You must log in or register to comment.
wait you guys have to pay to file taxes???
do they actually want you to evade taxes??
The tax system is so complicated, most people can’t handle navigating it on their own. Most people have jobs where taxes are automatically removed from pay checks and sent to both state and federal tax agencies. However, that amount is just an estimate and once a year (or quarter) you need to file paperwork to confirm whether you over or underpaid and then you either get a rebate (without interest), or you’ll need to send in a payment to make up the difference. That paperwork has been lobbied to remain as complicated as possible so that companies like Intuit can provide services that tax payers find useful and continue to pay for. This is more complicated for business owners, both big and small.
Well, in my opinion this will be a good platform for American progressives to run on: make taxes less complicated by getting rid of middle men.
This will absolutely 10000% never happen as long as lobbying exists in my opinion.
There is nothing wrong with lobbying…. There are lobbies for woman’s rights, black rights, all sorts of good causes have lobbies.
The politicians just bend over for corporate lobbies. Very important distinction. I think what would fit your argument better is will never happen as long as citizens United exists.
Any paid lobbying is bribery. Legislators should raise people’s opinion who voted them in and act as representative, not say what others pay them to say.
I can’t believe it is legal in so many countries. Apparently though it seems more problematic in the US but European countries aren’t immune either.
I mean someone has to pay the lobbiests. The National Organization for women pays lawyers to write laws for them to present to congress, through lobbiests who are also paid. You want feminist groups who are allowed to write feminist laws and present them to congress right? You want someone to advocate for laws you want right? That’s lobbying?
Citizens united is what you guys are thinking of. The one where corporations can donate infinite money to politicians? So when a corporate lobby brings anti-feminist legislation, they then contribute lots of money to the politician they are lobbying. And magically the politican ignores their voters and sides with the anti-feminist pro corporate law. That’s citizens united. It’s not a problem with lobbying. You have a problem with corporate lobbys not womans rights lobbys right? You have a problem with your representatives favoring corporate lobbys because they get infinite money throught… DRUM ROLL… Citizens united.
I really hope this helps.
When we were legalizing cannabis in Maine the local growers had to form a lobby to fight against the out of state corporate growers who also had a powerful lobby. Banning lobbying doesn’t help it just takes away peoples voices. Lobbying is just a group of people pooling resources to enact common legislation or political goals. It’s an important part of the political process people neglect. and it’s been diluted by money. Don’t need to dilute it further with misinformation.
There needs to be more citizen lobbying. What really needs to happen is citizens organizing, pooling their money, and hiring lobbyists, just like big corporations do.
A look at the Forbes Fortune500 should point out why that’s basically impossible.
Just looking at the top one, Walmart, not even considering anyone else on this list, their raw profit in 2024 after all expenses and payrolls and everything was
$15,511,000,000.00
Amazon in the #2 spot made almost double that. Remember this isn’t revenue, this is profit, this is extra money after all normal expenses are paid.
If I pulled together every single person I’ve ever met in my life, regardless of their opinion of me, and we all donated all the money we had ever made in our lives, we might approach a tenth of Walmart’s 2024 profits.
The wealth inequality gap in America is large enough that it is actually difficult to wrap your head around. The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars - to be exact, you’ll need 999 million more dollars to reach it after you have your first million in the bank. Fighting corporate money with citizens’ money is not only wasteful but impossible.
Now much of that money do they spend on lobbyists?
You and I will never know, but it could be up to that amount without even impacting daily activities.
Working within a corrupt system often serves to more deeply entrench that system.
No. You can file your taxes for free. And, if you ever pay to file your taxes, you’re not paying the government, you’re paying for tax preparation software or for a tax professional to do your taxes for you.
But! Even if your tax situation is very simple, filing your taxes on your own is difficult. In Europe, the government sends you a form with what they think you owe based on all the information they have on you. If you agree with the calculation, you just send the form back and either pay or receive a refund.
In the US your employer gives you some sheets of paper with some values on it. Your bank gives you some different forms. And so-on. When it’s tax time, you gather up all that paper, hope you have it all, try to remember what forms you need and if you have them, and then painstakingly try to copy the right values from the W-2, 1099-INT, and so on into the right boxes on form 1040, 1040 Schedule 1, 1040 Schedule 2, 1040 Schedule H, 1095-A, and so on. Then, you try to do the calculations where it says to multiply the value from 1040 row 43 by the correct value in table A9. A9 has different values depending on how many dependants you have, and if you’re filing jointly or alone.
Basically, it’s doable on your own, especially if you have a fairly standard / simple tax situation. But, it’s easy to make a mistake along the way. If you ever need an explanation about what you’re supposed to do, that information exists, but it’s in accountanteze, and it often refers to about 5 other IRS publications that just complicate things further. And, when you’re dealing with thousands of dollars, a mistake could be really costly. So, most people buy a copy of TurboTax every year for $30, which somehow turns into $60 by the time you’re actually ready to file because the $30 version only covers people in situation X, and since you have Y you need to upgrade.
TurboTax then takes $1 out of the $60 you paid them, and goes to Washington with that to lobby politicians to keep the tax code complicated so that people need to buy a new TurboTax every year. (Oh yeah, and things change just enough that every year you need to buy the latest software to file your taxes.)
In Europe, the government sends you a form with what they think you owe based on all the information they have on you. If you agree with the calculation, you just send the form back and either pay or receive a refund.
That’s not true everywhere in Europe
No? Where don’t they do that? Is what they have similar to the terrible US system?
I mean, yes, because if they catch you evading taxes then they get a free slave for the term of your incarceration. To them it’s a win-win.
oh shit yeah, theres that too.
beacon of democracy.
Yeah I figured the Canadian system we have was as bad as the US’s but apparently not. Having to pay to file is wild
No they just want us to do our part by both paying taxes to the government and paying corporations that pay the government. All makes sense in a tidy corporofascisit system.
Pay to file and get charged if we don’t pay the amount that the IRS knows that we owe.
They literally know how much we owe but make us pay a private company to calculate that number and then charge us if that private company didn’t help us get the right number.
So the private company offers more “protection” and “tax experts” they charge us more for and make their “calculator” a little less helpful every year so you feel like you need the “tax expert” AI chat to help you avoid a charge.
Capitalism is the most efficient system. CAPITALISM IS THE MOST EFFICIENT SYSTEM.
It’s technically free to file federal and the tax prep companies must offer this by law. But there are tons of loopholes to this to the point that many people pay to file even when they don’t have to.
State taxes are always charged if they need to be filed. It’s free in some states but not a lot and there is no requirement on most states for how much the tax prep software charges for that.
No, and no. It is typically more convenient to pay to file taxes though. These companies hand hold you through the process and often have some protection for you if you get audited.
That said, this still means the government needs to make things easier for everyone. You shouldn’t feel like you need help to just file a standard tax return if all you do is have a regular job, no investments, and no deductions. Which is something like half of the US.
Land of the fee™
Home of the slave.
for some perspective:
canada’s federal tax website lists all of the free services that you can utilize, and they even include NetFile so you don’t have to upload or submit any of your docuements.
i hear we’re looking for new provinces…
I’d vote to join a Canadian union if it ever shows up on my state’s ballot. It never will but I would. The South is a disgusting backwater of “divine” hatred.
i don’t want to sound like an old fuddy, but you sound just like some of your great-great-granparents :P
My great great grandparents didn’t live in America. There’s also the difference that I’d want to leave to escape a culture of greed, fascism and hatred while the Southern states wanted to secede to continue owning other human beings as livestock.
A million dollars is all it takes to buy whatever laws you want? That’s a really good deal for Intuit.
Remember all those (exactly) 1 million dollar “donations” all those CEOs were giving to Trump’s inaugural campaign? Those weren’t donations, they were bribes and kissing of the ring. Pledge loyalty (and pay a small fee) and the government will work for you.
Politicians are cheap, I remember once seeing a list of how much a lobbyist buys support from politicians for and the list was like $5k $2k $3k $6k. It’s ridiculous
That’s affordable. Maybe I’ll buy one
Now you need to save it for your tax filing fees
It’s much more complicated than that though. The lobbying firms hire people who are former politicians or former senior staffers who have all kinds of contacts all over Washington. Getting those guys on the payroll is extremely expensive.
Then, those lobbyists generally don’t just go off and bribe someone. They build and strengthen relationships. They know all the pain points that the politicians have, and they just make things easier. If a politician’s staffer is having trouble finding a good place to live in DC, the lobbyist knows a guy who knows a guy who can get them a great apartment.
Eventually, the lobbyist isn’t this guy who tries to get the politician to change some laws. He’s basically part of the team. So, when new legislation comes up, the whole team works on it together, including the lobbyist.
The end result is that the $5k or whatever is only the direct contribution to the politician’s re-election campaign or something. Most of the spending is hiring the lobbyist and paying all his/her various expenses that make them indispensable for the politician, so that they can step in at the right time.
They’re cheap because they fully believe in ideologies that screw everybody else. They’re not doing it for the cash but for their god.
Politicians get their jobs through an eagerness to bootlick capital.
That’s the number we get to see.
Fuck Intuit!
your political system is already based on legalized bribery and this is where you draw the line? lmao. Lobbying has destroyed america for a century.
This is from 1889. Literally nothing has changed. Go back 1000 years and it’s the same fucking shit. Even 3000 years ago in Egypt. It’s always rich vs everybody else just in different outfits.
Karl Marx
The Civil War in France
Written: July 1870 - May 1871Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions.
Here we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it.
I want another Teddy Roosevelt in office.
Fuck man even after trust busting, those companies were then and still are stupid big and powerful and maddeningly enriching to the 1%
At least we have shiny toys now built on the backs of global labor exploitation. That’s cool.
Amen
Legalized bribery is only bad when the other team is in office. When your team is bribed, it’s handy so they can run again in 4 years. Just don’t ask them to do any campaign promises that go against their donors.
What other team? A non shit country has like 10 parties that come and go regularly as time moves on.
Turbo tax made 1.6 BILLION in income. And that’s not enough. They need to lobby and change the landscape of the countries tax system to generate even more profit on top of the profit they already made.
This isn’t capitalism anymore this is something else entirely. It’s a metal disorder. A disease.
And this is just taxes. Capital also do this with our health, water, air, etc.
Intuit has been doing this for a long time, just in case anyone was wondering why $1 million seems like a low bribe. And it goes beyond preventing you from filing your taxes for free, with one of their goals being to make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible, so you are too frustrated to do it yourself.
This if from a 2019 Pro Publica article:
But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.
For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that, according to internal company and IRS documents and interviews with insiders. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.”
Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
Trump could have held the Saudis up for $50 billion on Inauguration Day 2016. Five minutes with the ambassador and he could have walked away with plenty of loot.
Yosemite Sam could have figured it out.
Some of this is about accepting bribes. A lot more is simply ideology.
Trump’s people do not believe the IRS should exist and they are trying to dismantle it. DirectFile is just low hanging fruit, intended to make people more frustrated with tax filing and more easy to radicalized in an attempt dismantle and replace with tariffs.
Like, this is a real decades long project that goes way beyond Trump. Abolishing the income tax was Goldwater’s wet dream.
I agree with you that the Project 2025 folks are important, but I’m talking about Trump in particular.
The shoes, the NFTs, and the crypto schemes are all about fleecing his own people.
There was a lottery where the top prize was dinner at the white House with POTUS. They ran it for months and there was never a single winner.
I think he really likes stealing from poor people. Either that or he’s too chicken to go toe to toe with someone who might hit back.
Add to that that Grover Norquist runs an organization called Americans for Tax Reform. GOP politicians all have to sign a pledge with them that they will never vote for a tax increase or for anything to make filing taxes easier.
Supposedly, this is because if taxes are easy to file, Americans won’t hate them enough and it makes it easier for the government to raise taxes. But, it’s awfully convenient that this is exactly what Intuit, H&R Block, etc. all want too.
Arab governments have been paying tributes for decades and hosting US troops all in exchange for the uncertain guarantee of not being turned into another Iraq or Libya. Any more extraction and the US risks them aligning with Russia or China instead. The mobs know that they shouldn’t bankrupt those who pay them protection money.
True, but $50 billion wouldn’t break the bank for the Saudis. Moreover, Trump’s recent actions show that he doesn’t really care about anything more than 15 minutes in the future.
The Saudis maintain a welfare state that’s the source for their legitimacy. They can’t tighten the belt on their citizens. It will break more than just the bank.
How many private airplanes and yachts do the princes have?
They could cut down to seventeen harems each and still have enough to pay off Trump.
It wouldn’t have to be a lump sum either.
Stock market manipulation or a similar scam would put the same amount in his pocket.
Aligning with China is looking cheaper by the day. It isn’t like Trump will be president for life, and even if, it isn’t like his dynasty will dominate US politics forever, and even if, it isn’t like the US will be mighty forever.
People keep talking about the American Empire falling.
Be careful what you wish for.
When the USSR fell there was a decade of genocide in Europe, followed by kleptocracy that makes the old KGB look sedate.
The US Navy has about a dozen nuclear aircraft carriers and three times as many nuclear subs.
The US used nukes and committed genocide even when it was rising, so doing so on the way out is characteristic. And no it doesn’t scare me, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.
I don’t you understand who actually controls the petrol-dollar.
Million dollar is practically nothing for this kind of company, they will net billions from this.
Even their corruption is incompetent.
Historically senators and representatives side with companies who’ve only given them thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in contributions. It’s very cheap to buy a vote.
Though often there’s also the understanding that a career spent supporting them will be rewarded with a cushy, high-paying lobbying job once they leave politics. Or paid speaking gigs if you’re the President.
deleted by creator
And if you’re in France, don’t use TurboTax, use the official government website that calculates everything for you reliably every year :o
With the nice simulator mode so you can run the numbers and see how much you need to budget for well beforehand.
deleted by creator
Unfortunately, the tool WealthSimple provides used to be called SimpleTax. It was made by a team in Vancouver and operated as donationware. You could file your taxes then choose however much you wanted to donate to them for the tool. They promised that they’d never sell your data, and never charge for the tool.
But… then they sold out to WealthSimple, who of course removed that promise to never sell your data.
I’ll stick to FreeTaxUsa even if they charge me. Fuck Intuit.
deleted by creator
Note: this plan may result in IRS mandated prison time from unpaid taxes
Decreasing the exemptions increases the amount of taxes withheld… For most people your advice as written just means letting the govt keep your tax refund every year.
Put every manager of TurboTax in prison as a traitor.
Or just put a cap on donations and block corporate donations?
I think people have to understand that we’ve entered a different era. The rich have gotten richer and become insanely powerful and “the game” has gone on for so long all the rules have been slightly bend to allow them to become more rich and powerful. If you continue to “be sensible” and ask if you may nibble around the edges, all you get is fascism. It’s inevitable. So first you have to destroy them and their power, then you can reform the system. Reforming the system now, even if you could, won’t do anything.
that would have been reasonable 20 years ago.
Crowdfund the airfare to El Salvador?
I honest to God can’t imagine how fucking cheap the price for them to make it so that people have to use their paid services… which will make them many, many times more than their bribe ever was.
It would be like if you paid me 1 dollar and I did something that would make you 200 or 300 dollars…
1 million to make filing taxes annoying af, well I’m not filing anything again
