is only rooting for a team.

Corruption will never be solved. It could possibly be reduced if there was less ROI. I expect that would require shrinking the government so there is less centralized power. A limited federal government and more administrative power handed back to the states (within reason) would be interesting.

> (Presumably you want the issues goy care about to be fixed!)

Is 'goy' a typo? I only know of its meaning as 'non-Jewish person'.

"Keep the national parks funded" sounds like a good use case for lobbying, until you realize it's only needed as a counterweight because lobbying diminishes the relative role of the democratic process itself in meeting needs.

This is a misleading characterization of the issue here. Let me pull up another very relevant analogy here. Let's say that you visit a government office for a driving license. Should you pay a bribe to the official? You are a responsible adult, after all. Bribes are needed for everything from housing permits to your kids' food assistance. How is it bad when it gets good things done?

Is this how you reason about corruption in government service? Unlike your argument about about lobbying, the problem is very conspicuous here - you're supposed to get those services without paying anything beyond the nominal service charges. They're your rights in an society where you already pay taxes to fund them. The government officials are already being paid with your tax money to do this job. What's even worse? If such loose and open-ended bargaining is permitted for basic essential services, then the only ones who will get those services will be the ones with money, not the ones who need it. Your housing permits and your kids' food assistance will become increasingly costlier and harder goals to achieve. That's why bribes are illegal.

If you look at this scenario carefully, it isn't much of an analogy. It's exactly the same situation, but with different players! When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests - because the public are the primary stakeholders in a democracy, and it's the utilization of their tax payments that these politicians are debating. Those politicians are supposed to be the people's 'representatives' who are elected and paid to listen to their constituents and lobby on their behalf. The public shouldn't have to 'lobby' with them too, especially for basic essentials like nutrition, national parks or tax filing!

What you call 'lobbying' in the US is known as 'political corruption' in most of the rest of the world. It's just a weasel word used to underplay the seriousness of such corruption. And as I pointed out earlier in my analogy, the rich ones outcompete the majority public here too. It's abundantly clear that even town councils favor big corpos even in the face of loud vocal opposition from the majority of their constituents. It's clear how much special treatment these professional grifters called 'lobbyists' get when they walk into the town hall just minutes before the discussion of a topic, while the town's people have to wait there for one and a half days without proper food, water or sleep in order to speak a few words in opposition. This is what happens when you legitimize corruption with cute terms like 'lobbying'.

We recently made a fairly large donation to a children’s hospital to support a specific research program. They directly told us that the highest-impact way to deploy the funds would be to pay lobbyists to try to get earmarks injected into federal bills. Like, >10x expected ROI.

Not all lobbying is straight-up mustache twirling. But it definitely left a bad taste in our mouths.

This would all be fine if the lobbying $ was only being paid to the lobbyists. The moment the $ flows to the politicians, it is what other countries would call a bribe.

economies of scale, he's just being a smart businessman.

> It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.

This is a bit reductive. Not everyone member of Congress goes to work for TurboTax after they retire!

However I imagine Inuit is a reliable source of campaign contributions every year. The simple solution is to get enough funding that the campaign can promise 3 or 4 election cycles of support for any politicians that vote in favor of tax filing reform.

I'd like to defend the notion of using a CPA a bit. I started using one when I became a partner in a passthrough LLC. I was now self-employed and was responsible for paying taxes on the businesses income as well as my own personal income. Filing that first year was incredibly stressful and time consuming, and I came to the conclusion that sometimes the right thing to do is to hire someone who knows what theyre doing.

Your post paints accountants as con-men, swindling people and promising "loopholes". Maybe some are, but they do provide a valuable service, especially if your tax situation is non-trivial.

I would love for the tax code to be simplified enough that I don't feel compelled to hire someone who put in the work to understand it, but that's simply not the case right now.

Was it always possible to do it for free with third-parties, or did that come about in response to things like free-file?

> The average HNer, who is fairly literate and well-informed about tax-prep, tends to misunderstand the situation.

The fact that TurboTax is cheaper than a local CPA does not change the fact that Intuit actively lobbies to prevent free tax filing.

In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or “your taxes are complex, please work with a tax specialist”. Also in a sane world this would be free and the government would be incentivized to simplify the tax code so that as many people as possible were in one of the first buckets. In our world the government is aggressively lobbied for complex tax codes and prevention of free tax filing.

> A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.

Define “regular”. Per TurboTax, only 37% of people qualify for free filing.

I have never tried to go through the TurboTax free file route but based on my experience with the paid service, I imagine they aggressively upsell free filers with the exact same scare tactics you associate with CPAs.