Republicans hate government and simplifying taxes

Not that it is any surprise to anyone. 

For decades the GOP has pursued an anti-tax and anti-government strategy called Starve the Beast. Wikipedia writes that starving the beast is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending by cutting taxes, in order to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending. The term the beast, in this context, refers to the federal government and domestic programs, particularly social programs such as education, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Starving the Beast has created an endless festival of theft in the form of unpaid taxes that now amount to something in the neighborhood of $1 to $1.4 trillion/year.

Yes, that is about $1 to $1.4 trillion/year! 

Hundreds of billions went uncollected for years, dating back at least to 2001, when only about $295 billion went uncollected. We are talking real money here. Thieves love this kind of stuff. It's what makes America great again for crooks, Republicans and the tax prep industry. 

Republicans fostered this festival of thievery for years in part by limiting the IRS budget to collect unpaid taxes and in part by threatening to shut down the IRS entirely if it got too uppity about collecting taxes owed but not paid. The GOP hates the IRS with a white hot vengeance. One cannot starve the beast if the IRS keeps feeding it dollars to spend. 

Not only is the Republican Party pro-pollution, anti-abortion and anti-inconvenient truth, it is also pro-vast federal debt, pro-tyranny, pro-lies, pro-thieves and pro-thievery. The GOP, it's the party hardy party!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

Shockingly, Democrats in congress recently managed to pass a law. More shockingly, the new law includes $80 billion to be spent at least in part on increasing collection of unpaid taxes. As expected, the Republicans have ferociously singled out and attacked this spending. There is a tiny part of that $80 billion that the GOP really hates, tax simplification for average taxpayers. ProPublica writes:

TurboTax maker Intuit has long blocked efforts to create free online tax filing for all, but this sweeping domestic policy bill provides $15 million to investigate how the IRS could implement such a program.

The United States has made a small but significant move toward creating a public system to allow millions of Americans to file their taxes for free.

The sweeping domestic policy bill passed by the House and Senate last week mandates that the IRS study options to provide a free tax filing option for Americans. That study represents a threat to the for-profit tax prep industry dominated by TurboTax, a product of the Silicon Valley company Intuit. President Joe Biden said he plans to sign the bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, today, following the party-line vote in the House to approve it on Friday.

Unlike many developed countries, the U.S. does not offer free tax filing services for taxpayers, who instead pay billions of dollars every year to highly profitable private tax prep companies.

The industry has tried to block or subvert a government free tax filing system for decades. ProPublica has reported for years on how companies have sometimes even tricked customers into paying for services that they should have gotten for free. Those articles led to investigations by federal agencies and states as well as a barrage of consumer legal actions. The reporting was also cited by Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden, who was behind the new provision. The companies maintain they did nothing wrong.

As we detailed in our story on Intuit’s 20-year campaign to prevent a government-provided tax filing service, the so-called Free File program was flawed from the start. Supposedly available to 70% of taxpayers, it only reached between 2% and 3% in recent years. After ProPublica reported that Intuit and others were intentionally making it harder for taxpayers to find the program online, there was renewed focus on Free File, including numerous investigations. The company stopped including code on its Free File website that made it harder to find the free version. Eventually, both Intuit and H&R Block, by far the largest providers, pulled out.

See how hard the free markets work hard to make life better. Better for the elites who own all the stuff and the markets and the politicians. Arguably not better for us average mushrooms who are fed bullshit and kept in the dark. 

Parts of a transcript from an NPR broadcast in 2017 about doing taxes:

BEN CONTRERAS, New Zealander: I never thought about taxes when I lived in New Zealand. For most people, you don't really have to take any time out to take care of your taxes every year.

T.R. REID: Americans spend about six billion hours a year collecting the data and filling out the forms. We spend $10 billion to H&R Block and other preparers and, on top of that, $2 billion in tax preparation software, which still takes hours of work.

I was in the Netherlands on March 31, the day before their taxes are due. I was with an executive who makes $200,000 a year, two mortgages, a lot of investments. He'd have to fill out 12 forms in America. I said, Michael, how do you pay your taxes? He pops a beer. He goes online. The government's filled in every line. If the numbers look right, he clicks OK. It takes five minutes.

And, in Japan, you get a postcard from the IRS that says, we think you made this much. We withheld this much. We owe you a refund of that much. We will put it in your bank on April 1. It takes one minute, if you think the numbers are right. And I said to my friend Togo, you know, in America, people spend hours, days filling out these forms. And he said to me, why would anybody want to do that?

Q: Yeah, why would anybody want to do that?