3 ms·

That’s my point: Americans spend a ton of time doing their taxes because taxes are complicated, not because the IRS doesn’t pre-transcribe their W-2. If all you

That’s my point: Americans spend a ton of time doing their taxes because taxes are complicated, not because the IRS doesn’t pre-transcribe their W-2. If all you need is the 1040-EZ, you can do that in 20 minutes.

maxerickson 4y ago
Right, the point is that we can and should get that down to 5 minutes. It's just stupid lobbying and weird ideology to insist that the IRS stay out of the preparation business. And then once they start doing it, they can probably figure out how to do it for a larger and larger percentage of people over time (and the tax code can be adjusted to make it work better in cases where it makes sense).
- twoodfin 4y ago
  I think you’re unintentionally making the weird ideologues’ point for them: The burden of taxes isn’t the 5, 10, 20, 200 minutes you spend preparing them, the burden is the taxes. Getting excited about saving taxpayers 15 minutes, and trading off $thousands of deductions for a few more minutes, suggests that you’re optimizing for obscuring the primary burden (the cost of government) rather than reducing it. It’s the weird ideologues who typically want an extremely simple system. But it’s very hard to make such a system as progressive as what we have today without reintroducing complexity.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    Why would people trade off deductions? I'm pretty sure that the serious proposals for IRS preparation are for them to pre-fill what they have and are open to the filer amending that or preparing their own return. We should anyway eliminate exemptions and deductions and shift the brackets to compensate. It's also sort of silly to go on about making sure that people understand the "burden", when government should obviously be restricting itself to things that are a net benefit to society. Of course there will be disagreements about the value of a given activity or service, but the notion that government must be a burden is pretty backwards.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    It is both the time and the taxes that are a burden. And there's always gonna be some people out there keeping track of all the dumb shit we are being taxed for but not changing it, just like today.
alistairSH 4y ago
1040EZ was discontinued in 2018.
rolenthedeep 4y ago
If all you need is the 1040-ez (as most people do) then it's trivial to automate with records that the IRS already has. Then you're given the opportunity to review and correct your automatic taxes like other countries already do. This is already what happens, except you're paying a third party for the privilege of copy/pasting some fields from one form to another. America isn't unique and special, solutions to problems in other countries aren't magically impossible here. The reason you think this is because you've been tricked into thinking our tax code is complex by necessity. In reality, things are only this bad because TurboTax and other tax preparing companies have lobbied for more complex tax codes and less access to free automated filing. If an independent company can produce software to file your taxes and charge you $150 for it, there's absolutely no reason the IRS can't do the same thing for free.

maxerickson 4y ago

Right, the point is that we can and should get that down to 5 minutes. It's just stupid lobbying and weird ideology to insist that the IRS stay out of the preparation business. And then once they start doing it, they can probably figure out how to do it for a larger and larger percentage of people over time (and the tax code can be adjusted to make it work better in cases where it makes sense).

twoodfin 4y ago
I think you’re unintentionally making the weird ideologues’ point for them: The burden of taxes isn’t the 5, 10, 20, 200 minutes you spend preparing them, the burden is the taxes. Getting excited about saving taxpayers 15 minutes, and trading off $thousands of deductions for a few more minutes, suggests that you’re optimizing for obscuring the primary burden (the cost of government) rather than reducing it. It’s the weird ideologues who typically want an extremely simple system. But it’s very hard to make such a system as progressive as what we have today without reintroducing complexity.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Why would people trade off deductions? I'm pretty sure that the serious proposals for IRS preparation are for them to pre-fill what they have and are open to the filer amending that or preparing their own return. We should anyway eliminate exemptions and deductions and shift the brackets to compensate. It's also sort of silly to go on about making sure that people understand the "burden", when government should obviously be restricting itself to things that are a net benefit to society. Of course there will be disagreements about the value of a given activity or service, but the notion that government must be a burden is pretty backwards.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  It is both the time and the taxes that are a burden. And there's always gonna be some people out there keeping track of all the dumb shit we are being taxed for but not changing it, just like today.

alistairSH 4y ago

1040EZ was discontinued in 2018.

rolenthedeep 4y ago

If all you need is the 1040-ez (as most people do) then it's trivial to automate with records that the IRS already has. Then you're given the opportunity to review and correct your automatic taxes like other countries already do. This is already what happens, except you're paying a third party for the privilege of copy/pasting some fields from one form to another. America isn't unique and special, solutions to problems in other countries aren't magically impossible here. The reason you think this is because you've been tricked into thinking our tax code is complex by necessity. In reality, things are only this bad because TurboTax and other tax preparing companies have lobbied for more complex tax codes and less access to free automated filing. If an independent company can produce software to file your taxes and charge you $150 for it, there's absolutely no reason the IRS can't do the same thing for free.