motbob

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4 years agodiscuss

I shouldn't have called the home energy thing a "deduction." It is a credit. And in 2021, some amount of charitable contributions could be claimed on top of the standard deduction.

"This isn't hard" -- as illustrated by both my and your mistake, this is as far from the truth as could be. Everything related to taxes is absurdly hard, whether it's setting up the right tax prep system, the right level of complexity in the tax law, or simply the right return to file as a taxpayer. My overarching point here is that Congress made a certain value judgment as to one of these very hard problems—that a healthy industry dedicated to getting people's tax returns correct might be in the best interests of both the government and taxpayers—and this might not actually be the product of corruption.

4 years agodiscuss

Looking at other countries is unproductive, since their tax laws and tax credit systems are completely different.

For example, in the UK, I believe where a child is living is tracked through some centralized benefits system throughout the year. That hugely changes the calculus as to whether an automated tax return makes sense. If the U.S. had a similar sort of centralized system for tracking dependents or at least children, then an automated return would make a lot more sense, since claiming children/dependents is a huge part of getting the credits you deserve, and it would be great if it were possible to do that automatically. But it isn't.

I've already explained why I think automated returns are bad in the United States. If you disagree, make counterarguments based on how taxes work here, not in some other country with an entirely different system.

4 years agodiscuss

"Something like 80%+ of tax payers could have their 1040s automatically generated by the government[.] The proposal was just to have the government send these taxpayers a summary that they can accept or amend, the default being they wouldn't have to do anything at all to file their taxes."

Sure, that sounds good on paper. But here's a list of people who would be hurt by this system unless they were sophisticated enough to realize that they should revise their return:

  - Most people with a kid  
  - Most people supporting a relative  
  - Most people supporting someone who has no income and lives with them  
  - Most people who made charitable contributions in 2021  
  - Many people with a home energy deduction  
  - Most people who participated in post-secondary education  
  - Anyone in the gig economy

That's a big list, and it's far from complete. So it's not clear that your proposed "do people's taxes, leave it up to them whether to acquiesce or not" plan is good for consumers overall.

4 years agodiscuss

This pessimism is pretty popular, and it's just wrong. It's not about whether the U.S. government will "displace existing corporations." It's about whether a publicly funded and developed solution to a problem is clearly better than a private solution.

Should the U.S. have an official tax preparation system? That would sure save a lot of people a lot of money, but I'm personally grateful for the fact that a bunch of private companies have been spending a lot of dough trying to develop good online tax prep utilities. Self-service tax prep is in a much better place than it was 15 years ago because of the efforts of those private companies. And an official option for tax prep would undercut those efforts. (At this point, of course, it's high time for the IRS to create an official option, and they are moving towards that.)

Congress is aware of the above concern. The lawmaking "meta" since the Reagan years is to not undercut the normal operations of a competitive market unless there's a clear reason to. But sometimes there are clear reasons to. That's why we have things like FDA rules that tell companies what can or cannot be labeled as "peanut butter" or "milk chocolate." It's why we strictly regulate the radio spectrum. It's why we have healthy anti-trust, anti-cartel, and anti-foreign-bribery laws. Congress understands traditional examples of market failures and is very interested in fixing them. But the tax prep industry, for example, is not an example of a market failure, so Congress is not excited about getting involved.

Getting back to FedNow, creating a standardized payment system to be used throughout the financial industry is a prime example of fixing a market failure: the difficulty of coordination, and the obvious benefit of getting every bank onto the same payment system. So I am not especially pessimistic about the prospects of this system.

4 years agodiscuss

Battleships are pretty intimidating too. Still obsolete.

4 years agodiscuss

Amazon is buying land piecemeal, lot by lot—probably roughly at market value, then. I don't think it's really comparable to someone buying Sears because they think Sears's land holdings are undervalued.

At worst, they're exposing themselves to the whims of the commercial real estate market as a whole. Not like Sears, where the value of their holdings depended on a pretty niche market—the value of malls.

4 years agodiscuss

Yeah, once you get above a basic level of filter complexity, Vapoursynth/Avisynth become much easier to script. The problem is that it's hard to do the initial setup of *synth.

4 years agodiscuss

To be clear, there is currently no good alternative to this. The way I see it, the IRS can switch to an invasive "selfie + utility bill" system, or it can remove self-service from their website altogether. It's important to keep tax information secure in order to protect the elderly and disadvantaged. After all, the victims of ID theft in tax are primarily taxpayers who are not regularly filing returns (like elderly and zero-income folks), since two "competing" returns will quickly alert the IRS to a problem.

The legacy IRS identity protection measures are both cumbersome and insecure, so getting rid of the latter problem is a big improvement.

5 years agodiscuss

That's a great achievement. It also illustrates why these long bike races are run in stages. A multi-day race where riders can disregard stages will turn into a nightmarish competition of inhuman endurance.

In video game speedrunning, the communities surrounding >24 hour speedruns (e.g. Breath of the Wild 100%) have often set up rules allowing for breaks for runners to sleep. This prevents the speedrun from becoming a competition of who can sleep the least.

5 years agodiscuss

Not a good analogy, for two reasons. First, workers who don't have equity in a company don't really have a gun to their head even if the existence of the company is at risk. The real "gun to the head" is the threat of jail time. Second, it has historically been difficult to convince dozens of people to coordinate with each other and do something illegal for little to no personal gain.

5 years agodiscuss

If you look at nominal interest rates, yeah. Real interest rates haven't been particularly lower post-1980 than pre-1980. Sure, high interest rates pre-1980 built wealth passively, but periods of high inflation also destroyed wealth passively.

5 years agodiscuss

If the problem still exists, it's way less noticeable than it was in 2010.

5 years agodiscuss

I agree that removing public dislikes is a pretty bad idea, but it's not that important of a tool in fighting misleading videos. I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with misleading thumbnails/titles, and what stopped the glut was not dislikes, but rather Youtube's use of watch time as an important metric.

5 years agodiscuss

True. But I think progress over the years is a better metric for whether things are in a good place, policy-wise, than "some other country does things better." So I'm not grumpy about the state of the U.S.'s internet infrastructure, but I am grumpy about the state of the U.S. health care system (for example).

5 years agodiscuss

Well, if you are a simple family where everyone is biologically related and living together, then things are pretty simple in the end. The issues come up with mixed families, divorced parents, etc.

As for the dollar values, if you make $30,000 and have 2 kids, you can usually get a $6,000 tax credit or more. The U.S.'s support for working low-income families is carried out through the tax system. Put another way, tax credits are one of the U.S.'s most important social safety nets.

5 years agodiscuss

Maybe it's "bull pucky" to you, but I have vivid memories of my parents agonizing over taxes as a child. The agony they went through is much ameliorated now due to advances in technology.

And thank you for the link, but this news segment basically is big on opinion, low on specifics. Feel free to link me to a detailed article on how non-U.S. countries handle self-employment or dependent tax issues and whether/how those things are easier elsewhere.

5 years agodiscuss

I agree with the basic premise that the IRS is nothing to be afraid of if you make a simple mistake. Though if you make a $5,000 error (which is getting out of "simple mistake" territory), they'll tack on a 20% penalty.

That being said, audits are incredibly annoying if you didn't make a mistake, especially if children are involved. The Examinations department of the IRS is hard-headed, to say the least, and they will often make any excuse to deny you credits that you are actually entitled to. In order to get a fair hearing, you have to appeal the case to court. (The U.S. has made the appeal and court processes pretty doable even for taxpayers without an attorney, though.)

5 years agodiscuss

The IRS can simplify the process, sure. And if you are living alone, have no children, and don't care about taking advantage of any special credits or deductions, then a "file for me" button would be fine. (Though the process for those taxpayers is already in a good place--I filed my taxes for free in about 30 minutes this year.)

But if you, say, have children, the IRS will not be able to "file for you" in any meaningful sense. Whether you are allowed to claim dependents on tax returns is a complicated question that is highly fact-specific. Happily, the IRS does not have cameras in my house checking to see if my children are living with me. I have to report that information to the IRS myself.

Drive for Uber? Your taxes are also gonna be pretty complicated, and there's no way the IRS can do them for you. After all, they don't have any information on how many miles you drove for Uber and what other business expenses you might have had.

Right now, the system we have is pretty good. Most people qualify for free filing, and free-file tools get better every year. At worst, there is an issue of consumer education (psst, you might be able to find a better/cheaper tax filing option than Turbotax).

5 years agodiscuss

Fwiw, there have been instances of Google straight up not being able to restore deleted content. When you go to delete videos, you do get warnings that deletion cannot be undone. I wouldn't be surprised if Google didn't have great records of deleted content.

Maybe Google deleted this tiny channel, or maybe it was user error by Project Censored (the apparent organizers of the conference), or maybe it was a publicity stunt by Project Censored. All three possibilities seem about equally likely.

5 years agodiscuss

The most popular subtitling software has a script/plugin to export video, which can then be used in a motion tracking program, the data from which can be fed back into the subtitling program.