8 ms·
Taxes are not hard for people with one job and one SSN and no schedule Ks filing in one place. Last year I had four TIN/EIN/SSNs, filing in up to three states,
by Telemakhos 5y ago
Taxes are not hard for people with one job and one SSN and no schedule Ks filing in one place. Last year I had four TIN/EIN/SSNs, filing in up to three states, depending on the TIN/EIN/SSN, along with a federal return. That meant a dozen different filings. Hiring an accountant was worth it for me.
On the other hand, when I was young, I did my own taxes by hand on paper, and it was easy: they are easy if you just have a W2 and maybe some 1099s. But I was not an adult then, nor did I have adult finances.
- fridif 5y agoDoes it stand to reason that the average person does not have multiple business entities in multiple locations? You are getting scammed by the government, who have made it burdensome to report all of this income. A tax professional or a service like Intuit are trying to help here. If the government wanted to make this process easier for the small percentage of people like you, they would have done so, but they haven't, because they have weak volition and desire for creativity.
- yladiz 5y agoDoes it stand to reason that the average person needs to actually file taxes if the government knows the information necessary to calculate a tax refund or bill anyway?
- fridif 5y agoHow would the government know what deductions you are applying for before you apply for them?
- yladiz 5y agoDoes the average person have complicated deductions?
- fridif 5y agoHow will the government know how much you have spent on gas without you telling them? Furthermore, my taxes take me less than 1 hour per year. I prefer the current system where I tell them what I think I owe. If they told me what I owed, and I disagreed, what recourse would I have? I guarantee it would take more than an hour.
- danaris 5y agoGas isn't a normal deduction for most people. I'd have to drive several orders of magnitude more than I do to spend tens of thousands of dollars on gas each year.
- fridif 5y agoSo are we really going to go through the entire tax code and all of the potential use cases of median individuals, all so that we can conclude that the government needs to predict our deductions in advance so that you don't have to spend 1 hour and $39 per year filling out your info on TurboTax? I'm tired of arguing with malicious people on the internet.
- danaris 5y agoI...what? No; under every actual proposal, people who have these complicated deductions and other specialized needs can still file exactly the way they do today so that they can get their taxes calculated properly. And making sure that >50% of Americans—in particular, the >50% who have the simplest taxes, which correlates highly with lower income—don't have to "spend 1 hour and $39 per year" with private companies to accomplish their legally mandated tax filing is a very good thing, even if it were to actually increase the inconvenience for the wealthy and complicated. Which, again, this wouldn't. So please put aside the ad hominem attacks, which I believe are against the HN guidelines anyway.
- fridif 5y agoSo paying $39 to a private company (not mandatory btw, you don't need to go with Intuit or TaxAct or HrBlock or etc), is evil incarnate... ...but the thousands of dollars my wife paid directly to the government two years ago for her green card application which still is not done is totally fine? If there was an Intuit for green cards, I would be camping outside to be the first to give them my money.
- Rexxar 5y agoWhy do you have to apply for deductions ? If you have right to a deduction it should be automatic.