4 ms·

This might sound like one of those "the people I disagree with are evil" kind of exaggerations, but it is not. This is a real position that is fairly common amo

by chc 8y ago

This might sound like one of those "the people I disagree with are evil" kind of exaggerations, but it is not. This is a real position that is fairly common among Republican thought leaders. For example, Ronald Reagan literally said "Taxes should hurt." The basic logic is that if filing taxes is too easy, people will not have a good grasp on how much the government is asking of them and will accept tax rates that would irritate them in a system with more direct participation. (On the flip side, this seems to assume that the taxes are being used to create a good enough quality of life that people are generally satisfied and not poor, so if that's happening, it might actually be a more realistic perspective than if people focused on the tax rate more.)

bunderbunder 8y ago
> The basic logic is that if filing taxes is too easy, people will not have a good grasp on how much the government is asking of them This basic idea seem patently ridiculous to me. I've more-or-less made a career of doing math and managing complicated procedures, yet still, I find the current tax prep process to be such a mind-numbing grind that, by the time we get to the point where I've calculated how much tax I actually owe, I've long since quit caring to calculate what percentage of my income that is. By that point, the only number I care to see is how much I owe or will be refunded, so that I can just be done with the whole mess. It's hard to imagine that someone who's got a more typical level of comfort with math is going to be any more prepared to do that one extra calculation. If the GOP really wanted me to be aware of how much tax I'm paying, they'd reduce the whole process to a simple report they send me, with everything already calculated, that has "your calculated income tax in dollars" and "your calculated income tax as a % of net income" listed in big bold print at the very top. It seems much more parsimonious to me to suppose that the logic is, "If we make income tax a hateful process, people will come to hate income tax." (Which, incidentally, is a line of reasoning that would play very well to the position of those who want to get rid of progressive taxation. Most other forms of tax we have in the USA are either flat or regressive.)
throw_away 8y ago
And yet it seems the majority of Americans don't understand marginal tax rates nor how refunds represent interest-free loans to the government. If the point was to educate the public about how taxes are applied, it's not working.

by chc 8y ago

bunderbunder 8y ago

> The basic logic is that if filing taxes is too easy, people will not have a good grasp on how much the government is asking of them This basic idea seem patently ridiculous to me. I've more-or-less made a career of doing math and managing complicated procedures, yet still, I find the current tax prep process to be such a mind-numbing grind that, by the time we get to the point where I've calculated how much tax I actually owe, I've long since quit caring to calculate what percentage of my income that is. By that point, the only number I care to see is how much I owe or will be refunded, so that I can just be done with the whole mess. It's hard to imagine that someone who's got a more typical level of comfort with math is going to be any more prepared to do that one extra calculation. If the GOP really wanted me to be aware of how much tax I'm paying, they'd reduce the whole process to a simple report they send me, with everything already calculated, that has "your calculated income tax in dollars" and "your calculated income tax as a % of net income" listed in big bold print at the very top. It seems much more parsimonious to me to suppose that the logic is, "If we make income tax a hateful process, people will come to hate income tax." (Which, incidentally, is a line of reasoning that would play very well to the position of those who want to get rid of progressive taxation. Most other forms of tax we have in the USA are either flat or regressive.)

throw_away 8y ago

And yet it seems the majority of Americans don't understand marginal tax rates nor how refunds represent interest-free loans to the government. If the point was to educate the public about how taxes are applied, it's not working.