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Comment by votepaunchy | Hacker News Reader

And yet whenever we try to eliminate “loopholes”, there’s some group complaining vigorously to keep that complexity. The new tax law simplified taxes for most filers by increasing the standard deduction (by eliminating exemptions).

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I understand I must not be in the "most filers" camp. I still have to go through all the work to figure out if I should itemize or just take the standard deduction. The effort it takes me to do my taxes hasn't changed. I wonder how many people actually have a reduced effort vs how many save taxes?

How do you know the new tax law simplifies filing since it didn't apply to 2017?

It's pretty much guaranteed that fewer people will itemize this year.

Whoever told you that is a moron. The new tax changes go into effect for 2018. Fewer itemizers for 2017 taxes has nothing to do with the changes to the tax code.

I guess my statement as made is ambiguous, but I wouldn't have said "this year" if I meant 2017 taxes.

Ok. Granted fewer people will itemize in 2018. And so what? I don't think TT has a stranglehold on the industry because people worry about their itemizations. In other words, I don't expect TT to have fewer users and less revenue for 2018 returns. No one is going to say "the standard deduction makes sense for me...I no longer need turbo tax"

Well they should. If you don't even need to itemize you should just fill out the forms from the IRS. If you can do some simple addition and subtraction it's not difficult. Probably just as fast if not faster than being interviewed by your tax program.

If you use TurboTax every year it carries over a lot of information each time.

But why? I mean we're in a forum if tech nerds and people are seriously advocating filling out a form and doing calculations manually?

You're missing the feature where your information is carried over year to year and all the forms you get can be automatically parsed. "Doing your taxes" with current software can be as simple as uploading a few PDFs and clicking next a bunch of times.

You generally need to do the itemized calculations to see which one saves you more money. Thus, the result is kind of meaningless as you do the same work either way.

The only way to simplify taxes is to actually remove deductions.

There are really only a few things most people deduct - state taxes, property taxes, charity and mortgage interest. You have to enter your state taxes anyway. It's not that hard to enter the other three and see if you are below the standard deduction.

I (and probably the vast majority of people) don't have to do any calculations to know I'll have less than $24,000 in deductions because $24,000 is ridiculously high amount.

You can deduct state taxes which adds up. Really 24,000$ is easier to hit than you might think.

You can only deduct 10k of state taxes starting next year

Which I think is BS for numerous reasons. A few being, the income tax is not how the federal government was supposed nor should be funded. We need appropriated funds and taxes, not a slush bucket that ebbs and flows. Also, states that want to use income taxes to take care of their citizens ought to have priority and not penalize them. Encouraging subunits to be responsible for their needs is a good thing. Decentralizing services is beneficial by design, even if not as efficient. The US is huge and the needs of the states are so diverse we should leave it to the states to address their own needs.

No it's really not, over 90% of Americans will claim the standard deduction this year: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanellis/2017/11/22/nine-in-te...

My deductions were usually only around ~$17,000 with pretty decent charitable contributions, I don't even have to think about if I'm going to itemized this year. I suspect I'm a pretty "average" itemizer.

The simplest tax code isn't necessarily the fairest.

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