Posted on 05/04/2014 5:03:51 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
It’s a couple of weeks too late for this to help most people this year, but I’m sure many of you ran into issues filing your taxes. It’s a huge pain in the backside, isn’t it? Over at Redstate, Matthew Clark dredges up a brilliant scheme from Ezra Klein which should make all of your lives easier.
Why not let the IRS do our taxes for us?
Liberal wunderkind Ezra Klein (formerly of the Washington Post and now of Vox.com) was pushing this new idea a few weeks ago.
Well it wasn’t really new. He’s been pushing it for years.
The idea is to let the IRS, which already has your income and other tax information reported to it, prepare your taxes for you. Klein promotes that it will save billions of dollars and millions of man-hours and “make the IRS your friend.” I mean who really likes doing their own taxes?
But it’s one of the absolute worst ideas I’ve ever heard.
Well, sure… the idea is bound to have a few critics, but not everyone would oppose it apparently. I don’t know if they still do this, but back in the 80′s I dated a girl who informed me that she had never filled out a tax return. Each year she simply filled in her name, date of birth, SSN and other personal bits on a blank 1040 and stuffed it in an envelope with her W-2. She then mailed it off to the IRS and had never had any problems with it. Now, I’m not sure if this was legal and her return was processed properly or she just hadn’t ever been caught, but she claimed to have gotten refund checks in the past, so I assumed it was possible.
Should you do it? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there might be a few people who could conceivably benefit from it. Young, single folks with one source of regular income who rent (rather than owning their home) and with no major outstanding debt or savings, could possibly get away with this and not lose much in the bargain. But I also agree with Matthew in that the IRS has the least possible incentive imaginable to put in any effort to ensure you get all of the deductions, etc. possible and pay the lowest bill. I mean, even if you implicitly trusted the government to begin with, this just sounds like a recipe for losing money.
What happens if you start a Tea Party or other conservative group?
I say flood them with paper returns. Flood them with phone calls. Make those assholes regret working for that criminal organization.
/johnny
Pine for it? The word is plan.
They’ve been working on this for years. Most of the time Congress has denied funding for their projects but they are inching closer every year.
Only works for the brain dead!!
The tax code is thousands of pages on how not to pay taxes.
They have had that program around for years. The real problem is that if it is instituted for everyone is if you are on the enemies list .....
- Obama only paid 20% and NYC (Commie) Mayor only paid 8.5%
- That is the most you should pay in income taxes
- “fairness” & “equality” and free $100,000,000 vacations in Afreaka right?
yeah, how's the saying go? to expect logic of the illogical means you are not logical... or something like that
100%!!!
I’m a seasonal, professional tax preparer of 10 years plus and an Enrolled Agent qualified to practice and represent taxpayers in civil matters in IRS disputes. There are areas in the tax code that are so confusing, so nuanced as to defy simple answers. When I prepare a return, I look for everything I can find to lower a client’s tax burden, this has been decided as a right by the US Supreme Court. When an IRS Employee (Lois Learner?) does a tax return, are they going to do the same? The ancient Romans had a saying - Qui bono! Look it up!
just think how many lawyers it'd put out of work...
why not simply goto a 10% flat tax and eliminate the IRS all together???
honest question: how do they do that in Russia?
This becomes a moot point if you simply eliminate corporate taxes altogether. (Ronald Reagan’s greatest non-implemented idea.)
No corporation actually pays taxes anyway - not if they want to stay in business. They simply either fabricate deductions or pass the taxes along to the consumer.
Those who lobby for higher corporate taxes are simply lobbying to have the prices they pay increased.
When I hear of people calling the IRS with a question & getting 10 different answers to the same question;this seems like a bit of a crapshoot.
How many of the big tax prep companies support Democrats? All of them?
I don’t know, but they, along with a lot of CPAs and attorneys have a vested interest in making the tax code as Machiavellian and arcane as possible.
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