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Or, you know, have your federal government implement self-filing online which covers 80% of the population. Tragedy of the Commons at its finest.
by timeimp 7y ago
Or, you know, have your federal government implement self-filing online which covers 80% of the population.
Tragedy of the Commons at its finest.
- imgabe 7y agoOh sure, I'll just get right on having the federal government do that.
- brown9-2 7y agoWhat is the legitimate argument against this, besides knee-jerk fear of government? They already have all this data and do this work.
- imgabe 7y agoI'm totally for it. I'm just saying it's not that easy for an average citizen to actually do anything about this. It's not like I can call 1-800-GOVERNMENT and say "Hey how about preparing my tax return for me? kthnx!" and then it will happen. It would require a massive, coordinated grassroots effort to overcome the lobbying by Intuit, H&R Block, etc. So saying "Hey just have the government do this!" is fairly useless.
- OrangeMango 7y agoThat's exactly what the IRS used to do (I used it for my after-school job in high school in the 1990s): > The IRS may be saving money as a result of its decision to shut down its free TeleFile program for filing taxes returns by phone, but the move is costing taxpayers millions of dollars, according to a report released by the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2542655/report--shutdown-of-telefile-is-costly-to-taxpayers.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2542655/report--shutdo...
- reaperducer 7y agoWhat is the legitimate argument against this, besides knee-jerk fear of government? Fear of government is engrained in American culture. It is literally what the nation was founded on, and enshrined in the documents which established the country.
- brown9-2 7y agoThat’s not an argument against the idea though.
- cascom 7y ago1. Tax payers will pay more because the government will optimize for revenue when making decisions/interpretations on their behalf 2. Errors are likely to go unnoticed as people will be loathe to “check the governments work” Also not really an argument, but a consideration is that by keeping taxes “painful”, they are more unpopular than they would be, making higher tax policies less palatable to the public.
- kevinschumacher 7y agoBoth of those points are FUD in my opinion. The government is already equally as able to optimize for revenue today as you claim they would be in a situation where the IRS mails you your 1040 with your income pre-printed. Ultimately most people’s income taxes are withheld from their paycheck, and you get a refund at the end. Do you know how much you pay in taxes now? Do you think other people know how much they pay? How would your knowledge of how much you pay change under a proposed system where the IRS mails you a pre-filled 1040? You say there’s work to be checked — it’s literally “did they get my w2 right?” and “do I want to take the standard deduction?” If you don’t want to take the standard deduction, the process reverts to what it is today - you fill out your own tax forms and send them in. Nothing changes for that situation. Your second point assumes gross incompetence or straight malice, which is unfair. Edited for clarity
- nerdponx 7y agoWhere is the Commons here? This is a case of American politicians selling themselves to private interests, on the (relative) cheap.
- roland35 7y agoTragedy of the Commons here means that a minority of highly motivated players (in this case the tax preparation companies like Intuit) work much harder to implement a policy that is only mildly annoying for the vast majority of people. In this case millions of people have to spend between $0 - ~$200 a year so that a few hundred/thousand people can make boatloads of cash to file taxes.
- nerdponx 7y agoI guess? In the Tragedy of the Commons, the people using the "Commons" ultimately make things worse for themselves. In this case, the people using the "Commons" don't get hurt.
- astura 7y agoNo, that's not at all what "tragedy of the commons" means. What you describe is just run-of-the-mill capitalism, not a "tragedy of the commons." To be a tragedy of the commons there must be 1) a shared resource (example: the ocean) 2) it must be in an individual's best interest to utilize the resource as much as possible (example: the more fish I catch the more money I make) and 3) the actions of each individual working in their individual best interest leads to the degradation of the shared resource as a whole for everyone given enough individuals (example: extinction of fish species). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons >The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action. The theory originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land. >In this modern economic context, commons is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as atmosphere, oceans, rivers, fish stocks, roads and highways, or even an office refrigerator.
- matthewaveryusa 7y agoI don't know man, the redesigned 1040 forms are pretty easy to fill out: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf
- pandapower2 7y agoSerious question from a non-American. Do you actually have to fill that out as part of doing your tax return?
- astura 7y agoIf you do your taxes manually, yes. What the software does is fill out the form for them.
- magashna 7y agoFiling taxes is notoriously obtuse.
- bane 7y agoThis is for very simple cases. It doesn't take much before you end up with hours upon hours of paperwork (usually because of property ownership or investments or similar).
- froindt 7y agoThat's the bare minimum you'll have to fill out. If you have investment accounts, you tack on more forms. If you have an inheritance, there's more paperwork. If you withdraw from your retirement accounts, you could have more.
- MatthewMcDonald 7y agonot to mention filing state returns
- pandapower2 7y agoWTF? I honestly had no idea that state returns were a thing.
- appleflaxen 7y ago> have your federal government implement self-filing online which covers 80% of the population. Yes! 100%! > Tragedy of the Commons at its finest. ok, now you lost me
- Spooky23 7y agoIt’s not tragedy of the commons, it’s just plain old corruption. The law can address this problem. If you work at a tax agency, the various secrecy acts establish a tight controls on taxpayer data. Like go to jail for doing the type of things that Intuit does.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- swiley 7y agoThey did support this. It looks like they're getting rid of it. https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/before-starting-free-file-fillable-forms https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/before-starting-free-fi...
- reaperducer 7y agoOr, you know, have your federal government implement self-filing online which covers 80% of the population And what about the other 20%, which could be upwards of 75 million people? It's so very SV/HN to reduce every problem to a numbers game, and anyone who doesn't fit into the larger figure is marginalized as an "edge case" to be ignored and discounted.
- edouard-harris 7y agoPresumably the remaining 20% would still use an accountant or tax software, so they'd be no worse off than they are today.
- elliekelly 7y ago... are you suggesting that the millionaires and billionaires who wouldn’t be covered by a self-filing online federal taxes would then be “marginalized, discounted, and ignored?”
- CPLX 7y agoThis is not a tragedy of the commons situation. The political jargon term you’re looking for is “logic of collective action.” More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action