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Oh, this adds another twist to why taxes are so complicated in the US. If the IRS was not bogged down in the tax reports of commoners, they might have more time

Oh, this adds another twist to why taxes are so complicated in the US. If the IRS was not bogged down in the tax reports of commoners, they might have more time for mischief, like pursuing Schaeffler and friends.

mistrial9 8y ago
hm - please consider that a founding principle of the United States was to remove a class system of families; therefore 'commoner', heraldry and family crest, titled names and the knighting system, are all explicitly removed.
- asark 8y ago
  If you reveal your class by your outrage at the very topic, you reveal it also by the way you define the thing that's outraging you. At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education. One woman interviewed by Studs Terkel for Division Street: America (1967) clearly revealed her class as middle both by her uneasiness about the subject's being introduced and by her instinctive recourse to occupation as the essential class criterion. "We have right on this street almost every class," she said. "But I shouldn't say class," she went on, "because we don't live in a nation of classes." Then, the occupational criterion: "But we have janitors living on the street, we have doctors, we have businessmen, CPAs" [...] Being told that there are no social classes in the place where the interviewee lives is an old experience for sociologists. "'We don't have classes in our town' almost invariably is the first remark recorded by the investigator," reports Leonard Reissman, author of Class in American Life (1959). "Once that has been uttered and is out of the way, the class divisions in the town can be recorded with what seems to be an amazing degree of agreement among the good citizens of the community." [...] The special hazards attending the class situation in America, where movement appears so fluid and where the prizes seem available to anyone who's lucky, are disappointment, and, following close on that, envy. Because the myth conveys the impression that you can readily earn your way upward, disillusion and bitterness are particularly strong when you find yourself trapped in a class system you've been half persuaded isn't important. When in middle life some people discover that certain limits have been placed on their capacity to ascend socially by such apparent irrelevancies as heredity, early environment, and the social class of their immediate forebears, they go into something like despair, which, if generally secret, is no less destructive. -- from Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Chapter 1, "A Touchy Subject" (typed in from the book, any errors probably mine)
  - dTal 8y ago
    Of course the "upper classes" believe they're there because of some intrinsic blue-bloodedness that gives them good taste. It's much more flattering than admitting it's because of daddy's money. Meritocracies are more fun to believe in when you're at the top.
    - asark 8y ago
      1) yes, they believe that in part because it's an ego boost, but 2) there are values, behaviors, attitudes, patterns of speech, and so on, that are socialized in at an early age and damn hard to consistently, convincingly fake later in life, made even harder because lots of them do rely on having had money available, if only to gain access to the places and activities where the socialization takes place. Prep school, "Summering" the right places, clubs, and so on. It doesn't so much matter that their attitudes and behaviors are strictly better, but that conforming to them and knowing about the things they know and being able to relate to them that way lets you network on a level those "under" them cannot, reinforcing the class hierarchy. You may be able to get a country club sponsorship on the power of your income, but someone else might swing it by being able to talk sailing or swapping prep school stories with their boss—and oh hey you play squash my brother needs a partner, you're not a member there well we'll have to fix that, you know there's a position open with one of our funds upstairs that I think you'd suit just fine, let me make a call or two...
  - mistrial9 8y ago
    yes, and.. also reading Studs Terkel in undergrad here.. A personal theory is that class-thinking is so deeply ingrained in the tribal psyche, that even after explicitly removing it, people re-invent it on a daily basis, to explain differences in people's standard of living, and generally-accepted notions of respected public life. BUT the modern mechanistic economy is not explainable by social notions alone. It is 'complicated' . Secondly, casting aspersions based on class-membership is "all the way out" as a basis for understanding modern economy IMO, either way .. it is prejuidice in another form
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    "At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have." Misdirection. Not money, ot more properly, wealth, but power. Much the topic of Smith's Wealth of Nations, actually. Though modern economics likes to pretend otherwise.
AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
But are the "commoners" taxes really complicated? If you only have w2 income it's just a simple 2-page 1040 form.
- adolph 8y ago
  Lots of people have young kids: Add another two pages for the "Child and Dependent Care Expenses" form. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f2441.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f2441.pdf
- bzbarsky 8y ago
  A bare-bones tax return involving only W-2 income for a couple with moderately high-paying jobs (doctor, lawyer, engineer, in some areas police officer, nurse, school principal, that sort of thing; enough to end up at $250k+ between the two of them) will include the following forms for the 2018 tax year: * 1040 (including Schedule 4, to report Form 8959 bits on) * 6251 (they probably don't owe AMT now, but need to fill out the form to prove it) * 8959 (because wage income over $250k). If they have any savings that's not cash under a mattress, probably add form 8960 and 1040 Schedule B or D or both (but now we have non-W2 income, of course). If they own a house, likely add Schedule A. If they have kids, probably add Schedule 3 for the child care credit and form 2441. Plus the various worksheets involved (child credit, not to be confused with the child care credit, the actual tax computation worksheet, etc), which I guess don't have to be filed with the IRS, at least. Now I agree that this is not really complicated in the grand scheme of things. I also agree that for people at lower income levels the 1040 is the only thing involved if no kids, add form 2441 if they have kids and are not stay-at-home parenting.
- scott00 8y ago
  A form so simple it only needs 117 pages of instructions.
  - bzbarsky 8y ago
    I mean, it's got 4 pages of instructions for whether you should file it at all, and if so where to send it. It's got a third of a page for what to put in the "name and address" fields. It's got half a page for what to put in the "SSN" field. A bunch of that deals with edge cases that are not relevant to most people, who don't even read this part of the instructions and just write down their name, address, and SSN. 8 pages of EIC credit table. 10 pages of tax table. Longish, but pretty simple. Now there are in fact things in there that are not simple. Filing status is usually simple, unless you try to figure out "head of household", in which case it's not. But in general, the 1040 is quite simple as tax forms go, and the instructions are mostly long because they are written out with a lot of detail and to be easy to follow, and have to cover various edge cases.
hliyan 8y ago
What would happen if we throw out the entire tax code, replace it with a single, flat tax rate for every adult citizen, with zero loopholes, and then institute some sort of welfare mechanism for those who can't afford to pay?
- jacobush 8y ago
  That sounds like a recipe for a dystopian future where more and more people are pushed over the edge where they become dependent on the welfare. Then the corporations and the state would together dictate what you had to do to be eligible for the welfare.
- CPLX 8y ago
  Ok deal. Let’s say 25% flat tax, to pick a random number. Now, 25% of what? Oh wait that’s the problem ain’t it. As the article notes in extreme detail there’s a lot of ways to argue about what is and isn’t income.
- PorterDuff 8y ago
  The tax rates are probably the simplest part of a tax code. Defining what 'income' really is or what an allowable 'expense' is, not so easy. Should two farmers helping each other out 1099 each other? Can a wealthy but chronically ill executive write off his RN wife's presence on a business trip?
  - hliyan 8y ago
    There has to be some way to reduce these scenarios to a set of principles, rather than defining a rule for every single scenario...
    - PorterDuff 8y ago
      It's called tax code. ...and then all the corner cases go to tax court. Thing is, life is more complicated than law.
  - abecedarius 8y ago

mistrial9 8y ago

hm - please consider that a founding principle of the United States was to remove a class system of families; therefore 'commoner', heraldry and family crest, titled names and the knighting system, are all explicitly removed.

asark 8y ago
If you reveal your class by your outrage at the very topic, you reveal it also by the way you define the thing that's outraging you. At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education. One woman interviewed by Studs Terkel for Division Street: America (1967) clearly revealed her class as middle both by her uneasiness about the subject's being introduced and by her instinctive recourse to occupation as the essential class criterion. "We have right on this street almost every class," she said. "But I shouldn't say class," she went on, "because we don't live in a nation of classes." Then, the occupational criterion: "But we have janitors living on the street, we have doctors, we have businessmen, CPAs" [...] Being told that there are no social classes in the place where the interviewee lives is an old experience for sociologists. "'We don't have classes in our town' almost invariably is the first remark recorded by the investigator," reports Leonard Reissman, author of Class in American Life (1959). "Once that has been uttered and is out of the way, the class divisions in the town can be recorded with what seems to be an amazing degree of agreement among the good citizens of the community." [...] The special hazards attending the class situation in America, where movement appears so fluid and where the prizes seem available to anyone who's lucky, are disappointment, and, following close on that, envy. Because the myth conveys the impression that you can readily earn your way upward, disillusion and bitterness are particularly strong when you find yourself trapped in a class system you've been half persuaded isn't important. When in middle life some people discover that certain limits have been placed on their capacity to ascend socially by such apparent irrelevancies as heredity, early environment, and the social class of their immediate forebears, they go into something like despair, which, if generally secret, is no less destructive. -- from Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Chapter 1, "A Touchy Subject" (typed in from the book, any errors probably mine)
- dTal 8y ago
  Of course the "upper classes" believe they're there because of some intrinsic blue-bloodedness that gives them good taste. It's much more flattering than admitting it's because of daddy's money. Meritocracies are more fun to believe in when you're at the top.
  - asark 8y ago
    1) yes, they believe that in part because it's an ego boost, but 2) there are values, behaviors, attitudes, patterns of speech, and so on, that are socialized in at an early age and damn hard to consistently, convincingly fake later in life, made even harder because lots of them do rely on having had money available, if only to gain access to the places and activities where the socialization takes place. Prep school, "Summering" the right places, clubs, and so on. It doesn't so much matter that their attitudes and behaviors are strictly better, but that conforming to them and knowing about the things they know and being able to relate to them that way lets you network on a level those "under" them cannot, reinforcing the class hierarchy. You may be able to get a country club sponsorship on the power of your income, but someone else might swing it by being able to talk sailing or swapping prep school stories with their boss—and oh hey you play squash my brother needs a partner, you're not a member there well we'll have to fix that, you know there's a position open with one of our funds upstairs that I think you'd suit just fine, let me make a call or two...
- mistrial9 8y ago
  yes, and.. also reading Studs Terkel in undergrad here.. A personal theory is that class-thinking is so deeply ingrained in the tribal psyche, that even after explicitly removing it, people re-invent it on a daily basis, to explain differences in people's standard of living, and generally-accepted notions of respected public life. BUT the modern mechanistic economy is not explainable by social notions alone. It is 'complicated' . Secondly, casting aspersions based on class-membership is "all the way out" as a basis for understanding modern economy IMO, either way .. it is prejuidice in another form
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  "At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have." Misdirection. Not money, ot more properly, wealth, but power. Much the topic of Smith's Wealth of Nations, actually. Though modern economics likes to pretend otherwise.

AlexTWithBeard 8y ago

But are the "commoners" taxes really complicated? If you only have w2 income it's just a simple 2-page 1040 form.

adolph 8y ago
Lots of people have young kids: Add another two pages for the "Child and Dependent Care Expenses" form. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f2441.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f2441.pdf
bzbarsky 8y ago
A bare-bones tax return involving only W-2 income for a couple with moderately high-paying jobs (doctor, lawyer, engineer, in some areas police officer, nurse, school principal, that sort of thing; enough to end up at $250k+ between the two of them) will include the following forms for the 2018 tax year: * 1040 (including Schedule 4, to report Form 8959 bits on) * 6251 (they probably don't owe AMT now, but need to fill out the form to prove it) * 8959 (because wage income over $250k). If they have any savings that's not cash under a mattress, probably add form 8960 and 1040 Schedule B or D or both (but now we have non-W2 income, of course). If they own a house, likely add Schedule A. If they have kids, probably add Schedule 3 for the child care credit and form 2441. Plus the various worksheets involved (child credit, not to be confused with the child care credit, the actual tax computation worksheet, etc), which I guess don't have to be filed with the IRS, at least. Now I agree that this is not really complicated in the grand scheme of things. I also agree that for people at lower income levels the 1040 is the only thing involved if no kids, add form 2441 if they have kids and are not stay-at-home parenting.
scott00 8y ago
A form so simple it only needs 117 pages of instructions.
- bzbarsky 8y ago
  I mean, it's got 4 pages of instructions for whether you should file it at all, and if so where to send it. It's got a third of a page for what to put in the "name and address" fields. It's got half a page for what to put in the "SSN" field. A bunch of that deals with edge cases that are not relevant to most people, who don't even read this part of the instructions and just write down their name, address, and SSN. 8 pages of EIC credit table. 10 pages of tax table. Longish, but pretty simple. Now there are in fact things in there that are not simple. Filing status is usually simple, unless you try to figure out "head of household", in which case it's not. But in general, the 1040 is quite simple as tax forms go, and the instructions are mostly long because they are written out with a lot of detail and to be easy to follow, and have to cover various edge cases.

hliyan 8y ago

What would happen if we throw out the entire tax code, replace it with a single, flat tax rate for every adult citizen, with zero loopholes, and then institute some sort of welfare mechanism for those who can't afford to pay?

jacobush 8y ago
That sounds like a recipe for a dystopian future where more and more people are pushed over the edge where they become dependent on the welfare. Then the corporations and the state would together dictate what you had to do to be eligible for the welfare.
CPLX 8y ago
Ok deal. Let’s say 25% flat tax, to pick a random number. Now, 25% of what? Oh wait that’s the problem ain’t it. As the article notes in extreme detail there’s a lot of ways to argue about what is and isn’t income.
PorterDuff 8y ago
The tax rates are probably the simplest part of a tax code. Defining what 'income' really is or what an allowable 'expense' is, not so easy. Should two farmers helping each other out 1099 each other? Can a wealthy but chronically ill executive write off his RN wife's presence on a business trip?
- hliyan 8y ago
  There has to be some way to reduce these scenarios to a set of principles, rather than defining a rule for every single scenario...
  - PorterDuff 8y ago
    It's called tax code. ...and then all the corner cases go to tax court. Thing is, life is more complicated than law.
- abecedarius 8y ago