The problem isn't people trying to influence the government to do the wrong thing. The problem is the government can so easily be convinced to do the wrong thing.
It's both.
If you tried to change the government to fix lobbying, every company would lobby against it. It wouldn't pass.
Also I don't really want to hear about how American citizens need to fix their government when they have no time for civic engagement. Independent polls show the US Govt has misaligned priorities to what the people want, and they often have a rock bottom approval rating.
Let's start by making voting days holidays, guarantee a livable minimum wage, guarantee time off like the rest of the sane world, let that marinade for a while, then let's criticize people for their lack of engagement.
Trending outrage seems to be the only way to move the needle at the moment so trying to undermine this article is also undermining progress.
I am pointing out the root of the problem is not TurboTax/Intuit but instead the government. Your comment is effectively the doing the same thing to my comment that I did to this article so I don't understand your criticism that I was "undermining progress". It isn't like "making voting days holidays, guarantee a livable minimum wage, guarantee time off like the rest of the sane world" is a much easier to accomplish political goal than "fix lobbying".
Fully agree with you that saying "This rent seeking entity with a will of its own and deep pockets to spend on lobbying, is solely a byproduct of a broken system and not also fundamentally culpable at this point for the continuation of that system". Governments and corporations are made of people who make a choice. If a company choses to profit off a bad thing the government wants to do, we can decry the industry as well.
At some point there was a complex tax code, and TurboTax et. al. didn't exist yet and were not to blame for it. At this point, they do exist and they must share in the blame.
My point was that this is something we all do. I have never met a single person who was always on the side of the greater good for every single political issue. I don't think voting or lobbying for your own interests is inherently immoral. If it is, basically all of democracy and capitalism is immoral.
No need to add grey space here.
To solve the problem, you can either liquidate all immoral people, or harden government against the desires of immoral people. Eliminating Intuit would just result in a new company picking up where they left off. Blaming and condemning Intuit is a no-op and a waste of time.
That's primarily because it would be unconstitutional to "fix" lobbying, at least they way detractors of the practice would likely consider adequate. It's right there in the First Amendment next to freedom of speech:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
But one thing it shows is that the American democratic process is supremely broken, because we don't seem to be able to punish our bad politicians who are accepting bribes. All you have to do is look at the average age and tenure of the senate compared to approval ratings and it tells it's own story.
My last point is that money is not speech, corporations are not people, and one person equals one vote. If you etched all that in legal framework you would totally still have lobbying, but I'd like to think it would help.
Most lobbying is boring stuff like proposed amendment drafting, outreach to Congressional and agency staff, highly targeted issue & message test polling, ...
are you saying you think people in power care about the people they rule over?
"Let's start by making voting days holidays"
if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow you to do it. they literally shot JFK, the elected president, almost 60 years ago. the idea that everything is not completely fucked at this point, is so incredibly naiive.
Are “they” in the room with you right now?
They don't have to disallow it, just make it difficult and inconvenient. The loud part is "election security". The quiet part is "voter suppression".
Like, why the hell do so many states only allow a SINGLE day to vote? I can understand not trusting the mail-in voting that Oregon and some other states do, but certainly we can all agree that letting the polls be open for multiple days with long hours would be a good thing, right?
> "Let's start by making voting days holidays"
I hate that there has been such a push for this. It's not going to increase turnout. It will not increase turnout from people that work emergency services, and will lower turnout for people that work customer-facing jobs like retail and restaurants. Just ask your cashier how easy it is for them to get Labor Day, Memorial Day, or Independence Day off of work. They will laugh in your face.
It's true that some employees would be hurt if Intuit went out of business, but paying someone doesn't magically make their behavior acceptable. You can't pay someone to harass people on the street and then say "sorry, I can't stop or my harasser will lose their income, the real villains here are the police for letting me do this."
Disagree. Nation-states, companies are entities with minds of their own.
Fascinating way to reframe this as a natural survival instinct of...checks notes... a corporate entity. An entity that exists at the government's pleasure, and whose charter can be revoked by said government.
Let's reframe your own logic:
> The real villains of this story are the politicians who TurtboTax/Intuit have successfully lobbied.
The politicians did nothing illegal by accepting the lobbying on behalf of TurboTax, after all. Under what rule or law would you punish them? Surely you can not fault politicians for earning money to continue to survive in politics, no?
You can go in circles with this kind of thinking.
Instead, we should look at outcomes. What do we want to happen with taxes? Ideally the government sends you pre-filled paperwork. Who is opposing this outcome? Intuit. Hence they are villians.
First off, I never said anything about a legal punishment. Secondly, politicians are ostensibly supposed to act for the good of their constituents. Corporations are motivated to act for the good of their shareholders. In this situation TurboTax/Intuit is operating as it is expected/supposed to act while the politicians are not.
> The corporations are ignoring something that is outside their responsibility.
Intuit is actively lobbying about tax preparation, ergo it is their responsibility, ergo they can be judged for their actions on it. In general you are correct, in the specifics here, you are incorrect.
Corporations may not be obliged to better society, but it is entirely reasonable for me to look upon them unfavorably when their management intentionally and knowingly takes actions that make life worse for most people.
It is very strange that you believe that an entity can engage with a government but then be absolved of all responsibility for the outcome of that engagement.
It doesn't matter that a certain choice is better for the corporation. It's still immoral for the corporation to harm people.
>Making the world worse so you can benefit is evil. It's evil when individuals do it, and it's evil when corporations do it.
You are simultaneously arguing against nuance in one comment and then for it in the next.
There is no need for the glib "checks notes" snark on a forum like this. I feel like it undermines the argument and makes the post come across as adversarial rather than constructive.
Current CEO has net worth of >$100 million. In fairness, the poorest board member of intuit has half a dozen positions earning $150,000 to $350,000 and _may_ not have accumulated true financial independence. But other board members have over $200 Million.
Those people make the following decision Every. Single. Year: “let’s try to get the government to make taxes far harder and riskier for hundreds of millions of Americans so that I can be even more rich than I already am.”
It would be more excusable if they merely hadn’t lobbied for Americans at all, someone else did, and they reacted quickly to additionally reap the benefits of the same policy.
But when you are already well past having all the money your family could ever need, and choose to try to get the government to fuck over hundreds of millions of people, then the blame lands on you just as much as the politician.
Of course, that is still a drop in the bucket compared to how many people suffer because of their lobbying, but it isn’t about simply one person being greedy for themselves.
If you're W2, and you have kids or 1099s the gov already knows about, there should be no need to file at all. State and local governments should tap into the federal feed, and there should also be no filing there. Any discrepancy that results in a bill or refund gets automatically sent out.
The amount of time wasted to do taxes, even a simple 1040EZ, is staggering. The fact that people with relatively simple tax situations are persuaded to use expensive filing services (H&R) or crappy software is criminal.
And when you go to an H&R Block office, you're talking with someone who doesn't really know taxes at all. They are just filling out forms like you might do yourself.
When my ex-wife and I had separated but were still legally married, she went to an H&R Block office and the tax preparer told her that she could file single. (No, you can't. It's married filing jointly or married filing separately.)
She also said our adult daughter didn't need to file at all because her income was below the filing threshold. (Yes, she did need to file because at the time she was on an ACA/Obamacare health plan.)
It's bad when I know more about taxes than the "expert" at H&R Block.
Survival instinct.