motbob

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Battleships are pretty intimidating too. Still obsolete.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.