The radical anti-tax groups are so anti-tax that they see making it easier to pay taxes as support for taxes. So they want it to be difficult to pay taxes to make it easier for them to argue against taxes entirely.
The system is broken in so many places trying to approach it with any rationality gives you a headache.
seems reasonable to me. otherwise you could "raise" taxes by eliminating deductions.
The number of deductions and credits is orthogonal to whether the IRS can save you the effort of collecting the information about what they think you owe.
> It’s no secret that the IRS and big spenders in Washington, D.C. want to socialize all tax preparation in America. The (ironically-named) IRS Office of Taxpayer Advocate has been pushing for IRS preparation of tax returns for years. There’s only one reason proponents want to do this—tax revenues. If the IRS invites a conflict of interest by adding “tax preparer” to its role as “tax collector,” it’s a near-certainty that everyone’s taxes will rise. In fact, higher tax revenues are a major selling point of mandatory IRS-prepared tax returns.
...
> More importantly, it directs the IRS that it “shall not compete with the private sector in providing these services to taxpayers, nor acquire, develop, or deploy enabling systems to duplicate or replace private tax preparation services.”
> Never again would taxpayers have to worry about the IRS filling out a Form 1040 for them against their will.
These are unserious people that shouldn't be anywhere near the halls of power.
https://www.atr.org/taxpayer-advocates-issue-joint-free-file...
The second quote is ridiculous -- it would mean the IRS shouldn't have a public facing free information site at all, that you should have to find someone else to tell you anything whatsoever about paying your taxes at all.
The third seems like a deliberate strawman -- all proposals would involve you needing to approve the IRS quote.
Unserious, indeed.
Because this is an actual problem for some people?
"I don't want government to operate effectively because to do so would ruin my ideological minarchism"
and
"I don't want government to operate effectively because I can profit from it operating less effectively"
are very friendly bedfellows indeed.
I don't know if getting rid of taxes entirely is really a goal for many of these people, but what you describe doesn't sound that unreasonable. Making paying taxes easier does sound like support for taxes, right? For example, if we didn't have payroll deduction, surely there would be more popular support for tax cuts.
How does that fit into their logic?
What happens if all the taxes are abolished and there is no need for that business? Will they start lobbying for more tax or lobbying against the final cut? Or lobbying for an income report system with the tax component stripped out, basically building what would have helped in the first place?
Doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t have taxes, but we’d have a tight temporal and psychological link between what we pay and the selections we make at the ballot box.
That's the temporal connection that needs to be made.
The idea that there is a whole host of politicians who want to increase taxes is ludicrous. No one campaigns on the basis of increasing taxes. Further, in most of the West, taxes have dropped dramatically over the past few decades. Most politicians campaign on (1) reducing taxes or (2) providing some benefits. The dishonest politicians campaigning on #2 are teh ones who claim you can increase benefits without increasing taxes (which is occasionally true but rarely). It's only the honest politicians campaigning on #2 who add that the benefit will indeed have to be paid for by higher taxes.
The politicians increasing taxes are the good guys because they're the only ones at least thinking about paying for benefits.
Practically it would never happen so it's difficult to argue for other than on ideological grounds. I think we as a society would find out that a huge amount of the population would simply be incapable of budgeting even quarterly tax payments. The enforcement costs would be immense.
Starving the beast is a major policy aim.
The powerful anti-tax group (which I support) is against this simplification problem. We believe making it simple would also make it simple to raise taxes and people will not realise how much money they are paying to the government. This reduces government's accountability in spending.
I think IRS must send us a bill each month and we must write a check to pay it. It is both simple and also people feel the pinch of paying taxes thus supporting measures to reduce taxes over time.
In other words you think people are too dumb to do the math, but yet are smart enough to make intelligent protests against taxes when they have to write a check?
Note: I don’t agree with the GP.
Let me rephrase my original sentence ". I do not want money taken away from people without they explicitly agreeing to it "
Just because you have to pay taxes anyways does not mean there should not be a formal consent in the form of a check.
1. There was any relation between how much we spent and what we pay in taxes. There isn't. In the U.S., so-called "fiscal conservatives" routinely give massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while simultaneously voting to increase spending in the largest discretionary spending category we have: the military—which currently represents 53.7% of our discretionary budget.
2. People currently had any idea what they were spending on taxes. In my experience, most people think the amount taken out of their paycheck is all federal taxes. They seemingly make no distinction between social security, 401k contributions, medicare, pre-tax benefits like health insurance, transportation benefits, FSA's, etc., local, state, or federal taxes. It's all just seen as "the government took money from me". It's amazing how many people legitimately think they're taxed over 50% (especially those that are in the 15-25% tax brackets).
> People currently had any idea what they were spending on taxes.
This is precisely the opposition to IRS doing your taxes for you. Imagine you receive a bill every month that shows the clearly what all these payments are and you have to write separate checks.
Taxes include all the things. Not just Federal income tax. It gets frustrating comparing tax rates to say - European nations - when they typically will be quoting all-in tax rates other than sales tax (VAT) - where the US number will almost invariably list only the federal income tax rate which tells not even half the story in many cases.
social security, medicare, medicaid, local income taxes, state income taxes, federal income taxes, real estate taxes, sales taxes.
Adding those taxes together equals your total tax load. I think more people are closer to 50% than you'd suspect. Programs like social security and medicare are re-distributive in nature and indistinguishable from taxes - they simply were marketed differently for political reasons. But lets call them what they are.
> 401k contributions, pre-tax benefits like health insurance, transportation benefits, FSA's, etc.,.
Agreed that those are not taxes - in fact somewhat the opposite!
Edit: formatting
I do think the distinction is relevant: The expected result is that you will get every dime you put into social security and medicare back. And then some. They're required savings accounts. Taxes spent on interstates, debt repayment, and the military, however, are truly expenses.