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Comment by credo | Hacker News Reader

>>The other awesome thing about Norwegian taxes is that the government does it for you.

The US has also attempted to do this. However, every attempt has been killed by corporate interests (like Intuit) and politicians (mostly Republicans) and special-interest-groups (conservative anti-tax organizations)

The latter claim that the government shouldn't automatically create a form with all taxes done because the government will not try to minimize citizen tax payments (and most people will check the 'OK' button without reviewing their taxes to see if they can get additional deductions). In reality, I think that most anti-tax organizations realize that they'll lose a significant portion of their support if filing taxes becomes easy. In the case of companies like Intuit, the motives are obviously transparent.

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I file my taxes on paper and I do the calculations by hand. I want it to be as painful as possible so I never forget how insanely complex and budensome it is.

I'd like to click one button, and for you to still have the option to be a masochist.

This isn't such a far fetched claim. In Israel for example - you get taxes deducted from your pay check every month, directly by your employer, based on the assumption that will be your constant salary for the rest of the year. Now lets say you get fired in September, lowering your annual salary and bringing you into a lower tax bracket - unless you personally file for a return at the end of the year, the government feels no obligation to return the taxes you've overpaid.

OK, but in the UK it’s the same scenario until the point where the government automatically returns any extra taxes you’ve paid (assuming you’re purely paying income tax through your employer).

It's a possibility but it will not be forcibly true. In Belgium you also get taxes deducted from your pay check every month and if you pay to much they just put back the money into your account every year

I don't see how this is much different from the current situation in the United States.

Most people (I bet HN readership included) are paid under a full time employee structure where the employer files a W2 and deducts all (or most) of the federal taxes the employee is liable for from their paychec. Even if you are a contractor, you're supposed to pay all of your own taxes every quarter (or pay penalties + interest), including your employer's half of the Medicare/Social Security taxes.

The big difference in the United States is that you are still required to file your own forms by April for the previous fiscal year for your tax return. You still have to do work to get a nontrivial amount of money back.

Does anyone hold those politicians up on this issue and demand further justification, spread the word of what they're obstructing?

Of course not! By the time of the elections, everybody has forgotten who voted for what, and it's all about the same old tribalism again.

This may be true, but I downvoted your comment because I don't see any sources for the strongly worded assertions made.

If we downvoted every assertion on HN that didn't come with a complete annotated appendix of sources, that would be every comment. Why do you apply this standard to this comment, and not to others?

A googling of something like "intuit lobby irs" will turn up as much info as you care to have about the situation, incidentally.

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