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Why the IRS Should Automatically Fill In Returns With What It Knows
theodp writes "An article in the NY Times begins, 'In the digital age, filing income tax returns should be a snap. Important data from employers and financial institutions has already been sent to government computers. Yet taxpayers are still required to perform the chore of preparing a return from scratch, in many cases paying a software company for the privilege.' Why, if your needs are simple, can't you just download forms pre-filled with whatever data the IRS has received about you, make any necessary adjustments, and automatically get the IRS calculation of your taxes? Sounds reasonable, but the IRS rejected the President's proposal to give taxpayers the option to do so as 'not feasible at this time' due to delays in the receipt of W-2 and 1099 data. However, California managed to offer a pre-filled state tax return, which cost only 34 cents to process compared to $2.59 to process a traditional paper return. Despite the success of the pilot, meager funds have been allotted for the program due to the strength of its political opponents — 'principally, Intuit' — according to the state controller. Intuit argues it would be a 'conflict of interest for government to be both tax collector and tax preparer.'"
Intuit would probably argue that it's a conflict of interest to be both a tax payer and tax preparer.
Whilst I don't live in Sweden (I'm in the UK), I have to ask quite what your point is?
The Swedes may pay more in taxes, but in return get free healthcare, good roads, low crime, free schooling and university, (i believe) free (or heavily subsidised) childcare, efficient public transport, and much more.
They're also very highly rated in terms of their low wealth disparity (road fines for example are based on a percentage of your annual income so that a rockstar in a ferrari feels the same sting in their speeding ticket as does a poor person in a skoda), and human development index.
I could go on. The key point is that nations all make decisions about their priorities - the US believes in waging war and keeping the poor unhealthy and uneducated, other nations do not.
tl;dr - high taxes are worth paying if you get good services in return. Think of Sweden as the 'Apple' of nations, versus the 'Windows Me' of the USA.
Which means that healthy people...
Yeah, because you just know you'll never get cancer or get hit by a car. Or maybe you've got some special ability to plan this not to happen right after you got laid off from a job?
...who don't drive much...
Taxes also pay for other pieces of infrastructure including bicycle paths and subsidies for public transport.
...and are long-ago graduates...
"Hey! I got my free cake courtesy of my parents' generation, now why should I pay for the next generation's free cake?!"
...with no children...
Ok, you may have a point here, were it not for a concept known as "solidarity" (look it up, the word is in practically every dictionary).
...pay to support people who want to freeload off the government.
Most people who are receiving more money than they're contributing tend to feel pretty bad about this but most of the time it's also not as easy as "oh well I guess I'll stop having cancer/being paralyzed/being unemployed and start paying more taxes!". The current swedish government did some amazing arithmetics prior to the last election and claimed over and over and over again that the reason unemployment was so high wasn't because there weren't enough jobs but because those who were unemployed simply weren't looking for jobs hard enough, naturally they ignored people pointing out that all available numbers showed that for every available job there were something like 4-5 unemployed people, kind of hard to get rid of unemployment just by "trying harder to get a job" under those circumstances...
/Mikael
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