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How 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 cur

by fridif 5y ago

How 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 ago
Gas 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 ago
  So 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 ago
    I...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 ago
      So 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.
yladiz 5y ago
You still haven't answered my question: does the average person have complicated deductions? What is the government just calculated the average amount someone drives for their job and just give a blanket deduction by default, and if you had more you would just tell them you spent more? Further, you make this point in a later comment: > I'm tired of arguing with malicious people on the internet. I don't see anything remotely malicious in this thread other than people not agreeing with your point, and this whole thread seems to be pretty healthy. With that in mind it's quite interesting to me that you're implying that this healthy discussion is malicious.
Spoom 5y ago
> If they told me what I owed, and I disagreed, what recourse would I have? You'd file your taxes exactly as you do now, losing nothing.

by fridif 5y ago

danaris 5y ago

Gas 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 ago
So 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 ago
  I...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 ago
    So 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.

yladiz 5y ago

You still haven't answered my question: does the average person have complicated deductions? What is the government just calculated the average amount someone drives for their job and just give a blanket deduction by default, and if you had more you would just tell them you spent more? Further, you make this point in a later comment: > I'm tired of arguing with malicious people on the internet. I don't see anything remotely malicious in this thread other than people not agreeing with your point, and this whole thread seems to be pretty healthy. With that in mind it's quite interesting to me that you're implying that this healthy discussion is malicious.

Spoom 5y ago

> If they told me what I owed, and I disagreed, what recourse would I have? You'd file your taxes exactly as you do now, losing nothing.