7 ms·

I guess it was originally done this way because in the past people actually had some semblance of privacy and the government didn't actually know a great deal a

I guess it was originally done this way because in the past people actually had some semblance of privacy and the government didn't actually know a great deal about people's income. Eventually, privacy was eroded away year after year to the point where the government now knows an extreme amount about each citizen. I guess I'd refrain the question - instead of asking why do we need to do taxes when the government knows everything about us that they could do it for us, should we really have that little privacy? Maybe instead of changing the way we file taxes, we change the way the government is intimately entangled with our lives? Of course, those ideas, liberty and privacy, small government, etc., isn't really fashionable with the latest generations and most people would gladly give up their freedom and privacy to save having to fill out some paperwork.

guntars 2y ago
It was the older generations that gave up freedom and privacy for convenience, making that choice for everyone.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
janalsncm 2y ago
Liberty and privacy are fashionable. The problem is that our Congress passes hundreds of pages of domestic spying legislation in the middle of the night. It’s not exactly the School House Rock democratic process we learned about in 4th grade. But that’s really beside the point. If you are like millions of other Americans filing W2s, the fact that you work for your employer isn’t a secret. Your salary isn’t a secret. Most people will take the standard deduction. There’s no reason why that can’t be the default. It’s not a privacy violation for the IRS to use that info to make peoples lives easier.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > the fact that you work for your employer isn’t a secret I would prefer if it was. It's even worse than that, the government has entitled itself to be a party to every transaction over $600, so even the self employed have to shoulder this unseemly burden. > Your salary isn’t a secret It is. It's a shared secret. Again, I would prefer if I didn't have to do this. My salary is not at all the same as my "taxable income." It puts me in a position to have to justify my filings after the fact to an entity that only has access to half my relevant information.
  - markofzen 2y ago
    It's not a secret if your company uses any of the large payroll services due the Equifax "The Work Number".
    - anamexis 2y ago
      Don't you need to specifically authorize someone to use that to get your salary?
      - lupire 2y ago
        Not if that someone is Equifax itself or any of its hackers.
        anamexis 2y ago
        Sure, any payroll company (or their hackers) knows your salary.
  - philistine 2y ago
    There never was a point in the period of time when people filed taxes in the US that the government wasn’t entitled to know your salary. It used to take more time and effort to get the info, but better technology doesn’t change the game, it highlights that it wasn’t a « shared secret ». Your employer has a ton of paperwork to file related to your pay.
    - whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
      Did you not just explain how the game changed from technology in your own post? Before all of this unconstitutional collection of Americans information the government had to have a target and go out and collect and tabulate the information. Now it’s a select where citizen does thing x over y threshold. How is this not changing the game?
      - 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- maxrecursion 2y ago
  If they got rid of all the deductions and loopholes most people wouldn't need to file as the only thing they'd have to put on their taxes is their W2 income. I believe the IRS is even informed of things like 401k disbursement and stock sales. Meaning most people wouldn't have to submit for those either. The gains of simplify the tax code are gargantuan, but unfortunately, the wealthy and powerful organizations benefit from the current system, and would be hurt financially by simplifying it. So, it will never be simplified.
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    Part of the problem is that the main way the government knows how to give people money is through tax deductions. It doesn’t have to be that way. Covid checks demonstrated that grants are possible. That in and of itself would simple things, since there would just be a list of things you can apply for.
kayson 2y ago
> I guess it was originally done this way because in the past people actually had some semblance of privacy and the government didn't actually know a great deal about people's income. You still had to file taxes, though, so they would know about your income, if only a year behind. I read somewhere that tax withholding only started during WWII (and it was supposed to be temporary). It's really the withholding that would give the IRS the information needed to file your taxes in advance, so it's only a fairly recent possibility.
- nilamo 2y ago
  It's not just withholding. Cost basis info on all stock market transactions are also provided to the IRS by your brokerage...
  - altdataseller 2y ago
    What about expenses for those that are self employed? What about rental income? What about expenses related to rental properties? Lots of things the government doesn’t know…
    - alistairSH 2y ago
      None of which apply to the vast majority of filers. Nobody is saying filing taxes should never be necessary. Only that it shouldn’t be necessary for most people. The flow should be… Employer and financial institutions send info to IRS (they mostly do already). Then, in January, IRS sends a “Is this correct?” notice to residents. If correct, no action is needed. If not correct, then make adjustments.
      - nilamo 2y ago
        100% agree. These conversations always seem to end with lots of "what about"s, as if being easy for the average case was somehow undesirable.
      - dh2022 2y ago
Barrin92 2y ago
>we change the way the government is intimately entangled with our lives? I've lived in Sweden where taxes are not just automatically filed but every citizen can trivially look up anyone's tax returns and nobody ever saw it as the government being intimately entangled with anyone's life. Privacy violation would be to look into how and on what you spend your money, not that everyone pays their share of taxes. That tells you nothing about what people spend their money on. Merely that they aren't avoiding paying their part. I don't see the problem with the government automatically doing my taxes or anyone being able to see that.
- RiceRichardJ 2y ago
  Swedish views on privacy don’t necessarily apply outside of Sweden. Are income levels not deserving of privacy?
  - bedobi 2y ago
    Is your address? Your ssn? Your phone number? In Sweden, anyone can look it up. https://ratsit.se https://ratsit.se
    - dantheman 2y ago
      of course your address, phone number, income, etc should all be private just because the phone companies shared this didn't mean it's a good idea; and they always provided a way to be unlisted
      - throw0101c 2y ago
        > of course "Of course" makes it sound like it is obviously / objectively true, but it is a sentiment that is not necessarily true, either in the past, or even in the present everywhere on the planet. > your address, phone number, income, etc should all be private just because the phone companies shared this didn't mean it's a good idea This information was public in the past before the phone companies existed. May I introduce you to the concept of city directories: > A city directory is a listing of residents, streets, businesses, organizations or institutions, giving their location in a city. It may be arranged alphabetically or geographically or in other ways. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_directory > City Directories were created for salesmen, merchants, and other interested in contacting residents of an area. They are arranged alphabetically giving lists of names and addresses. These often list the adult residents of a city or area. * https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/City_Directories https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/City_Directories They can date back to (at least) the 1800s and continued into the twentieth century: > City directories were published yearly. The Archives has them from 1834 to 2001 (except for a few years in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and in 1987, when they were not published). * https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/accountability-operations-customer-service/access-city-information-or-records/city-of-toronto-archives/whats-in-the-archives/city-directories/ https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/accountability-operat...
__s 2y ago
The two aren't really related. A implies B does not mean B implies A, ie negating B won't negate A, ie not having automatic tax filing won't remove the loss of privacy Might as well say "Maybe instead of changing the way we file taxes, we solve world hunger" (I say this while voting for small government & making efforts to preserve my privacy)
Gibbon1 2y ago
Up until WWII most working class people didn't pay federal income taxes.
II2II 2y ago
> instead of asking why do we need to do taxes when the government knows everything about us that they could do it for us They cannot do everyone's taxes since what they know about many individuals is incomplete. > should we really have that little privacy? Put that way, the answer is no. On the other hand, virtually everyone demands services from their government and very few people want those services to be transactional (e.g. most people demand roads, few people want to pay based upon their usage of those roads). That means the government needs some form of revenue. For various reasons, it has been decided that a person's income should be a portion of those revenues. In order to ensure that people are paying their dues, the government needs to collect some information. Are there other ways the government could get revenues? Sure, but all of them are going to be problematic in some form or other. > Of course, those ideas, liberty and privacy, small government, etc., isn't really fashionable with the latest generations and most people would gladly give up their freedom and privacy to save having to fill out some paperwork. One has to be careful about generalizations. Even though a desire for liberty and privacy may be universally appealing, we would find that people's views on what those terms mean varies from generation to generation and from individual to individual. Note that I said the meaning changes, not a person's desire for it. As for the desire for small government, well, some people want small government and other people don't. It is a far less universal ideal.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  > For various reasons, it has been decided that a person's income should be a portion of those revenues. In order to ensure that people are paying their dues, the government needs to collect some information. Are there other ways the government could get revenues? Sure, but all of them are going to be problematic in some form or other. No, just a singular reason: Prohibition.
  - superb_dev 2y ago
    Taxes existed before prohibition, right?
    - Turing_Machine 2y ago
lupire 2y ago
You are more than welcome to go off grid and enjoy your privacy.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
artdigital 2y ago
In Australia, when doing the yearly tax filing, the ATO website already prefills all/most of the amounts because they already know those anyway Your job is it then to correct things, fix wrong ones and submit what they couldn’t get automatically The ATO website is also veeeery nice! I was surprised how simple of a task doing taxes was
jhanschoo 2y ago
> liberty and privacy, small government, etc., isn't really fashionable Your negative freedom and ownership of property is recognized and enforced by the tax-funded awesome power of the state. If you like small government there is no lack of countries that you can emigrate too where the internationally-recognized government is too weak to enforce its protection over much of its society. These are usually places that are too unstable to be palatable to someone from a developed nation. > should we really have that little privacy? As someone else mentioned, the government already has to know that to know that you are paying the right amount of tax given your means. Alternatively, consider simplifying tax laws so that it needs to know less. Also, look at regulation that limits what the government can do based on the information that it has on you; for that matter, businesses too, for privacy's sake.

guntars 2y ago

It was the older generations that gave up freedom and privacy for convenience, making that choice for everyone.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

janalsncm 2y ago

Liberty and privacy are fashionable. The problem is that our Congress passes hundreds of pages of domestic spying legislation in the middle of the night. It’s not exactly the School House Rock democratic process we learned about in 4th grade. But that’s really beside the point. If you are like millions of other Americans filing W2s, the fact that you work for your employer isn’t a secret. Your salary isn’t a secret. Most people will take the standard deduction. There’s no reason why that can’t be the default. It’s not a privacy violation for the IRS to use that info to make peoples lives easier.

akira2501 2y ago
> the fact that you work for your employer isn’t a secret I would prefer if it was. It's even worse than that, the government has entitled itself to be a party to every transaction over $600, so even the self employed have to shoulder this unseemly burden. > Your salary isn’t a secret It is. It's a shared secret. Again, I would prefer if I didn't have to do this. My salary is not at all the same as my "taxable income." It puts me in a position to have to justify my filings after the fact to an entity that only has access to half my relevant information.
- markofzen 2y ago
  It's not a secret if your company uses any of the large payroll services due the Equifax "The Work Number".
  - anamexis 2y ago
    Don't you need to specifically authorize someone to use that to get your salary?
    - lupire 2y ago
      Not if that someone is Equifax itself or any of its hackers.
      - anamexis 2y ago
        Sure, any payroll company (or their hackers) knows your salary.
- philistine 2y ago
  There never was a point in the period of time when people filed taxes in the US that the government wasn’t entitled to know your salary. It used to take more time and effort to get the info, but better technology doesn’t change the game, it highlights that it wasn’t a « shared secret ». Your employer has a ton of paperwork to file related to your pay.
  - whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
    Did you not just explain how the game changed from technology in your own post? Before all of this unconstitutional collection of Americans information the government had to have a target and go out and collect and tabulate the information. Now it’s a select where citizen does thing x over y threshold. How is this not changing the game?
    - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
maxrecursion 2y ago
If they got rid of all the deductions and loopholes most people wouldn't need to file as the only thing they'd have to put on their taxes is their W2 income. I believe the IRS is even informed of things like 401k disbursement and stock sales. Meaning most people wouldn't have to submit for those either. The gains of simplify the tax code are gargantuan, but unfortunately, the wealthy and powerful organizations benefit from the current system, and would be hurt financially by simplifying it. So, it will never be simplified.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Part of the problem is that the main way the government knows how to give people money is through tax deductions. It doesn’t have to be that way. Covid checks demonstrated that grants are possible. That in and of itself would simple things, since there would just be a list of things you can apply for.

kayson 2y ago

> I guess it was originally done this way because in the past people actually had some semblance of privacy and the government didn't actually know a great deal about people's income. You still had to file taxes, though, so they would know about your income, if only a year behind. I read somewhere that tax withholding only started during WWII (and it was supposed to be temporary). It's really the withholding that would give the IRS the information needed to file your taxes in advance, so it's only a fairly recent possibility.

nilamo 2y ago
It's not just withholding. Cost basis info on all stock market transactions are also provided to the IRS by your brokerage...
- altdataseller 2y ago
  What about expenses for those that are self employed? What about rental income? What about expenses related to rental properties? Lots of things the government doesn’t know…
  - alistairSH 2y ago
    None of which apply to the vast majority of filers. Nobody is saying filing taxes should never be necessary. Only that it shouldn’t be necessary for most people. The flow should be… Employer and financial institutions send info to IRS (they mostly do already). Then, in January, IRS sends a “Is this correct?” notice to residents. If correct, no action is needed. If not correct, then make adjustments.
    - nilamo 2y ago
      100% agree. These conversations always seem to end with lots of "what about"s, as if being easy for the average case was somehow undesirable.
    - dh2022 2y ago

Barrin92 2y ago

>we change the way the government is intimately entangled with our lives? I've lived in Sweden where taxes are not just automatically filed but every citizen can trivially look up anyone's tax returns and nobody ever saw it as the government being intimately entangled with anyone's life. Privacy violation would be to look into how and on what you spend your money, not that everyone pays their share of taxes. That tells you nothing about what people spend their money on. Merely that they aren't avoiding paying their part. I don't see the problem with the government automatically doing my taxes or anyone being able to see that.

RiceRichardJ 2y ago
Swedish views on privacy don’t necessarily apply outside of Sweden. Are income levels not deserving of privacy?
- bedobi 2y ago
  Is your address? Your ssn? Your phone number? In Sweden, anyone can look it up. https://ratsit.se https://ratsit.se
  - dantheman 2y ago
    of course your address, phone number, income, etc should all be private just because the phone companies shared this didn't mean it's a good idea; and they always provided a way to be unlisted
    - throw0101c 2y ago
      > of course "Of course" makes it sound like it is obviously / objectively true, but it is a sentiment that is not necessarily true, either in the past, or even in the present everywhere on the planet. > your address, phone number, income, etc should all be private just because the phone companies shared this didn't mean it's a good idea This information was public in the past before the phone companies existed. May I introduce you to the concept of city directories: > A city directory is a listing of residents, streets, businesses, organizations or institutions, giving their location in a city. It may be arranged alphabetically or geographically or in other ways. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_directory > City Directories were created for salesmen, merchants, and other interested in contacting residents of an area. They are arranged alphabetically giving lists of names and addresses. These often list the adult residents of a city or area. * https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/City_Directories https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/City_Directories They can date back to (at least) the 1800s and continued into the twentieth century: > City directories were published yearly. The Archives has them from 1834 to 2001 (except for a few years in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and in 1987, when they were not published). * https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/accountability-operations-customer-service/access-city-information-or-records/city-of-toronto-archives/whats-in-the-archives/city-directories/ https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/accountability-operat...

__s 2y ago

The two aren't really related. A implies B does not mean B implies A, ie negating B won't negate A, ie not having automatic tax filing won't remove the loss of privacy Might as well say "Maybe instead of changing the way we file taxes, we solve world hunger" (I say this while voting for small government & making efforts to preserve my privacy)

Gibbon1 2y ago

Up until WWII most working class people didn't pay federal income taxes.

II2II 2y ago

> instead of asking why do we need to do taxes when the government knows everything about us that they could do it for us They cannot do everyone's taxes since what they know about many individuals is incomplete. > should we really have that little privacy? Put that way, the answer is no. On the other hand, virtually everyone demands services from their government and very few people want those services to be transactional (e.g. most people demand roads, few people want to pay based upon their usage of those roads). That means the government needs some form of revenue. For various reasons, it has been decided that a person's income should be a portion of those revenues. In order to ensure that people are paying their dues, the government needs to collect some information. Are there other ways the government could get revenues? Sure, but all of them are going to be problematic in some form or other. > Of course, those ideas, liberty and privacy, small government, etc., isn't really fashionable with the latest generations and most people would gladly give up their freedom and privacy to save having to fill out some paperwork. One has to be careful about generalizations. Even though a desire for liberty and privacy may be universally appealing, we would find that people's views on what those terms mean varies from generation to generation and from individual to individual. Note that I said the meaning changes, not a person's desire for it. As for the desire for small government, well, some people want small government and other people don't. It is a far less universal ideal.

lesuorac 2y ago
> For various reasons, it has been decided that a person's income should be a portion of those revenues. In order to ensure that people are paying their dues, the government needs to collect some information. Are there other ways the government could get revenues? Sure, but all of them are going to be problematic in some form or other. No, just a singular reason: Prohibition.
- superb_dev 2y ago
  Taxes existed before prohibition, right?
  - Turing_Machine 2y ago

lupire 2y ago

You are more than welcome to go off grid and enjoy your privacy.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

artdigital 2y ago

In Australia, when doing the yearly tax filing, the ATO website already prefills all/most of the amounts because they already know those anyway Your job is it then to correct things, fix wrong ones and submit what they couldn’t get automatically The ATO website is also veeeery nice! I was surprised how simple of a task doing taxes was

jhanschoo 2y ago

> liberty and privacy, small government, etc., isn't really fashionable Your negative freedom and ownership of property is recognized and enforced by the tax-funded awesome power of the state. If you like small government there is no lack of countries that you can emigrate too where the internationally-recognized government is too weak to enforce its protection over much of its society. These are usually places that are too unstable to be palatable to someone from a developed nation. > should we really have that little privacy? As someone else mentioned, the government already has to know that to know that you are paying the right amount of tax given your means. Alternatively, consider simplifying tax laws so that it needs to know less. Also, look at regulation that limits what the government can do based on the information that it has on you; for that matter, businesses too, for privacy's sake.