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Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

It's not just that, anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist has outsized interest on the right and he gets republicans to sign a pledge to not raise taxes, and if they violate the pledge Norquist raises money and campaigns against them. The problem is, the pledge also requires signees also do not support legislation to make paying taxes easier.

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.

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It turns out that:

"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.

Where do you see that?

https://s3.amazonaws.com/atrfiles/files/files/Federal%20Pled...

EDIT: OK, found this

https://www.atr.org/taxpayer-advocates-issue-joint-free-file...

https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/ba148cd5babdda39...

https://s3.amazonaws.com/atrfiles/files/files/041111lt-wycoa...

Presumably in the "reduction or elimination of deductions and credits" - simplifying the tax code would require those kinds of changes.

>oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates

seems reasonable to me. otherwise you could "raise" taxes by eliminating deductions.

Seriously? That's the basis of saying that the anti-tax pledge prohibits IRS tax prep?

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.

Not the basis at all, just one example. Here's another good one that OP added at the end in an edit:

> 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...

Alright, those would have been better excerpts to cite.

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.

"> Never again would taxpayers have to worry about the IRS filling out a Form 1040 for them against their will."

Because this is an actual problem for some people?

> 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.

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.

What does it mean in that instance to provide a service that makes taxes easy to file for you? Intuit's entire business model is making paying taxes easier. Except you have to pay for it.

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?

I’d love to see the end of payroll deductions and to make annual taxes due the Monday before Election Day.

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.

Actually, the correct temporal link would not be with elections but with choices you make to use publicly funded roads, breathe clean air due to public funded regulations, etc.

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.

Very little of the federal budget goes to those things you listed. State budgets may vary.

Right. I'd love to see the end of Payroll deductions in addition to making it stupid-simple to file and pay. Let me visit a website and toss my bank account info in.

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.

Grover Norquist is on record saying that his anti-tax stance is to get rid of most if not all of government.

Starving the beast is a major policy aim.

A similar group of people are upset at the signs in California highlighting works projects done with the new Gas Tax money (SB 1) that's up for repeal in November. Their argument is that if people see the projects that are benefiting from that tax money, they'll be more in favor of keeping the tax.

The reasoning against many simplified tax filing proposals is that many of them reduce transparency and arguably raise taxes in an indirect sense because it makes it harder to file for deductions. I agree with that if you keep the current underlying tax system but just "simplify" filing.

While I suppose it depends on the proposal in question, the ones I've seen generally follow a "make the simple cases easier" rule: get the forms pre-filled with what's possible to prefill, verify what's filled in is correct, and if necessary, complete what's missing. If you need to file for deductions that such a system misses, it doesn't have to be any harder than it is now.

Think about how users interact with software and how often they adjust default settings. Any additional forms outside of the pre-filled forms will likely get ignored by a sizable amount of people. That's what I meant by an indirect tax hike.

It doesn't appear that the anti-debt pledge has any weight whatsoever since around January 2017.

Filing your own taxes is already trivial for the vast majority of people. The only reason people don’t fill out their own 1040-EZ is brainwashing that “taxes are hard”.

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