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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

The fact that a tax-hater such as Grover Norquist opposes reforming the tax-filing procedures illustrates the complex dichotomy between giving government good responsibility without giving it dictatorship-like responsibility.

In Norquist's opinion, making taxes too easy to file will make citzenry too complacent about how they're being nickel-and-dimed and will lull them into not pursuing reform. OK, fair enough.

But what about a scenario in which for 30-50 million Americans file for their taxes by sending a SMS (as it's apparently done in Scandinavian countries)? And all the other taxpayers, they're wondering: "Why the f-ck can't my taxes be that easy??"

Isn't this scenario as likely to lead to overhaul of our complicated tax code?

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>But what about a scenario in which for 30-50 million Americans file for their taxes by sending a SMS (as it's apparently done in Scandinavian countries)? And all the other taxpayers, they're wondering: "Why the f-ck can't my taxes be that easy??"

That's why Grover Norquist and others are lobbying against this. If taxes weren't a hassle, their movements would lose an important emotional touchstone that fuels many people's aggravation against the government. Being able to tap into that frustration, in order to enrich themselves and their political donor class is very effective.

Exactly, instead of having a convenient -option- that could save many Americans time and money Norquist and people like him are forcing the rest of the country to use a less efficient method. In other words they are taking away people "freedoms" in order to force them to fight to get their "freedoms" back. Norquist is of course more than happy to provide helpful guidance on what freedoms should be fought for.

I would caution against making Grover Norquist the foundation of any inquiry.

The argument seems to be that Americans don't sufficiently resent paying taxes already because it's too efficient, so we have to make their lives even more inconvenient. The amount of complaining about taxes I hear on a day to day basis I think entirely discredits the premise of the argument.

How does your independent consultancy cram all of its income and expenditure items into an SMS?

Less snark version: the main cause of complicated tax code is needing to have rules about how much you can deduct for an expense when determining net income (for entities taxed by net rather than gross income, like corporations and independent contractors), not from special credits or varying rate schedules.

That problem, in turn, is amplified by the size of the taxes, which gives people an incentive to abuse whatever leeway is given by the deduction rules, forcing them to be more precise, leading tax experts to abuse the new language, and so on.

Btw, just did my taxes. Did you know that the cost of classes to change your career or improve earnings isn't deductible unless it's from an institution on an approved list?

> How does your independent consultancy cram all of its income and expenditure items into an SMS?

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough, so snark accepted...what I meant is that if there are Americans who are in the "SMS-and-done" category, then there is a group of Americans who are almost in that bracket. But because of our convoluted tax code, they are ultimately forced to use a third-party to deal with filing taxes.

In my imaginary unicorn world, this group of Americans would be the critical voting bloc toward either an overhaul of the tax code that makes tax filing simpler, if not SMS-simple. There will always be entities that need dedicated tax accountants...but tax reform is about reducing the overall number of entities

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