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0 pointseyelidlessness5y ago0 comments

> the good reason: some people are philosophically opposed to easy taxes - people should be painfully aware of the money they are giving to the government.

That’s only a good reason if you’re opposed to the actual programs and/or outcomes. If you favor those programs and outcomes, making people “painfully aware” of their cost almost certainly undermines them. Which...

> The bad reason: Lobbying by intuit and parties to prevent easy tax preparation. Their ROI on regulatory capture is very very good.

Tax prep companies certainly don’t have this kind of power, and only one of the parties has that platform. That’s who’s invested in making taxation feel painful. Not just in terms of awareness but in policy too.

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10 comments · 5 top-level

rayiner5y ago· 3 in thread

> That’s only a good reason if you’re opposed to the actual programs and/or outcomes. If you favor those programs and outcomes, making people “painfully aware” of their cost almost certainly undermines them.

Not at all. I support bigger government providing more services. I’d happily pay a lot more taxes. But I also support forcing people to grapple with the cost of government once a year. They should be making the informed decision to pay more or less taxes, not acquiescing to it merely because the government automatically takes their money and makes it so they never have to think about how much.

My brother in law, who is 20 and just starting to have to pay taxes, called my wife and I to complain. It’s an easy form for him to fill out, but he had to write a check because his employers didn’t withhold enough. I felt like it was an excellent learning experience.

Majromax5y ago

> But I also support forcing people to grapple with the cost of government once a year.

But that's one-sided: people do not have the same requirement to "grapple" with the benefits of government once a year. That feeds right into known cognitive biases, where we underweight small but steady effects and overweight concentrated effects.

If you had a "yearly day of reckoning" with your partner where you re-hashed every argument, fight, or disagreement from the previous year without commensurate attention to the benefits, I daresay it would not be good for your relationship.

Moreover, this approach doesn't even seem to be effective at instruction. In particular, many people don't seem to understand the difference between marginal and average tax rates (link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724773/), which is a precondition for understanding the system as a whole.

rayiner5y ago

> But that's one-sided: people do not have the same requirement to "grapple" with the benefits of government once a year.

Presumably you experience that every day. Moreover, politicians spend tons of time talking about those benefits.

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zerocrates5y ago

Having the government just send you a yearly "bill" showing your total taxes already withheld, calculated tax owed, and the balance, which you then start from to file extra deductions or whatever, seems more effective to me in that sense than the current system. The average user of TurboTax or whatever really only sees or pays attention to their refund/shortage number and not the actual amount of tax paid.

The current system feels more calibrated so that people have a negative association with the IRS, rather than being well-informed about how much they're paying.

m4635y ago· 2 in thread

> That’s only a good reason if you’re opposed to the actual programs and/or outcomes.

Your argument seems to be that if you pay more taxes, then you get good programs and services.

In a similar vein, you should give your kid lots of lunch money to take to school, because he would have a more nutritious lunch. :)

eyelidlessnessOP5y ago

My argument is that I would rather live in a society that benefits from the services afforded by my taxes than live in a society that overly scrutinizes them. I don’t much need for those services thank goodness (anymore, thank goodness), but I’m sure glad they exist for the people who do need them and I’m not about to start pinching those pennies at “time to fill out an annual form”. And I trust the judgment of “money well spent” from people with expertise and investment who share those values much more than random cranks who just see their own forms and complain.

m4635y ago

I understand your point, but I believe it should be "trust but verify". Checks and balances are a normal part of any stable structure of governance, and they should always be there.

One thing that confounds me is how do taxes tend to increase as a percentage (and will it only end because of mathematical limitations like the laffer curve?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

zentiggr5y ago

I think you need to catch up with the investigative reporting on just how hard Intuit has lobbied to limit free filing, and how entrenched the deal is in IRS leadership.

Matheus285y ago

>Tax prep companies certainly don’t have this kind of power, and only one of the parties has that platform. That’s who’s invested in making taxation feel painful. Not just in terms of awareness but in policy too.

You'd be surprised.

syshum5y ago

>>That’s only a good reason if you’re opposed to the actual programs and/or outcomes. If you favor those programs and outcomes

Most of the people that philosophically opposed to easy taxes, are philosophically opposed to taxes in general and by extension most of the programs the taxes fund.

I am one of those people, doubly so for income based taxation which IMO is unethical. I prefer a Henry George Style single tax system for public finance but that is beyond the scope of this thread

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