1mo ago

Legalized bribery

183 comments

Wait sorry what? Non-USian here, bear with me.
What does "program" mean here? Why is this program necessary to file your taxes for free? Do you guys have PAY to file your taxes if you don't use/apply/qualify for that program?? Am I misunderstanding what it means to "file" taxes? It's been a while since I was this confused by a US thing.
- US tax code is (deliberately) complicated and unlike other countries, you need to manually fill out the forms with your financial data even though the government already knows it and what you owe (minus exemptions that the vast majority of citizens won't claim). This is because there is a major industry around tax preparation, and the big names (such as Intuit) have aggressively lobbied for decades to keep the process as complicated and inconvenient as possible so that people are forced to pay them to fill out their tax forms. This lobbying has also resulted in the legally mandated free filing options being buried and hard to find, with many people not even knowing they exist.
  Tax prep is a huge scam with many billions of dollars behind it. Weather providers are probably going to be next in the news, since they've been trying to kill the free government-run forecasts and force people onto their paid platforms for just as long.
  
  Free Tax USA is easy to use and free for federal, $15 for state. I used it last time. This time I filed for an extension because the IRS might be so gutted by October I won't even have to pay. And I owe a lot because I was a contractor for most of 2024.
  Normally I have no problem paying taxes but this time it's different.
  
  The existing paid weather and mapping services are not excited. Right now they just repackage days that's provided by the government for free, so while their customer base isn't as big as it would be without NOAA, NWS, and USGS data available to anyone, their expenses are super low.
  They'd need 1000x at many customers to cover the expense of gathering their own data.
  Instead, what they'll all end up doing is paying huge money to third party services (e.g.SpaceX), who have existing infrastructure that can be used to launch weather monitoring services and will end up being the only ones to benefit from this.
  
  Their argument is that the government releasing detailed weather data for free makes it impossible for commercial offerings to compete. So it's likely they'll either lobby to force the government services to stop providing anything other than the raw data (leaving weather companies to translate it into forecasts and useful visualizations), or to privatize the NOAA weather stations and satellites so they can sell the data for profit.
  
  Okay so the "paying" is for when you use third parties to "help" you file, yes? You don't pay the government for the privilege of being able to file, yes? So what does/did this Free File thing do?
  Taxes aren't easy in Germany either, I'm glad I have a husband who is level-headed enough to do them for us both because I'd always have a near mental breakdown when I tried. But it's always been obvious to me where and how to file without involving anyone I'd have to pay. Fuck.
  
  Personal filing is always free, the "free" in "free filing" refers to the prep part. It just means you fill out and submit your taxes yourself rather than paying a tax firm's accountants to do it for you. Calling it that makes it seem like the firms are part of the process rather than bloated parasites feeding off taxpayers. I wouldn't be surprised if the name was also a result of their influence.
  Their accountants can claim exemptions and rebates buried in the tax code that laymen wouldn't know exist - ones that they lobbied for to make their services more attractive. It makes them worthwhile for some households, but only because they're solving a problem they birthed and grew in the first place.
  
  IRS Direct File was just a free government-run alternative to the tax filing programs like TurboTax.
  You can still do your taxes by hand without the help of any software for free, but they've killed the website that fills out the forms automatically and the manual process is significantly more complicated.
  
  Free file is software that people use to file. As far as I'm aware, it's always been free to print out the forms and mail it all in.
  
  Why don't Americans vote for politicians who want to get rid of the "tax preparation industry?"
  Why don't more politicians mention it at all?
  Why has the working class been conditioned to squabble over bullshit while the ruling class robs them blind, again?
  I'm starting to think consumerism breeds stupidity.
  
  Turns out that when you do make that vote, the fucking Cheeto looking stupid fucker who takes bribes still wins. And I voted as hard as I could!
  
  Culture needs to change.
- Definition: A system of services, opportunities, or projects, usually designed to meet a social need.
  In this case, a digital service provided directly by the IRS, hence the name "Direct File." In contrast, filing by paper is still supported. Tax preparation businesses have been actively preventing the US filing process from being simplified, naturally because that's the reason they make money.
  
  So this Direct File thing is simply for filing your taxes online? Because we have a thing like that too (doesn't every "civilised" country?). And that's what they want to abolish? US lobbyists are something else, man.
  
  They want to be the middleman, so requirements for them to provide a free filing service are hidden and direct competition is in this case buried.

183 comments