The Internal Revenue Service is moving ahead with a plan to build its own free tax filing program, known as Direct File, announcing Tuesday that a pilot version will be available to some taxpayers in 13 states next year.
Armed with an influx of new money approved by Democrats last year, the IRS is conducting a major overhaul of its operations – despite continued threats from Republicans to cut future funding and even abolish the agency altogether.
Eventually, the IRS tax filing system could serve as an alternative to private tax preparation companies like H&R Block and Intuit’s TurboTax.
This is great, but republicans are gonna hate it. They want everyone to hate taxes with a passion, so they make it difficult, time consuming and expensive to pay your taxes, and make government services as bad as possible so even poorer people who don’t pay much tax feel they get a bad deal out of taxation.
If ordinary people found it easy and convenient to pay taxes they might notice that they get more out of government than they put in and that rich people are bearing more of the cost than they are. If they thought that, they might support tax increases or things that horrify republicans like medicaid for all.
That’s not it. Only reason is lobbying by tax software companies that somehow (read using lots of money) convinced politicians that a government provided solution is bad idea.
It’s the same thing with your health-care and schools system.
That’s definitely also true, but republicans genuinely want everyone to hate taxation as well, so their interests very much align with the companies that want to fleece you.
Lots of countries have pay as you earn schemes where your income tax is deducted but your employer and sent to the government and you don’t have to even lift a finger, likewise the price on the item at the shop, by law, includes tax and it’s completely seamless for you. Republicans will never like such schemes because they want taxation to be hated by all so that they’ll go along with tax cuts that primarily benefit such folks.
Isn’t the W-4 supposed to allow for a pay as you earn situation? It just never works out right and you either give the government an zero interest loan for the year or you get a surprise bill. Seems like they could be more on top of that.
IIRC that’s what the income tax was supposed to be like … it wasn’t even supposed to be an “income tax”, it was supposed to be a tax on the employer side based on the amount of money they’re paying their employees. Somehow it ended up being that employees individually have to deal with the headaches and your actual take home salary isn’t obvious.
These people are too stupid to realize a person comes every week and takes away their garbage. They have soft, lizard brains. They have dudes that drive cars to and from work every day on government health insurance who with a straight face say they do not really on the government at all.
No they know this.
They just want to privatize it so a rich bastard can get more money.
Here’s a fun article and book about just that. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
Wow that was a good read.
Am I the only one paying quarterly for garbage service? It’s like $800 a year.
Free software like TaxHawk and FreetaxUSA popped up once TurboTax and HR Block started charging people. I get your point, but it doesn’t carry as much weight with the fre, easy software that’s out there.
That second paragraph doesn’t make sense to me. You are saying that “ordinary people” will notice that they benefit from the cost/return ratio compared to “rich people”, so they’ll get greedier?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for medicaid for all… but I don’t follow that logic at all
They’ll notice that they benefit from taxation so they’ll be happier with a higher tax economy and see that tax cuts hurt them more than help them.