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"Hey, we here at The Government would like to make your experience paying taxes less painful. Hence forth, we're just going to take whatever amount we think is
by huffmsa 10y ago
"Hey, we here at The Government would like to make your experience paying taxes less painful.
Hence forth, we're just going to take whatever amount we think is accurate, and you don't have to do anything!
Just trust us!"
Politely sir, take one giant step back from that and your beachfront property in Arizona, and diddle your own face.
Now, serious answer? Because EVERYTHING about the US Government is intentionally designed to be slow, cumbersome and painful, SPECIFICALLY to limit the amount of damage government institutions can cause to the country.
- raverbashing 10y agoYou're saying this like inefficient government institutions can't harm business
- huffmsa 10y agoThey can, but the goal is to make people hate said institutions so much that they elect people who limit the institutions power to the absolute minimum necessary. Inefficient institutions cause lots of small pains, extremely efficient, overly powerful ones nationalize your oil and gas industry because they can.
- pjc50 10y agoInefficiency and powerlessness are not at all the same thing, as the US's various police services demonstrate on an ongoing basis. The inefficiency of the court system also makes it more, not less, of an imposition.
- IIIIIIIIIIII 10y agoAre... are you alright, sir?
- fiblye 10y agoThere's zero correlation between efficient taxing and corrupt governments. The "we want to break government so that people don't trust it" shit doesn't make sense. Why not opt for a good government that you can reasonably trust, and do away with the anxiety and potential harm a shitty government causes? It's like saying you don't wear your seatbelt because the fear of dying makes you drive more carefully.
- schoen 10y ago> It's like saying you don't wear your seatbelt because the fear of dying makes you drive more carefully. This kind of thing is a real phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation
- crisdux 10y agoI'm not sure why other people in this thread think this is crazy. This is actually a widely held belief by Republicans. Many of them want paying taxes to be hard so people will be conscious of government burden. They believe making tax filing simple is a risk to our liberties.
- jeltz 10y agoI have read about this before, but it still sounds totally crazy to me. There have been plenty of inefficient and corrupt governments which still have managed to impose police states. To me it seems like a cult of personality for the leader is a greater threat to your liberty than efficient bureaucracy.
- crisdux 10y agoI guess this boils down to philosophical differences in the role of government. One side believes that greater taxation leads to a larger role of government in society and results in the erosion of personal liberties. They are afraid that making filing taxes easier could continue this trend. I don't think this has anything to do with efficient bureaucracy and cult of personalities. The discussion on if government is ever able to be an efficient participant of all parts of society that it involves itself in is always up for debate. One fundamental reason for this belief is that government can not be the best solution to many of societies issues because the incentives on individuals in government, government bureaucracies and the public are so misaligned.
- smacktoward 10y agoYou're assuming that people won't include something in their ideology just because it is crazy.
- rsynnott 10y agoPaying tax is very simple in Ireland (the average person rarely has to interact with the revenue service, certainly not every year), but no-one really _likes_ paying tax, all the same. This idea that people wouldn't notice if it was easy seems silly; they still see it coming out of their salary.