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Nope, for a few reasons. First, the IRS has already screwed my taxes up with faulty assumptions - three times over the last decade. Each time it's been a huge
by gyardley 12y ago
Nope, for a few reasons.
First, the IRS has already screwed my taxes up with faulty assumptions - three times over the last decade. Each time it's been a huge pain to correct. I simply don't trust them to get it right.
Second, I don't particularly trust them to notify me when there's something in the tax code that works in my favor. They're not going to file your 83b elections for you. They certainly aren't going to tell you about, say, the special rules for the Qualified Small Business Stock that you've held for five years. However, they'll happily take your overpayments if you don't know about these rules yourself.
Third, I want everyone to be more aware of the taxes they're paying. You're not going to get informed citizens and intelligent voters if the system's set up to hide the financial consequences of their voting decisions. It'd be better for America and American politics if we moved in the opposite direction, and got rid of automatic tax withholding.
- raldi 12y agoHow do you feel about this quote from the article? “Imagine if your vehicle registration fee was done the same way,” Mr. Bankman asked in a recent interview. “Imagine if the state said, ‘Go to your car, find your VIN number and then look at this table that has different tax rates to find out how much you owe.’ If they did, people would probably need to hire an expert for that too.”
- gyardley 12y agoHonestly, I'm a little torn. It sounds like a huge pain, and I wouldn't want to do it. Neither would anyone else. On the other hand, huge pains like this are how policy gets changed. If it became more obvious to everyone that this was yet another hidden tax, perhaps there'd be more pressure to eliminate it or make it more rational.
- raldi 12y agoHow far would you take it? Would you support a law that mandated that taxes had to be paid in person, at one central office, with a long line in a hot, crowded room, and also they have crying babies and car alarms? That would be an even bigger pain and lead to even more pressure to eliminate taxes.
- gyardley 12y agoWhen someone already says they're torn about an intermediate position, they're not likely to be in favor of one taken to cartoonish extremes.
- raldi 12y agoThe thing is, though, I find it cartoonish to force people to calculate and file their own income tax. Especially since many of them just pay someone else (a person or a computer program) to do it for them. Which, in a way, is like yet another tax.