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Vintage 1960s Era Film Shows IRS Defending Its Use of Computers
coondoggie (973519) writes "It's impossible to imagine the Internal Revenue Service or most other number-crunching agencies or companies working without computers. But when the IRS went to computers — the Automatic Data Processing system --there was an uproar. The agency went so far as to produce a short film on the topic called Right On The Button, to convince the public computers were a good thing."
What was the uproar about actually? Were people afraid the computers would make mistakes and overcharge them or what?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
What else would the public be familiar with computers doing in the late 50's that would help them have context for this decision?
It seems to me that the computer was still an unknown entity to most people at the time.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
For those not interested in helping useless middle-man ad farms, here's the original source on the National Archives website (including the YouTube video):
How Computers Changed the Tax Game
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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People were afraid of being treated like numbers rather than human beings. It was a very different era.
They will go away in a few years.
If you're about to say they were correct, hold on a minute. Without the aide of computers, the tax laws wouldn't be this complicated. No human could ever interpret and correctly follow tax law as it sits right now. So all these computers caused it to grow completely insane and waste small business owner's time.
This was the era of excitement about supersonic flight, men flying into space on rockets, and so on. The fear was NOT about circuit boards and software (or vacuum tubes and relays and patch panels), but rather about POWER and CONTROL. People were worried about giving more power to the one part of the US government that, by DESIGN, considers itself above the Constitution and insists the people have no rights.
People were concerned that this would further de-humanize things and further encourage the government to think of the citizens as numbered parts in a machine rather than free people in charge of their government. If you are a free person, the government answers to you, but if the government assigns you a part number, you are just a gear in the machine.... the government that stamped a number on you is clearly your master. When Social Security was created, one of the things critics warned about wasd that the "account number" assigned to each person would, over time, become a citizen ID number that would be used to track people and control and regulate them. The critics were called loony, and the people pushing Social Security made it illegal for the numbers to be used for anything but Social Security (a typical fake big-government advocates like to use to pass bad policy). Years later, government removed the prohibition, justifying the action by pointing out the savings in money and bureaucracy if all of government could use the same unique number for citizen ID. Now, after decades, no American citizen can vote, bank, get a job, etc without having a "Social Security Number" (citizen ID number? part number?) and a person's entire life can be turned upside-down if somebody else starts using that number. The critics who predicted bad side effects of such a system and its assigned citizen numbers, as loud as they were, actually under-predicted what would happen.
This was also a further exposure of the basic lies that were used to create the IRS and the tax system in the first place. When the income tax was first instituted (as a temporary tax to fund a war) the politicians in Washington DC insisted that the tax would only apply to the rich and it would only take 1% of their income. By computerizing the IRS, the government was essentially admitting the lies and preparing to analyze, monitor, and tax the formerly-free people of the United States like never before. Back when the income tax began, people who warned that it would gradually evolve into a tax on everybody and it would inevitably rise to something really outrageous like 5% were denounced and ridiculed. As is so often the case, the politicians pushing thier big new policy were the real liars and the people who sounded like chicken little with their warnings about inevitable growth were in fact not only right but they actually underestimated how bad it would be. The income tax eventually went over 90% for the rich (who bought lobbyists and politicians and got lots of "loopholes" and never actually PAID those rates) and plenty of middle-class pay over 15% (THEY cannot afford to buy politicians to get their own "loopholes").
There's a pattern here for those who care to notice it. The people who keep warning about growing government control over individuals are more-often right than the meat puppets of the growing BigBusiness-BigGovernment enterprise who generally lie to get their way. In 1961, WWII (with Hitler's Germany and Imperial Japan) was fresh in the public memory and Nikita Khrushchev was threatening the west with his Soviet military, so Americans were much more worried about the down-side of big government's potential to number people, treat them as things, and then use them.
When one looks at the use of Offshoring, and Entitlements for Hedge Fund Mangers, Oil Companies, and Tax Havens. One is compelled to ask, "when is enough, enough?"
We all know we only have computers because of NASA and space. Although computers can be used to add and subtract vast reams of numbers, back then governments and corporations were too stupid to see this. Only though space exploration do we have the computers we have today. Charles Babbage? Konrad Zuse? All lies. There were no computers before about 1961.
Alan Turing 1941?
John von Neumann?
ENIAC 1948?
Anything?
No?
The amazing thing is that the IRS today is no more efficient then it was in the 1950s before any computerization.
Certainly in 2007 the Australian tax office's internal budget was AU$11.4 billion, or 1.23% of GDP. In 1955 it performed essentially the same task without automation for A£66.7 million which was 1.33% of the 1955 GDP. The difference is not statistically significant. (Normalizing by GDP (essentially the sum of everyone's earnings) accounts for the growing population and inflation.) US figures will show a similar effect.
The only effect of computerization has been to enable the rules and regulations that govern us to become an order of magnitude more complex.
See below for the sad details. http://berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html
Pretty sure the only reason we have computers is because they're so good at working out ballistic trajectories. Oh, and of course the Lorenz cypher.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Turns out I was due a two hundred dollar refund that year. The IRS had a check in my hand within a month for over three hundred dollars - even though the error was entirely mine, my money earned interest while in the government's coffers. Upon detecting my error, the IRS promptly corrected the situation in accordance with their rules.
A tiny, anecdotal example: but I have to say that the IRS is, on the whole, honest. What they do may (IMHO) be offensive, but the agency itself is merely an aspect of the current US Government. It is not inherently good or evil by itself. Closing caveat - this is a personal anecdote, your mileage may vary, past performance should not be taken as an indicator for future performance, etc.