6 ms·

> Why is the system still this backwards? Intuit lobbying hard to keep tax rules complex.

JSavageOne 5y ago
Blaming "lobbyists" absolves the politicians of their responsibility. The fault lies with the politicians for creating and perpetuating this broken system. (copy and pasted from another comment)
- jacobolus 5y ago
  Like anyone else, politicians respond to incentives. US crony capitalism is a large-scale systemic failure, and the tax filing system (and under-resourced IRS) is just one symptom. If you want a narrow target, you can blame the GOP activists on the US Supreme Court, or if you want to go beyond that, blame the GOP senators/presidents who appointed them, the Federalist Society, the GOP donor base, GOP-aligned media organizations, etc. Gutting campaign finance restrictions was a vast judicial overreach, performed for partisan advantage and the benefit of corrupt wealthy patrons.
  - jbverschoor 5y ago
    There's a word for those incentives.. "bribes"
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      The #1 most relevant goal for politicians is to get re-elected. (Personal enrichment is largely orthogonal.) Raising large campaign contributions is of obvious benefit to that effort, and is not directly a bribe per se. But it does have some of the same problems that bribery has. It’s undoubtedly true that some US politicians have gotten bribes, defrauded partners or constituents, embezzled money from their campaigns or the government, used inside information to trade stocks, etc. But even if all of those were impossible, the nature of the US campaign finance system would create plenty of perverse incentives.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    > Like anyone else, politicians respond to incentives. Sure, but it's not like they don't have a choice. Regardless of any incentives, they're the only ones actually empowered to make these decisions. Lobbying, offers of bribes, campaign financing promises, etc. do not in any sense detract from their ability and responsibility to make the right choices.
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      Nearly everyone who takes any responsibility or even believes that there is such a thing as personal or professional ethics has been systematically purged from the GOP over the past few decades, and the GOP now has 6 votes on the Supreme Court and 50 Senators (=> effective veto of all legislation), and may well end up with congressional majorities after the next election. You can’t un-screw a system by just telling the people inside who were selected for their mendacity and corruption to “make the right choices”.
      - nybble41 5y ago
        > You can’t un-screw a system by just telling the people inside who were selected for their mendacity and corruption to “make the right choices”. Of course not, but it's still the politicians (on both sides of the aisle) who are ultimately at fault for abusing their position and failing in their duty to their constituents, not the lobbyists for merely making suggestions or offering deals in their own self-interest. Restricting lobbying or campaign contributions wouldn't do anything to improve existing politicians' "mendacity and corruption". They'll just find other, less public, ways to serve themselves rather than their constituents.
        jacobolus 5y ago
        > politicians who are ultimately at fault In a democracy, it is the voters who are ultimately at fault. But perhaps more to the point, it is the system that is at fault, and the system is very complex: institutions, physical infrastructure, social mores, common beliefs, canonical media and stories, traditions, language, .... You can’t just point fingers at individual people in a large imperfect system and pretend that swapping them would fix it. Troubleshooting and improving large complex systems is really hard and improvements are usually incremental, except sometimes in extraordinary crises.
  - ascagnel_ 5y ago
    I'd add one more in there for a tighter focus -- the lobby group "Americans for Tax Reform", which opposes all tax increases, and specifically opposes any effort from the federal or state governments to provide pre-filled tax returns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Opposition_to_free_automatic_tax_return_filing_and_other_efforts_to_make_tax_filing_easier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Oppos...
briandear 5y ago
Intuit isn’t the problem. Politicians are. See Milton Friedman on this subject. A complicated tax code is used to reward and punish people. The tax code was complex long before Intuit came around. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8
- masklinn 5y ago
  That has nothing to do with the issue at hand. All tax codes are complicated, and you can always spend days minmaxing your taxes (or hire someone to do that for you). But the US is unique in the developed world as making filing taxes hell even if you don’t try to minmax them, and that is primarily due to tax filing companies lobbying against the IRS doing what everybody else does (and secondarily due to the GOP very much wanting filing taxes to be as painful and error prone as possible, and for it to be as expensive as possible for the IRS).
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    > All tax codes are complicated, But the US tax code is an order of magnitude larger than the Swedish one. Which probably means that it is several orders of magnitude more complex (however that might be defined).
    - bpye 5y ago
      And yet as mentioned earlier in this comment thread, the IRS has already managed to automate this on their side, as they can do an “electronic audit”.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
missedthecue 5y ago
TurboTax is a relatively new product, and they haven't been big lobbyists for their whole existence. Why wasn't the tax process simple before then?
- aj7 5y ago
  No. TurboTax has been around for as long as people have had their own computers.
- Linosaurus 5y ago
  TurboTax was first released in 1984, according to Wikipedia. That's ~20 years before Sweden got everything prefilled for some of the population. As an example.
aj7 5y ago
Yes. This is well known. They became so rich and powerful they had lobbyists (bag men) to protect their interests.

Blaming "lobbyists" absolves the politicians of their responsibility. The fault lies with the politicians for creating and perpetuating this broken system. (copy and pasted from another comment)

jacobolus 5y ago
Like anyone else, politicians respond to incentives. US crony capitalism is a large-scale systemic failure, and the tax filing system (and under-resourced IRS) is just one symptom. If you want a narrow target, you can blame the GOP activists on the US Supreme Court, or if you want to go beyond that, blame the GOP senators/presidents who appointed them, the Federalist Society, the GOP donor base, GOP-aligned media organizations, etc. Gutting campaign finance restrictions was a vast judicial overreach, performed for partisan advantage and the benefit of corrupt wealthy patrons.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  There's a word for those incentives.. "bribes"
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    The #1 most relevant goal for politicians is to get re-elected. (Personal enrichment is largely orthogonal.) Raising large campaign contributions is of obvious benefit to that effort, and is not directly a bribe per se. But it does have some of the same problems that bribery has. It’s undoubtedly true that some US politicians have gotten bribes, defrauded partners or constituents, embezzled money from their campaigns or the government, used inside information to trade stocks, etc. But even if all of those were impossible, the nature of the US campaign finance system would create plenty of perverse incentives.
- nybble41 5y ago
  > Like anyone else, politicians respond to incentives. Sure, but it's not like they don't have a choice. Regardless of any incentives, they're the only ones actually empowered to make these decisions. Lobbying, offers of bribes, campaign financing promises, etc. do not in any sense detract from their ability and responsibility to make the right choices.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    Nearly everyone who takes any responsibility or even believes that there is such a thing as personal or professional ethics has been systematically purged from the GOP over the past few decades, and the GOP now has 6 votes on the Supreme Court and 50 Senators (=> effective veto of all legislation), and may well end up with congressional majorities after the next election. You can’t un-screw a system by just telling the people inside who were selected for their mendacity and corruption to “make the right choices”.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      > You can’t un-screw a system by just telling the people inside who were selected for their mendacity and corruption to “make the right choices”. Of course not, but it's still the politicians (on both sides of the aisle) who are ultimately at fault for abusing their position and failing in their duty to their constituents, not the lobbyists for merely making suggestions or offering deals in their own self-interest. Restricting lobbying or campaign contributions wouldn't do anything to improve existing politicians' "mendacity and corruption". They'll just find other, less public, ways to serve themselves rather than their constituents.
      - jacobolus 5y ago
        > politicians who are ultimately at fault In a democracy, it is the voters who are ultimately at fault. But perhaps more to the point, it is the system that is at fault, and the system is very complex: institutions, physical infrastructure, social mores, common beliefs, canonical media and stories, traditions, language, .... You can’t just point fingers at individual people in a large imperfect system and pretend that swapping them would fix it. Troubleshooting and improving large complex systems is really hard and improvements are usually incremental, except sometimes in extraordinary crises.
- ascagnel_ 5y ago
  I'd add one more in there for a tighter focus -- the lobby group "Americans for Tax Reform", which opposes all tax increases, and specifically opposes any effort from the federal or state governments to provide pre-filled tax returns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Opposition_to_free_automatic_tax_return_filing_and_other_efforts_to_make_tax_filing_easier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Oppos...

briandear 5y ago

Intuit isn’t the problem. Politicians are. See Milton Friedman on this subject. A complicated tax code is used to reward and punish people. The tax code was complex long before Intuit came around. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8

masklinn 5y ago
That has nothing to do with the issue at hand. All tax codes are complicated, and you can always spend days minmaxing your taxes (or hire someone to do that for you). But the US is unique in the developed world as making filing taxes hell even if you don’t try to minmax them, and that is primarily due to tax filing companies lobbying against the IRS doing what everybody else does (and secondarily due to the GOP very much wanting filing taxes to be as painful and error prone as possible, and for it to be as expensive as possible for the IRS).
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  > All tax codes are complicated, But the US tax code is an order of magnitude larger than the Swedish one. Which probably means that it is several orders of magnitude more complex (however that might be defined).
  - bpye 5y ago
    And yet as mentioned earlier in this comment thread, the IRS has already managed to automate this on their side, as they can do an “electronic audit”.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

missedthecue 5y ago

TurboTax is a relatively new product, and they haven't been big lobbyists for their whole existence. Why wasn't the tax process simple before then?

aj7 5y ago
No. TurboTax has been around for as long as people have had their own computers.
Linosaurus 5y ago
TurboTax was first released in 1984, according to Wikipedia. That's ~20 years before Sweden got everything prefilled for some of the population. As an example.

aj7 5y ago

Yes. This is well known. They became so rich and powerful they had lobbyists (bag men) to protect their interests.