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OMG big business is trying to ruin my life! The government are not incentivized to do a good job preparing your taxes. I'm not a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theoris

by nathanb 14y ago

OMG big business is trying to ruin my life! The government are not incentivized to do a good job preparing your taxes. I'm not a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist. I don't think the US government wants to institute a program to systematically defraud the population. But I do believe that governmental inefficiency and incompetence is nigh-limitless, and the very people who may need their tax returns the most could end up being cheated out of them, not by malice but by indifference or stupidity. (And there are many opportunities for the poor and underserved to have their taxes prepared for free. Many credit unions will do it, for example, and they are incentivized to do a good job because the tax returns will likely pass through their hands). I realize the counter-argument is "but you can just opt-out if you don't trust the government". Sure. I can also choose to drive if I don't want my civil liberties violated by the TSA (and I do, except when traveling internationally). If the easiest and most convenient option also involves giving away rights, most people will take it. And then when later it turns out that it's being abused, there will be insufficient infrastructure in place for many people to choose an alternative. I hope this is just paranoid ranting.

UnFleshedOne 14y ago
So, to extend your analogy, if flight was just invented and a flight transport system was being proposed now, you would argue against it because TSA would start violating your liberties when you use it and deterioration of existing horse carriage-based infrastructure will make opt-out a non-option?
- nathanb 14y ago
  Sure, if you want to convert my argument into straw-man form to more effectively belittle it, that is a very effective way to do so. A more accurate way to extend the analogy to transportation would be a company starting a free bus service for lower-income neighborhoods. All you have to do is link your grocery store rewards card and scan it every time you use the bus, which will authorize the company to access all your purchase data from that card. You could very easily argue that this is a good thing, and perhaps at the outset it would be. But if it turns out that the company is doing something sleazy--rewards cards sometimes also encode personally-identifying information which could be used unethically, for example--then at that point a person's livelihood could very well depend on continuing to use that bus system, especially if the convenience of the system forced other free or low-cost alternatives to stop serving those neighborhoods. In both of these cases (the IRS preparing your taxes and the company holding your personal information), the organization is not incentivized to do a good job. In fact, especially in the IRS case, the worse a job they do, the more tax money the government takes in.
  - UnFleshedOne 14y ago
    Ah, that is much better analogy, yes. I don't think IRS _necessarily_ has no incentive to do the job properly though. If government didn't want those deductions and tax cuts used, they would not introduce them in the first place. Excluding the cases where the cuts were made based more on politics than on policy. No idea what proportion that would be. Tax deductions are (supposed to be) made not because government wants to give people a break and be nice, but because it wants to influence certain behaviors. If those cuts are not used then they don't serve their original purpose, so that is an incentive for IRS to count deductions properly.

by nathanb 14y ago

UnFleshedOne 14y ago

So, to extend your analogy, if flight was just invented and a flight transport system was being proposed now, you would argue against it because TSA would start violating your liberties when you use it and deterioration of existing horse carriage-based infrastructure will make opt-out a non-option?

nathanb 14y ago
Sure, if you want to convert my argument into straw-man form to more effectively belittle it, that is a very effective way to do so. A more accurate way to extend the analogy to transportation would be a company starting a free bus service for lower-income neighborhoods. All you have to do is link your grocery store rewards card and scan it every time you use the bus, which will authorize the company to access all your purchase data from that card. You could very easily argue that this is a good thing, and perhaps at the outset it would be. But if it turns out that the company is doing something sleazy--rewards cards sometimes also encode personally-identifying information which could be used unethically, for example--then at that point a person's livelihood could very well depend on continuing to use that bus system, especially if the convenience of the system forced other free or low-cost alternatives to stop serving those neighborhoods. In both of these cases (the IRS preparing your taxes and the company holding your personal information), the organization is not incentivized to do a good job. In fact, especially in the IRS case, the worse a job they do, the more tax money the government takes in.
- UnFleshedOne 14y ago
  Ah, that is much better analogy, yes. I don't think IRS _necessarily_ has no incentive to do the job properly though. If government didn't want those deductions and tax cuts used, they would not introduce them in the first place. Excluding the cases where the cuts were made based more on politics than on policy. No idea what proportion that would be. Tax deductions are (supposed to be) made not because government wants to give people a break and be nice, but because it wants to influence certain behaviors. If those cuts are not used then they don't serve their original purpose, so that is an incentive for IRS to count deductions properly.