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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

As i mentioned on another thread[1], that's one of those American things that really don't make any sense after spending more than a few seconds about it. There is no legitimate excuse for things to be this bad. The best I've heard is that paying taxes being hard is good because it reminds you how much money you give the government, so you are more attentive how it's spent, but it doesn't really make sense either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30842175

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> paying taxes being hard is good because it reminds you how much money you give the government

Wouldn't it be the opposite? Having a complicated tax system makes it harder to find out how much you're paying. If things were simpler it would be much more apparent.

As a counter-example, sales taxes (and VATs) are very simple, yet almost nobody knows how much they’re paying.

In Europe VAT is a line item on every invoice. And apparently in the US you have to do some mental gymnastics to manually add sales tax to the listed price to figure out how much to pay in the first place.

Of course most people have no idea how much VAT they pay for Amazon purchases in a year, but that's mostly a product of them not knowing how much they spend on Amazon in a year. If they know the latter, the former is trivial to figure out.

> apparently in the US you have to do some mental gymnastics to manually add sales tax to the listed price to figure out how much to pay in the first place

FWIW, usually in the US it's just a line item on the receipt or checkout screen.

FYI, in the US, depending on the jurisdiction, some items are exempt from sales tax. E.g. necessities like food and clothing. In my jurisdiction, clothing is taxed by the county but not by the state.

Which is a long way of saying that even if you knew the total you spent at Amazon, you wouldn't be able to derive the total amount of sales tax paid.

In the US, it's still a line item on your receipt. Most places don't include sales tax on the shelf tag or price sticker due to complexity. You can have state, county/area, and/or city taxes that apply. In NYC, for instance, we have a 4% NY State sales tax, a 4.5% NYC sales tax, and a 0.375% NYC metro area sales tax, totaling 8.875%. Clothes aren't taxed in the metro area sales tax so are 8.5% unless they're under $110 and then they're exempt. Most food is exempt except prepared food. Then there's the issue of fractions of a cent as the sales tax is calculated on the total bill not each item individually. There's also the fact that taxes change now and then... they adjust what food it applies to or what the cutoff is for clothes, etc. Some organizations have a sales tax exemption certificate (if they are a business planning to resell for instance) and that must also be taken into account.

Due to complexity, all larger stores with multiple geographic locations would never have separate pricing signage for every single store, so they don't. Other stores do the same. It's all calculated at the register as things are scanned in the computer.

As has been said numerous times, this is a bullshit excuse. If the register is capable of calculating the taxes, an electronic price tag system ( which is the norm in all big chain stores in Western European countries, which have multiple geographic locations and have locale-specific prices) would too.

If you're referring to the digitally updated signage at the shelves (e-paper or otherwise), none of the stores I go to in NYC have that except Best Buy.

It may be weird for you when you visit, but, as we all grew up with it, it's just normal here.

As a non-American who's not self-employed or a business owner I get a monthly payslip with my gross pay and the tax deduction. I see that every month, I know exactly how much I pay the government. All my investments also have tax deducted by the provider as well, when applicable.

I never have to think about calculating or filing tax, but I always see it and know exactly how much it is.

This is also the case for most Americans, but we're still expected to file every year. For most people, it's verifying what the government already knows. Filing a 1040-EZ with no itemization should be unnecessary.

Nit. But the 1040-EZ form was discontinued. I don’t disagree with the basic point that simple taxes could be more automatic—though the reality is that simple taxes are pretty simple.

The exact amount doesn't matter for this, all that matters is that you vote against taxes. It is sufficient that you suspect you may owe some amount and realize that you are required to figure it out. If it's hard to figure out, that serves the purpose of those who want you to associate negative emotions with taxes so that you'll vote against taxes.

That sounds like an incentive to vote against complexity, not against taxes. Paying a larger amount doesn't make the calculation any harder to figure out, nor does paying a lesser amount make it easier.

It's pretty obvious if you do your own taxes, even without fully understanding the tax code. The last few lines include "Add up [lines]; this is the total you owe for the year: ____" and "Add up [lines]; this is how much you already paid: ____".

> The best I've heard is that paying taxes being hard is good because it reminds you how much money you give the government, so you are more attentive how it's spent

The argument I've heard is that so righteous indignation over the "staggeringly high" taxes "stolen from the hardworking American people" or whatever. This is one of the same arguments as to why sales taxes shouldn't be included in the shelf price of an item or service.

Except it doesn't work. People can be mad about taxes regardless of whether they're easy or hard to file. (Paying taxes is straightforward; the vast majority of us have it done for us from our paychecks every interval.) And where I live, public votes to raise the sales tax for various projects, often public transit, rarely if ever fail.

It seems to me just to be an excuse to not actually deal with our busted as hell tax collection system because that system benefits people who themselves have an excuse to rile people up about taxes.

I think there is room for a reasonable agreement which could result in a simplified filing system, without making it opaque. My modest proposal would be that each voter’s registration card (or equivalent voting voucher) be attached to a statement showing all the taxes they’ve paid since the last election, and where they went, along with some information on how many taxpayers there are, and the amount and percentage of income and payroll taxes paid by income decile.

I think this would provide the transparency that conservatives want, along with the simplicity that liberals want. My only concern is that the data would be fudged, like the social security “statements” are.

> The argument I've heard is that ...

> Except it doesn't work. People can be mad about taxes regardless of whether they're easy or hard to file.

"that can't possibly be a fair representation of that ideologue's position, there's huge gaps in the logic!"

look, positions way out on the fringes don't have to make coherent sense to the rest of us. PETA runs kill-shelters that euthanize millions of animals every year, sometimes multiples of other kill shelters. It makes sense to them, they have their own logic why that's good.

Making Americans hate every aspect of taxes - the amount, having to spend a couple quality hours with a tax program every year, getting sales tax rolled on top of advertised prices, everything - is the goal here. Just make taxes suck so that people hate them. Because then people will oppose taxation.

That's highly ineffective and ultimately pointless. I don't want income taxes to be abolished because I think taxation is wrong. I want them to be abolished because there are better taxes than income taxes cause dead weight losses in the economy and tell people to work less than they want.

Abolishing income tax because it is hard to file is quite absurd. You can have a flat percentage income tax and then you wouldn't have to file. Then you could implement an automatic deduction via tax credits ala Milton's negative income tax. For me that would be an acceptable compromise if my goal was simplifying taxes.

I've heard a slightly different version of that rational, which I think is more more plausible but cynical. Tax collection is deliberately painful to justify cutting IRS funding and passing tax cuts (mostly for the very wealthy). It doesn't really make a lot of sense rationally, but might be effective as a manipulation tactic.

Well if you work from an assumption that taxation is theft and gov't is an existential threat to liberty then it makes sense why filing for taxes is terrible.

By that very same logic living in a community without paying for public infrastructure is theft as well which would turn a lot of land owners (frozen property taxes) into thieves.

That is, in fact, Grover Norquist’s position.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...

Thank Grover Norquist for that. Arguably he has had far more effect on this than the pittance Intuit has spent buying politicians.

What did Grover Norquist do (not-American here)?

Grover Norquist wants to cut government spending. It's difficult to do that directly because people often like government services. Instead he suggests cutting taxes. This is easier to sell to the public because no one likes paying taxes. This will drive the government into debt, forcing spending cuts due to the risk of default. This plan is called "starving the beast".

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

For this plan to work, people have to really hate paying taxes. So, despite the fact that Norquist and his allies often talk about things like "reducing the burden on the taypayer", they have in fact acted to make paying taxes as unpleasant an experience as possible. This means deliberately underfunding the IRS and ensuring filing taxes is slow, complicated, and expensive.

He is also the architect of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which is endorsed by the vast majority of Republican politicians currently in office. The pledge prohibits them from supporting any legislation that would increase taxes on people or corporations. The idea of "starving the beast" has been endorsed in as many words by a number of politicians, including George W. Bush.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Taxpa...

Any time a Republican politician starts talking about reducing the deficit, know that they are lying. Over 95% of them have publicly signed a pledge meant to deliberately increase the deficit. This isn't a conspiracy theory. The plans are public.

This seems like an internet meme and a "just so" story that once you dig turns out not to be true (the "let's make it more complex" part).

Sources would be nice.

I don't have a source of him saying that's why he opposed return-free taxes. This article has links to the statements of his organization:

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...

His stated reasons are so fantastically stupid that I can't imagine them being legitimate. Return-free filing is the best tool we have to achieve his claimed goals of reducing the complexity and confusion of tax season. Can you think of an innocent explanation for his opposition?

> Grover Norquist wants to cut government spending. It's difficult to do that directly because people often like government services.

Reminds me of Grafton where the population didn't care about cutting government services and only cared about lower taxes. Liberals all over the country moved there and it ended with bear attacks because everyone was disposing their trash incorrectly and the only policeman in town had a broken down car.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...

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