What, so now the government needs to track all my spending in order to figure out my tax rate? No, thank you.
Or like the Illinois progressive sales tax experiment of 1977? That's just plain silly¹.
¹ And admittedly not a real occurrence – look up The Pale King by David Foster Wallace.
Are they keeping track of whether I got married or divorced, or had a kid, or a death in the family, or a disability? Of whether I bought or sold a house, took out a HELOC, or started a home office, or installed solar panels?
Are they keeping track of whether I sold something for $5 on eBay, or of how much my sales tax was for groceries, even when I pay in cash? Do they have a file keeping track of my charitable contributions? If I'm a teacher who uses their own money to pay for classroom supplies, the IRS already knows this? They know whether the kids are at day care when I'm working? They know how much I spent on medical costs during the year? Whether I took a college class?
To the extent the IRS knows, I would consider that a bad thing.
There's clearly plenty of waste and poor spending in the federal budget, though there's wide-ranging disagreement on which parts are the wasteful ones.
Oh, and yea, I still quite enjoy tax-night when I get to sit down with my reciepts and 109x's and file, though I will say I always mail my state returns in to avoid the additional $20 fee for e-file.
I live in Sweden. Yeah, that country. Not only do we have a bank issued digital identity our revenue service has a online system for doing your taxes and it takes less than 10 minutes.
If you buy/sell stocks using ISK and have a mortgage all of that is manage for you. You just review the numbers and sign of on it (using your digital identity). Then you get your returns.
The US tax system is perplexing to me.
It's complicated because the variation of tax paying. It becomes bottom up rather than top down.
They stole your $40 every year and used it to lobby Congress.
Do you realize how absurd it is to justify having to pay a fee… just to give the government our money? It’s a weird argument to make especially when normalizing the whole TurboTax angle, a company that is not only the result of but a perpetuator of our broken system. Lobby to keep our system broken and inefficient to rake in money from taxpayers.
Not only should the process be free — no exceptions — but it should be painless too. And we have not checked either one of those boxes. And people will continue supporting TurboTax to inject their $40 right into the company’s lobbying budget.
It shocks me sometimes how little imagination for innovation some people have, especially as it relates to the government and the ways our institutions are ran. This is not the norm in many other countries around the world and neither should it be.
