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Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

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zem·

they could probably do it anyway, but intuit lobbied against it:

http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-g...

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The lobbying by Intuit that prevents us from having first-world taxing bodies makes my blood boil.

We need a "lobby for the common people" fund.

The irony of this statement is that the entire US government itself was formed on a similar premise.

"government of the people, by the people, for the people"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address

Those are called “taxes”. In theory.

To be fair, there's lobbying on the other side against simplified tax codes. There have been lots of proposals: flat tax, fair tax, consumption taxes, VATs, etc. All are opposed by lobbying groups and not even the same ones.

All this foaming at the mouth and finger pointing only makes things worse.

I think we can all agree that you should never have to pay to have your taxes done. Taxes are a rule set, a rule set that can be codified into software.

The IRS should be able to prefill all of your taxes for you, and allow you to click Submit. But you should be able to change/add info, if you have supporting documentation. There is no reason Intuit and other businesses should need to exist to provide tax preparation services.

Well yeah but we're talking about the U.S. here, this is a culture that won't put final prices on price tags because then the customers won't know how much sales tax they're paying.

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