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How do you propose to garner support to fix the system without drawing attention to the bad actors? "A multi-billion dollar company has been lobbying the IRS so

How do you propose to garner support to fix the system without drawing attention to the bad actors? "A multi-billion dollar company has been lobbying the IRS so it can steal money from the most vulnerable taxpayers" is far more compelling than "poor people pay more taxes than they have to".

slg 5y ago
>How do you propose to garner support to fix the system without drawing attention to the bad actors? Is there any evidence that drawing attention to bad actors actually garners political support to fix this? Look at the comments here, almost everyone is talking about the problems with Intuit and not how to fix this systemically. What we need is grassroots political change. This specific issue regarding tax prep is a symptom of larger systemic problems caused by two main issues. First-past-the-post voting means that people generally only have two viable choices when voting. Anyone who is a single issue voter and their single issue is the tax prep industry is extremely rare and frankly in my opinion crazy. This means that no one has any incentive to change the status quo. The second problem is how US's free speech laws (or perhaps more accurately the current interpretation of these laws) basically create a near free-for-all in terms of campaign financing. Since there is almost no strong motivation for change, the only people involved in the discussion about tax prep are the people who are already invested in the industry. They obvious have a huge incentive to lobby against the death of their industry. So you have an issue in which we have little public motivation for change versus an entire industry that would be willing to dedicate all their profit to fighting change. It isn't surprising we see the results we see. >A multi-billion dollar company has been lobbying the IRS so it can steal money from the most vulnerable taxpayers" is far more compelling than "poor people pay more taxes than they have to". I am not making the second argument. I am generalizing the first argument to "multi-billion dollar companies have been lobbying the government to steal money from everyone, let's adjust our system to stop that".
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  >> What we need is grassroots political change. I'd argue that someone drawing attention to specific bad actors is implicitly saying "stop these people from doing this" which is far more actionable than your generic "What we need is wide-spread, bipartisan support for change". What am I supposed to do with that?
  - slg 5y ago
    >I'd argue that someone drawing attention to specific bad actors is implicitly saying "stop these people from doing this" Exactly, but people focus on the "these people" rather than the "doing this". Why stop this single actor when we can stop anyone from "doing this".

slg 5y ago

>How do you propose to garner support to fix the system without drawing attention to the bad actors? Is there any evidence that drawing attention to bad actors actually garners political support to fix this? Look at the comments here, almost everyone is talking about the problems with Intuit and not how to fix this systemically. What we need is grassroots political change. This specific issue regarding tax prep is a symptom of larger systemic problems caused by two main issues. First-past-the-post voting means that people generally only have two viable choices when voting. Anyone who is a single issue voter and their single issue is the tax prep industry is extremely rare and frankly in my opinion crazy. This means that no one has any incentive to change the status quo. The second problem is how US's free speech laws (or perhaps more accurately the current interpretation of these laws) basically create a near free-for-all in terms of campaign financing. Since there is almost no strong motivation for change, the only people involved in the discussion about tax prep are the people who are already invested in the industry. They obvious have a huge incentive to lobby against the death of their industry. So you have an issue in which we have little public motivation for change versus an entire industry that would be willing to dedicate all their profit to fighting change. It isn't surprising we see the results we see. >A multi-billion dollar company has been lobbying the IRS so it can steal money from the most vulnerable taxpayers" is far more compelling than "poor people pay more taxes than they have to". I am not making the second argument. I am generalizing the first argument to "multi-billion dollar companies have been lobbying the government to steal money from everyone, let's adjust our system to stop that".

skeeter2020 5y ago
>> What we need is grassroots political change. I'd argue that someone drawing attention to specific bad actors is implicitly saying "stop these people from doing this" which is far more actionable than your generic "What we need is wide-spread, bipartisan support for change". What am I supposed to do with that?
- slg 5y ago
  >I'd argue that someone drawing attention to specific bad actors is implicitly saying "stop these people from doing this" Exactly, but people focus on the "these people" rather than the "doing this". Why stop this single actor when we can stop anyone from "doing this".