4 ms·
The tax system for the average American is, frankly, simple (or simple enough). You pay a flat percent of most purchases as a sales tax. It varies by geography
by vineyardmike 2y ago
The tax system for the average American is, frankly, simple (or simple enough).
You pay a flat percent of most purchases as a sales tax. It varies by geography, but most people spend their day to day life in a single place (their home town).
You pay a flat percent of your home as a property tax. Most people who own property don't move, so while it varies regionally, you don't have to think about any but yours.
You pay a percent of your salary as income tax (it's technically progressive, but i don't think most Americans really think about this conceptually outside of tax filing). Your employer takes out this for you, and then once a year you fill out some forms that seem scary, but for the average American are actually somewhat straight forward. The government writes you a check back if you over paid.
Then everyone talks about all the loopholes and stuff that rich people and businesses get. Most Americans never touch 99% of any of that, and just think it's a way for the rich to get richer. Some people talk about charity tax deductions, but most people don't know how that works, but also wouldn't really benefit from this. Similarly there is the vague idea of business write-offs that no one really understands nor needs to know about.
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- RHSeeger 2y agoThis is an amazingly simplistic view of what actually happens when doing taxes for everyone I have ever met. The number of deductions you need to consider and figure out if you qualify for, even for someone fresh out of college, can be overwhelming. Heck, anyone with a child may has tons of "is this deductible" expenses, above and beyond any child tax credits (which they may or may not qualify for). I'm outside the "average" nowadays, but I've been paying someone to do my taxes for me for decades because I don't have the mental bandwidth to figure out all the things that could save me money on my taxes. All the way back to when I was earning well below the poverty line (though I paid someone less back then).
- hobs 2y agoIn the last decade there's the rise of all the online tax prep software (that isn't run by Intuit) which just ... asks you questions. That's it, that's the hack that solves the problem of all the weird deductions - reducing it to word problems that you can answer - there's definitely a few dozen of them though.
- jnwatson 2y agoI don't think that "can be reduced to a questionnaire" is an effective indicator of simplicity. The IRS forms themselves are essentially word problems. The DeepMind personality cloner just asks questions. It is definitely not simple.
- hobs 2y agoIt's about as simple as it can get, plain questions - "Do you own a boat or did you buy one this year?" At some point there is irreducible complexity, but most tax questions are of this nature for all normal people - a huge portion of people could file a form 1040ez and be done with it.
- vineyardmike 2y agoDo most people actually qualify for any meaningful deductions? Does a married couple, say, two minimum wage workers, both on W2, really qualify for any meaningful deductions? The median American household earns about 60k a year in income. Most people should probably take the standard deduction, and not try to itemize their taxes? Most deductions require you to actually spend a certain amount of money to save anything, and the standard deduction is like 30k. There are millions of permutations of different deductions, and that makes taxes seem scary, and society talks a ton about all these different rules, but I’m pretty confident that the average W2 American stays well within the happy-path of “employer takes a percentage of your income, and you ack that in April”