Comment by techsupporter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by techsupporter | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

> 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 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.

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