this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Filing taxes in the US is a cruel and byzantine process. It's fucked that the government has the resources and really the infrastructure to know what people owe, and will go through with finding out from time to time to determine if people are cheating, but all but requires them to use a private service to figure out what they owe first.
If all your income is from wages (like most people) the IRS already knows what you made cause your employer had to file w2 forms and withhold taxes. You just have to fill out a bunch of forms and hope youre right! Sometimes they fuck over waiters and stuff cause they get a lot of tips and don't always claim their tips, which is just so shitty.
blame turbotax and their peers. we should have had an electronic filing system a decade ago. but special interests said naw, fuck that.
By design.
One of the purposes of the planned inefficiencies of state services, often the direct consequence of completely economically irrational private-public partnerships and offloading to private firms of public services who will bid for contracts to run state-constructed infastructure on the basis that they will minimize costs (inducing low wages, high turnover rates of workers and low efficiency, surprise suprise). The malignant genius of it is that the inefficiency of the effects of partial and shadow privatization of what should be public services turns people against them and pro privatization because they still perceive it as public.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in the case of tax systems, especially the US tax system, or the US postal service.
Neoliberalism reestablishes profitability by sefl-destructive cost-cutting.
That's a weird take indeed. In Belgium, and a lot of other countries, you file your income and file what you think is deductable drop your income as costs or benefits and then the government calculates what you owe. Last few years they had it all figured out and the only thing I had to do was check if the figure they had were correct and sign. Filing taxes took me less than 10 minutes. On the other hand, we are paying more taxes than most of the countries in the world.