To get a Refund Anticipation Loan (or RAL) you have to go to a really shady place. They're illegal now.
You can get a loan from most tax places, and the interest rates are typically quite high by the standards of middle class suburbanites, but if your income is only $20k you don't have a $1,500 "Oh Shit" fund, so when your car gets impounded*/breaks down/etc. your choices are pretty damn limited. You need the money now, or you'll lose your job and you're totally fucked. You need the loan and you don't really care much about the interest rate.
From the lenders point-of-view people who make $20k and have no "Oh Shit" budget are not anywhere near 100% reliable. If you make 10 $1,000 loans, and one guy doesn't pay you back, you have to charge 11.1% interestjust to make up for that one guy. And you still haven't paid the costs of administering the loan -- office space, staff paid/treated well enough to show up every day on time in fucking ties, etc. -- and if those are a couple hundred per loan you could lose money on a 40% interest rate even if 90% pay you back.
So yes, by the standards you are familiar with the rates charged by tax offices are ridiculous. OTOH, if some smart cookie could figure out a way to get poor people loans at Middle Class rates I'd nominate them for the Nobel Peace Prize.
*Impounded is the worst. You don't have $300 to pay the ticket, and you don't have $150 to pay the impound fees. So you scramble around for three days and now your impound fees are $500, because there's a parking fee, but the car's only worth a grand, etc.
Which is a lot of paperwork, and at the end of the paperwork you have a) royally pissed off your boss b) you are still on the hook for your half of the Social Security/Medicare taxes AND c) you still haven't had anything withheld for your Federal taxes.
Don't get me wrong. Getting reclassified is almost certainly the smartest option by far, but less screwed by the boss is still screwed by the boss.
$20k, with one kid, means you get all your withholding in the refund plus $2,954 Earned Income Credit and roughly $1,000 in Additional Child Tax Credit. Which means that their Federal taxes can easily be 20% of their annual income. So they just have it taken from their refund.
Most of them don't have computers with internet connections, which makes doing taxes very difficult. More importunately for them, they aren't very well educated, but they know they could easily fuck up their taxes and get in huge trouble; so paying a couple hundred bucks to ensure that 20% of their income actually arrives is a very good deal.
It would cost the American government money. And in the current set of political circumstances it's virtually impossible to get the government to spend government money on anything new (altho doubling down on old spending seems to be quite popular).
Many of those 32% are adult kids moved back home (who generally pay minimal rent), or have everyone on the lease.
Moreover, I just took the Schedule E class, and nobody talked about this. So I wouldn't worry that the IRS is gonna target roommates. Almost all of these would be break-even because the rent taken from the roommates is equal to the rent given the landlord.
Now if you own the House, then you should probably do a Schedule E.
Reread those statements. "Bend the cost curve" is jargon for reducing the double-digit increases we'd been experiencing every year. "Spend less on health care than if this bill doesn't pass" is also clearly a claim that costs would grow less under Obamacare.
If Obama was claiming it would reduce total costs deficit reduction would have been the headline, not "universal coverage."
Question: Have you heard of the Federal Republic of Germany? Are you aware that the biggest difference between their system and Obamacare is that their insurers are non-profit?
If a subsidized private insurance market that shields consumers from most costs, and includes a risk-mitigation system, can survive in Germany why not here?
1) Fiduciary duty in tax prep means filing the most advantageous legal return possible. If somebody hands me a 1099-MISC, then a return that does not include that is illegal. Period. They can go to some other tax office, refuse to hand over the form, and we'll all be happier that way.
2) I've never had a client who admitted making $350 and didn't get some paperwork. If you're being paid under the table you're being paid under the table, and you ain't gonna tell your tax guy about it.
It's kind of important in the tax prep field. I do not file returns I know are wrong. Period. I've filed returns that I'm pretty sure we're seriously bending the rules, but if a client hands me a piece of paper that legally required to be on a tax return he'll just have to live with me putting it on the damn tax return.
This exact scenario actually happened to me. Guy got out of prison, worked a couple days as a groundskeeper, and got a better job. So he had just under $400 on a 1099-MISC. Since it was on a 1099-MISC it was definitely reported to the IRS.
If I hadn't reported it, it probably wouldn't have resulted an audit. But that's because they don't bother with audits when they know they're right. What they do is program their computer to send you a letter (starting with a CP-2000) saying they think the return is wrong. Since he can't show them he didn't get paid for those two days a few months later he'd get a CP-22 informing him it was time to pay up. Now they wouldn't send the cops after him, but his next year's tax return would be reduced by whatever number was on the CP-22 plus interest.
Which would mean that, from his point of view, he paid me to do a simple thing right, and not only did I do that one thing wrong I got him in trouble with the law again.
Whether a retail tax place is a good deal really depends on two things:
1) How good you are at following instructions written in simplified legal English.
2) How much you're depending on these taxes to be exactly right.
1) is much harder for most Americans then you'd think. The phrasing is quite complex. You have to immediately pick up on whether a line is asking you to use Adjusted Gross Income or Modified Adjusted Gross Income, etc. As Engineers most Slashdotters could probably do it. OTOH, as Engineers, with absolutely no instruction in the field, many many Slashdotters would totally fuck it up and file a completely wrong return due to the Dunning-Krueger Effect. There is a reason the IRS insists everyone who works at a retail tax office take 15 hours of Continuing Education Credits after taking 150-200 hours in class instruction on the subject.
Now if you start from a form prepared by a retail tax place, and your life hasn't changed much (i.e.: having a kid changes your taxes completely, as does switching over to being a contractor from an employee), this will work fine even if you don;t know what you're doing.
I work for a major tax prep company, and we're upgrading this year. The big bosses finally got sick of paying two guys to come out of retirement every year because nobody else understands a DOS Codebase.
They've been trying to upgrade for about three years, but the program was never ready. Even today we'll have to switch over to the old DOS software for certain returns.
More importantly, new tax software costs money. The government is out of money, Obama refuses to let the Republicans fire half the staff, and the Republicans refuse to let Obama double the tax rate.
Since everybody hates the IRS when Obama/the GOP need $15 million for some really politically popular program they raid the IRS budget.
If you're self-employed, have investment income, or asset depreciation, you probably already do your taxes with a real CPA. If you aren't, you probably should.
Why? It's not hard. Depreciation is just that. Investment income is easily handled with the standard reporting.
Employment is hard. We pay a CPA to do the stuff for our 2 part time employees. But the taxes I just drop into Turbotax.
Depreciation may not be hard for you.
For damn near everyone else, including lots of people who think taxes are easy, remembering which category every-damn-thing falls into is virtually impossible. Remembering that MACRS replaced ACRS in '86, which means that a rental house that's been rented out sine 1984 could be on a 15, 35, or 45-year table (depending on what the taxpayer chose back then), etc. is just a fucking nightmare. Especially for personal vehicles used for business use. Sometimes you can deduct depreciation, other times your business use fell below 50% so you have to pay your old depreciation back and flip over to a completely new method (straight-line, IIRC).
I strongly suspect you think it's easy because your software is doing all the actual work, and all you had to do was tell it a) what you paid, and b) what kind of thing it was.
"Self-employed" in IRS-speak covers a whole fucking lot of people. If you get paid more then $400 from somebody who doesn't withhold Social Security and Medicare you're self-employed.
You are required to file a Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ with a 1040A. You can;t use the simpler (and, at tax places that charge by the form, cheaper) 1040A or 1040EZ.
I do taxes in a fairly poor neighborhood. Per capita income is in the $20k range. And I get a lot of people who have a side-gig that doesn't do withholding. If they only make $350 I can avoid the Schedule C by reporting it as "Other Income" on line 21 of a 1040, but I cant get that onto a 1040A or an EZ.
If you have a side-job that doesn't withhold you are legally required to report it as a business. That way Self-Employment taxes get calculated properly, and you get credit with Social Security administration. The only out is if you earned less then $400. Then you're exempt from Schedule SE.
Which means that if you make $500 helping a caterer do big banquets, or even if you work for a cheap-skate who does't like withholding, you've got a Schedule C. You have to have some records of whatever expenses you paid to do the job (this is pretty much the only way you can deduct commuting mileage), you have to put them on the form, the whole nine-goddamn yards.
Schedule D is less common, but not as rare as you'd think. It;s where you report stock sales, so any Slashdotter who lived the dream of a successful start-up has filed quite a few of these. Most of Mitt Romney's income is actually reported on a D, because he pays himself with stock from his company, which he holds for a long time, which allows him to take advantage of the very low long-term Capital Gains rate.
Schedule E is the rare one. It's only for landlords.
If you can find a politician saying costs would actually be reduced in toto I'll be stunned. They argued people like my Mom would see reduced costs, due to the Individual Mandate, guaranteed issue, and subsidies.
As for the free market, all free markets encourage short-term decision-making. The point of the free market is that millions seeking short term gain are more likely to be right then some planner ion the capital in a fancy suit. Moreover you;re demonstrating that you don;t understand the how the program works with this particular objection. Guaranteed issue and the mandate means everyone is on the marketplace. That means the person who gets the $3 million cancer treatment is on the marketplace. Her risk is going to be assumed by the system as a whole regardless of who pays the bill. All the risk-mitigation system does is ensure her insurance company does;t go bankrupt.
In other words, if you actually knew what you were talking about, you'd understand that this policy is the only thing that will keep small insurers from going bankrupt.
As for the sustainability, you have yet to mention a single problem with Obamacare sustainability that isn't present in numerous other countries. If the Canadians can survive since the Great Doctor's Strike of '62 it's fairly silly to argue Obamacare is doomed.
None of these things (particularly 1 and 2) prove Obamacare is (present tense) a disaster.
I consider it like a landslide. The disaster starts some time before people start dying and property starts getting buried. There is a point when disaster and the harm it causes is inevitable. I believe we are past that point for Obamacare now.
You are free to believe anything you want.
I intend to listen to the accountants in charge of monitoring government expenditures, who say flat-out Obamacare is controlling costs.
You've really got to stretch credibility to argue that a program that is perfectly sustainable during a massive recession will magically become unsustainable in the next decade.
It's "perfectly sustainable" in that a) large portions of the program have been deliberately delayed in implementation, and b) most of it which has been running, has done so for only the past year. Calling a system which hasn't quite fallen apart in its first year "perfectly sustainable" is an abuse of the English language.
So you admit that the actual numbers so far so absolutely zero signs of the disaster you predict, and that your conclusion is based entirely on your anticipation of future events?
Problem is you have demonstrated precisely zero knowledge of how health care economics works in the real world.
There are a number of dynamics which are ignored here. First, that the subsidies perfectly insulate from the cost of the insurance. Once you've chewed through the deductible of the insurance, you have no further reason to care about reducing the cost of your healthcare.
An interesting criticism. It would be significantly more persuasive if there following weren't true:
1) The alternative to Obamacare is employer-sponsored health plans that are significantly worse at giving consumers "skin in the game" then an Exchange policy.
2) This line of reasoning is precisely the opposite of what one observes when one looks at reality, rather then elegant economic theories. The UK has no version of cost-sharing, the Canadians have very little cost-sharing, and the US lots of cost-sharing. Yet the Brits have lower costs then the Canadians, who have lower costs then us. If you're going to counter with that ridiculous "but Americans are just more expensive to treat " argument I'll be forced to bring out the actual costs of US programs.
In healthcare the main driver of actual costs is always what Doctors tell their patients. People go to my employer (Home Depot) and pick the second-most expensive product all the time because they figure that';s the one they need, but at a Doctor's office they're going to either a) trust the Doctor's judgement and move heaven and earth (prior to Obamacare Spaghetti Charity dinners were the method chosen) to get the exact procedure he recommends. In a centralized system these costs can be contained by whomever is in charge. In a decentralized system they cannot be contained.
Medicaid provides similar insulation, but it has the cost control feature that health care can simply be withheld either directly or by various games such as delaying service or making the act of getting service more onerous.
Bullshit.
The cost control feature in Medicaid is that it's reimbursement rates are crap. It's hard to convince Doctors to care for Medicaid patients is that they read the fee schedule and said fuck that, not isn't that they read some asshole's Economics PhD's thesis on supply and demand in the health industry and concluded they had a moral duty to encourage people to get off Medicaid by refusing service.
As health care and health insurance costs continue to rise (since most people don't actually have incentive to consume less health care no matter how expensive it gets), then we get to the next dynamic, a strong incentive to dump more people
My Dad made an earnest attempt to explain how Animal Farm was a parable of the struggles between Stalinists and Trotskyists when I first read it, so if you;re in the "Reagan Greatest President who Ever Lived" School you really don't want me to take his word as gospel.
I've probably got a better handle on the era then most people who lived through it, because I'm not only a history major I also debate this shit extensively online. I've picked up a lot of info on Iran-Contra, the "Was it Reagan or Volcker" debate over the end of Stagflation, Carter proving an entirely morality-based policy increases immorality by an order of magnitude, etc.
Moreover you're ignoring my argument. I am not saying that Reagan was a bad guy, or that I won't understand what you mean intellectually if you tell me "so-and-so is the new Reagan," or "such-and-such-policy is the most Reaganesque" I'm saying it has zero emotional resonance for me. I get the logic, but logic alone ain't never changed a vote. If it did nobody would talk about Reagan, because he would have been unnecessary.
I really think Republicans would have much better luck with my generation if they realized that everything I know about Reagan is shit my dad said. My 8th birthday was a few months into Bush I's term, so I really truly have absolutely no memory of what Ronald Reagan actually did. I was in my early teens when Ken Burns the Civil War was on TV; so Buchanan, Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant are much more real to me then Ronald Reagan. Hell, add Jeff Davis to the list.
Are you speaking about the policy or the political implications? Because the policy is doing precisely what we wanted it to do. 1) almost everyone is covered; 2) cost increases in the system as a whole are no longer going up by double-digits each year, 3) there is no three because we weren't trying to do a third thing.
And my rebuttals are
1) There's still a lot of uninsured and Medicaid is reducing its actual benefits - I think within ten to twenty years, it will effectively cease to become health insurance for most of the US.
2) Cost still increases faster than wages and we need to remember that we're still in a period of an unusually poor economic recovery - worst since the end of the Second World War.
3) Who is paying for the subsidies and the additional people on Medicaid? The rich aren't that rich.
You've just changed your argument. None of these things (particularly 1 and 2) prove Obamacare is (present tense) a disaster. They're potential problems for the program long-term, but that's not unusual.
Present tense, the various sources of funding are clearly enough for the program, because the deficit is shrinking and Obamacare's lower cost is part of that. Medicaid is real insurance, and the rich are clearly able to afford their bit of the bill because they just keep getting richer.
You've really got to stretch credibility to argue that a program that is perfectly sustainable during a massive recession will magically become unsustainable in the next decade.
4) As to not having any ulterior motives for Obamacare, I think that's been disproven by now. One of the architects, Johnathan Gruber indicates that the so-called "Cadillac tax" is a stealthy way to eliminate tax deductions for health care benefits. And I suspect some people may have intended Obamacare as a means to introduce single payer. After all, a natural consequence of the program is to dump more people on Medicaid.
I don't think you understand what single-payer means. Some Medicaid is single-payer, but quite a bit of it isn't. Both Arkansas and Ohio have multi-payer Medicaid systems. The Stealth single-payer provision was supposed to be the public option, but Lieberman killed that.
As for the employer tax exclusion, you should note that a) everyone who seriously thinks about health policy thinks it's a dumb idea (righties because it's a huge market distortion they believe drives up demand for healthcare, while alienating consumers from it's true price; lefty for a whole host of reasons) and b) if Boehner had called up on Jan 1, 20909 with a plan that would pass with GOP permission that would reduce cost growth, and get us to 100% enrollment by doubling-down on the employer health system the major political problem would have been convincing Progressives to up their stealth-single-payer public option.
Politically we thought it would be a vote-winner by now, and it clearly isn't, but if you think that we would trade health care reform for 70 Senate seats and 2/3 of the House you don't understand us at all.
I agree. And I'm thankful every day that the US public isn't similarly suicidal.
Moreover if we can't use them for health reform, there's probably an extremely strong fiscal conservative streak in that 70 Senate seats and 290-odd House seats, which means we can;t spend on space either.
I don't have a problem with that. I don't think the point of government is to give us "nice things" that we could get for ourselves.
You're making that "could" word do a lot of work in this argument.
Which leaves me with a simple questions: Can you name single country which has actually had either a) universal health care, or b) a manned space program without the government footing the bill?
The sentence you quoted is a two-parter. The first part includes the phrase is about taxes. We could raise taxes, and pay for nice things. Yet your entire argument is focused entirely on the second bit. Seriously. I have heard no proposals for NASA expansions that are more expensive then $10 Billion a year. $10 Billion a year in taxes is 0.06% of GDP. If you think adding jacking up taxes by 0.06% of GDP would result in a significantly different economic outcome then the alternative you are fucking insane.
And even pretending you didn't ignore half my argument, your counter is incredibly weak. Interest on the US Debt is below inflation. Has been since 2010. This means the market would literally be paying us for the right to lend us the money we'd be using. Now if the market refuses to give us sub-inflation interest rates after we pass a few "nice things bills" (say $10 Billion for NASA, $20 Billion student loan debt relief, $20 Billion to shore up pension funds, maybe some tax cuts, etc.) we'd have a bunch of very nice things we didn't have before, and here's the key thing: Our fucking bank would be paying us to buy them.
You'd be a much more effective troll if you had basic reading comprehension skills.
For example, you accuse me of "deriding the opposition" in the original post, but I'll be damned if I can figure out which side you think I consider the "opposition."
Then you start on a one-party system. That might have made sense, if we were 12. But since we're adults, we know that many long-established Democracies have one-party government most of the time. The Canadian version of multi-party government does not actually have multiple parties in the government, because Canadian parties have never formed coalition governments.
The "wants money out of the pockets of the people" thing is equally silly. In this post I supported more space spending, even through deficit spending. And deficit spending does not come from the pockets of the people.
I do have to give you points for tiptoeing around Godwin's law by using the word "Fascist" instead of "Nazi." But the ad hominem is remarkably weak, there's no creativity involved, and you did;t bother to tailor the insult to either this conversation or it's target. For example, if I was to bother insulting you I'd have to go with "infantile moronic loon," or "guy who think's Luke's Bat'leth was the best thing on B5," but really you aren;t worth wasting a good insult on.
So overall this troll warrants one star. You have some promise, but you really need to start reading the other person's post before you can truly troll properly.
c) not particularly enamored with government spending on principle,
Wrong. They give lip service to it, but pork projects abound with th GOP. Especially if it feeds spending/defense etc in their home state.
Republicans are a lot less likely to propose spending, and when they do it is a lot smaller, then Democrats. This is true even if you factor in military spending (even relatively anti-military Democrats don't think we should fire half the Army, OTOH it's not hard to find a Republican claiming he wants to fire the entire Department of Education).
That does't mean Republicans oppose all spending increases all the time, in all circumstances, but it does mean that somebody proposing $5 Billion a year to create a new space shuttle is gonna have more trouble from a GOP Congress then a Democratic one.
Now if the President, and the Congress were the same party; and a) the low-taxes hawk, b) the deficit hawks, or c) both could be convinced to shut up for 10 goddamn years and let the government pay for nice things (note: in the 60s we had much higher taxes and much higher government spending due to 'Nam and LBJ's Great Society) we could do something about that.
"Pay for nice things"? You had your chance in 2009-2011. They paid for a health care train wreck and some faux Keynesian spending. They couldn't muster the political will for any sort of space-oriented funding.
Similarly, there's a really good chance you'll get another case of disappointment in 2017-2019 too from the other side of the US political system. If the US government weren't pure shit at spending money, you wouldn't have a problem with low taxes people or deficit hawks. But it is pure shit at spending money. That's the real reason you never get nice things.
Health care train wreck?
Are you speaking about the policy or the political implications? Because the policy is doing precisely what we wanted it to do. 1) almost everyone is covered; 2) cost increases in the system as a whole are no longer going up by double-digits each year, 3) there is no three because we weren't trying to do a third thing. You will note that all three of these things are objectively true. You can quibble about the magnitude of the success (and I'll agree to an extent: we clearly wanted Texans to get expanded Medicaid and they haven't), but you can't seriously argue that it isn't doing precisely what we wanted in policy terms.
Politically we thought it would be a vote-winner by now, and it clearly isn't, but if you think that we would trade health care reform for 70 Senate seats and 2/3 of the House you don't understand us at all. What good would 70 Senate seats do us if we can't use them to pass healthcare reform? Moreover if we can't use them for health reform, there's probably an extremely strong fiscal conservative streak in that 70 Senate seats and 290-odd House seats, which means we can;t spend on space either.
Slashdot Mirror
To get a Refund Anticipation Loan (or RAL) you have to go to a really shady place. They're illegal now.
You can get a loan from most tax places, and the interest rates are typically quite high by the standards of middle class suburbanites, but if your income is only $20k you don't have a $1,500 "Oh Shit" fund, so when your car gets impounded*/breaks down/etc. your choices are pretty damn limited. You need the money now, or you'll lose your job and you're totally fucked. You need the loan and you don't really care much about the interest rate.
From the lenders point-of-view people who make $20k and have no "Oh Shit" budget are not anywhere near 100% reliable. If you make 10 $1,000 loans, and one guy doesn't pay you back, you have to charge 11.1% interestjust to make up for that one guy. And you still haven't paid the costs of administering the loan -- office space, staff paid/treated well enough to show up every day on time in fucking ties, etc. -- and if those are a couple hundred per loan you could lose money on a 40% interest rate even if 90% pay you back.
So yes, by the standards you are familiar with the rates charged by tax offices are ridiculous. OTOH, if some smart cookie could figure out a way to get poor people loans at Middle Class rates I'd nominate them for the Nobel Peace Prize.
*Impounded is the worst. You don't have $300 to pay the ticket, and you don't have $150 to pay the impound fees. So you scramble around for three days and now your impound fees are $500, because there's a parking fee, but the car's only worth a grand, etc.
Which is a lot of paperwork, and at the end of the paperwork you have a) royally pissed off your boss b) you are still on the hook for your half of the Social Security/Medicare taxes AND c) you still haven't had anything withheld for your Federal taxes.
Don't get me wrong. Getting reclassified is almost certainly the smartest option by far, but less screwed by the boss is still screwed by the boss.
$20k, with one kid, means you get all your withholding in the refund plus $2,954 Earned Income Credit and roughly $1,000 in Additional Child Tax Credit. Which means that their Federal taxes can easily be 20% of their annual income. So they just have it taken from their refund.
Most of them don't have computers with internet connections, which makes doing taxes very difficult. More importunately for them, they aren't very well educated, but they know they could easily fuck up their taxes and get in huge trouble; so paying a couple hundred bucks to ensure that 20% of their income actually arrives is a very good deal.
But only for the American people.
It would cost the American government money. And in the current set of political circumstances it's virtually impossible to get the government to spend government money on anything new (altho doubling down on old spending seems to be quite popular).
Many of those 32% are adult kids moved back home (who generally pay minimal rent), or have everyone on the lease.
Moreover, I just took the Schedule E class, and nobody talked about this. So I wouldn't worry that the IRS is gonna target roommates. Almost all of these would be break-even because the rent taken from the roommates is equal to the rent given the landlord.
Now if you own the House, then you should probably do a Schedule E.
So it's more common then I thought, but still not very common.
Reread those statements. "Bend the cost curve" is jargon for reducing the double-digit increases we'd been experiencing every year. "Spend less on health care than if this bill doesn't pass" is also clearly a claim that costs would grow less under Obamacare.
If Obama was claiming it would reduce total costs deficit reduction would have been the headline, not "universal coverage."
Question:
Have you heard of the Federal Republic of Germany? Are you aware that the biggest difference between their system and Obamacare is that their insurers are non-profit?
If a subsidized private insurance market that shields consumers from most costs, and includes a risk-mitigation system, can survive in Germany why not here?
What about the Dutch?
Two points:
1) Fiduciary duty in tax prep means filing the most advantageous legal return possible. If somebody hands me a 1099-MISC, then a return that does not include that is illegal. Period. They can go to some other tax office, refuse to hand over the form, and we'll all be happier that way.
2) I've never had a client who admitted making $350 and didn't get some paperwork. If you're being paid under the table you're being paid under the table, and you ain't gonna tell your tax guy about it.
Have you ever heard of ethics?
It's kind of important in the tax prep field. I do not file returns I know are wrong. Period. I've filed returns that I'm pretty sure we're seriously bending the rules, but if a client hands me a piece of paper that legally required to be on a tax return he'll just have to live with me putting it on the damn tax return.
This exact scenario actually happened to me. Guy got out of prison, worked a couple days as a groundskeeper, and got a better job. So he had just under $400 on a 1099-MISC. Since it was on a 1099-MISC it was definitely reported to the IRS.
If I hadn't reported it, it probably wouldn't have resulted an audit. But that's because they don't bother with audits when they know they're right. What they do is program their computer to send you a letter (starting with a CP-2000) saying they think the return is wrong. Since he can't show them he didn't get paid for those two days a few months later he'd get a CP-22 informing him it was time to pay up. Now they wouldn't send the cops after him, but his next year's tax return would be reduced by whatever number was on the CP-22 plus interest.
Which would mean that, from his point of view, he paid me to do a simple thing right, and not only did I do that one thing wrong I got him in trouble with the law again.
Whether a retail tax place is a good deal really depends on two things:
1) How good you are at following instructions written in simplified legal English.
2) How much you're depending on these taxes to be exactly right.
1) is much harder for most Americans then you'd think. The phrasing is quite complex. You have to immediately pick up on whether a line is asking you to use Adjusted Gross Income or Modified Adjusted Gross Income, etc. As Engineers most Slashdotters could probably do it. OTOH, as Engineers, with absolutely no instruction in the field, many many Slashdotters would totally fuck it up and file a completely wrong return due to the Dunning-Krueger Effect. There is a reason the IRS insists everyone who works at a retail tax office take 15 hours of Continuing Education Credits after taking 150-200 hours in class instruction on the subject.
Now if you start from a form prepared by a retail tax place, and your life hasn't changed much (i.e.: having a kid changes your taxes completely, as does switching over to being a contractor from an employee), this will work fine even if you don;t know what you're doing.
It is incredibly fucking complex.
I work for a major tax prep company, and we're upgrading this year. The big bosses finally got sick of paying two guys to come out of retirement every year because nobody else understands a DOS Codebase.
They've been trying to upgrade for about three years, but the program was never ready. Even today we'll have to switch over to the old DOS software for certain returns.
More importantly, new tax software costs money. The government is out of money, Obama refuses to let the Republicans fire half the staff, and the Republicans refuse to let Obama double the tax rate.
Since everybody hates the IRS when Obama/the GOP need $15 million for some really politically popular program they raid the IRS budget.
If you're self-employed, have investment income, or asset depreciation, you probably already do your taxes with a real CPA. If you aren't, you probably should.
Why? It's not hard. Depreciation is just that. Investment income is easily handled with the standard reporting.
Employment is hard. We pay a CPA to do the stuff for our 2 part time employees. But the taxes I just drop into Turbotax.
Depreciation may not be hard for you.
For damn near everyone else, including lots of people who think taxes are easy, remembering which category every-damn-thing falls into is virtually impossible. Remembering that MACRS replaced ACRS in '86, which means that a rental house that's been rented out sine 1984 could be on a 15, 35, or 45-year table (depending on what the taxpayer chose back then), etc. is just a fucking nightmare. Especially for personal vehicles used for business use. Sometimes you can deduct depreciation, other times your business use fell below 50% so you have to pay your old depreciation back and flip over to a completely new method (straight-line, IIRC).
I strongly suspect you think it's easy because your software is doing all the actual work, and all you had to do was tell it a) what you paid, and b) what kind of thing it was.
"Self-employed" in IRS-speak covers a whole fucking lot of people. If you get paid more then $400 from somebody who doesn't withhold Social Security and Medicare you're self-employed.
You are required to file a Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ with a 1040A. You can;t use the simpler (and, at tax places that charge by the form, cheaper) 1040A or 1040EZ.
I do taxes in a fairly poor neighborhood. Per capita income is in the $20k range. And I get a lot of people who have a side-gig that doesn't do withholding. If they only make $350 I can avoid the Schedule C by reporting it as "Other Income" on line 21 of a 1040, but I cant get that onto a 1040A or an EZ.
If you have a side-job that doesn't withhold you are legally required to report it as a business. That way Self-Employment taxes get calculated properly, and you get credit with Social Security administration. The only out is if you earned less then $400. Then you're exempt from Schedule SE.
Which means that if you make $500 helping a caterer do big banquets, or even if you work for a cheap-skate who does't like withholding, you've got a Schedule C. You have to have some records of whatever expenses you paid to do the job (this is pretty much the only way you can deduct commuting mileage), you have to put them on the form, the whole nine-goddamn yards.
Schedule D is less common, but not as rare as you'd think. It;s where you report stock sales, so any Slashdotter who lived the dream of a successful start-up has filed quite a few of these. Most of Mitt Romney's income is actually reported on a D, because he pays himself with stock from his company, which he holds for a long time, which allows him to take advantage of the very low long-term Capital Gains rate.
Schedule E is the rare one. It's only for landlords.
If you can find a politician saying costs would actually be reduced in toto I'll be stunned. They argued people like my Mom would see reduced costs, due to the Individual Mandate, guaranteed issue, and subsidies.
As for the free market, all free markets encourage short-term decision-making. The point of the free market is that millions seeking short term gain are more likely to be right then some planner ion the capital in a fancy suit. Moreover you;re demonstrating that you don;t understand the how the program works with this particular objection. Guaranteed issue and the mandate means everyone is on the marketplace. That means the person who gets the $3 million cancer treatment is on the marketplace. Her risk is going to be assumed by the system as a whole regardless of who pays the bill. All the risk-mitigation system does is ensure her insurance company does;t go bankrupt.
In other words, if you actually knew what you were talking about, you'd understand that this policy is the only thing that will keep small insurers from going bankrupt.
As for the sustainability, you have yet to mention a single problem with Obamacare sustainability that isn't present in numerous other countries. If the Canadians can survive since the Great Doctor's Strike of '62 it's fairly silly to argue Obamacare is doomed.
What's the fallacy?
That email is insecure, that faxes are secure, or that Ontario Doctor's offices still use faxes because it's illegal for them to use email?
None of these things (particularly 1 and 2) prove Obamacare is (present tense) a disaster.
I consider it like a landslide. The disaster starts some time before people start dying and property starts getting buried. There is a point when disaster and the harm it causes is inevitable. I believe we are past that point for Obamacare now.
You are free to believe anything you want.
I intend to listen to the accountants in charge of monitoring government expenditures, who say flat-out Obamacare is controlling costs.
You've really got to stretch credibility to argue that a program that is perfectly sustainable during a massive recession will magically become unsustainable in the next decade.
It's "perfectly sustainable" in that a) large portions of the program have been deliberately delayed in implementation, and b) most of it which has been running, has done so for only the past year. Calling a system which hasn't quite fallen apart in its first year "perfectly sustainable" is an abuse of the English language.
So you admit that the actual numbers so far so absolutely zero signs of the disaster you predict, and that your conclusion is based entirely on your anticipation of future events?
Problem is you have demonstrated precisely zero knowledge of how health care economics works in the real world.
There are a number of dynamics which are ignored here. First, that the subsidies perfectly insulate from the cost of the insurance. Once you've chewed through the deductible of the insurance, you have no further reason to care about reducing the cost of your healthcare.
An interesting criticism. It would be significantly more persuasive if there following weren't true:
1) The alternative to Obamacare is employer-sponsored health plans that are significantly worse at giving consumers "skin in the game" then an Exchange policy.
2) This line of reasoning is precisely the opposite of what one observes when one looks at reality, rather then elegant economic theories. The UK has no version of cost-sharing, the Canadians have very little cost-sharing, and the US lots of cost-sharing. Yet the Brits have lower costs then the Canadians, who have lower costs then us. If you're going to counter with that ridiculous "but Americans are just more expensive to treat " argument I'll be forced to bring out the actual costs of US programs.
In healthcare the main driver of actual costs is always what Doctors tell their patients. People go to my employer (Home Depot) and pick the second-most expensive product all the time because they figure that';s the one they need, but at a Doctor's office they're going to either a) trust the Doctor's judgement and move heaven and earth (prior to Obamacare Spaghetti Charity dinners were the method chosen) to get the exact procedure he recommends. In a centralized system these costs can be contained by whomever is in charge. In a decentralized system they cannot be contained.
Medicaid provides similar insulation, but it has the cost control feature that health care can simply be withheld either directly or by various games such as delaying service or making the act of getting service more onerous.
Bullshit.
The cost control feature in Medicaid is that it's reimbursement rates are crap. It's hard to convince Doctors to care for Medicaid patients is that they read the fee schedule and said fuck that, not isn't that they read some asshole's Economics PhD's thesis on supply and demand in the health industry and concluded they had a moral duty to encourage people to get off Medicaid by refusing service.
As health care and health insurance costs continue to rise (since most people don't actually have incentive to consume less health care no matter how expensive it gets), then we get to the next dynamic, a strong incentive to dump more people
My Dad made an earnest attempt to explain how Animal Farm was a parable of the struggles between Stalinists and Trotskyists when I first read it, so if you;re in the "Reagan Greatest President who Ever Lived" School you really don't want me to take his word as gospel.
I've probably got a better handle on the era then most people who lived through it, because I'm not only a history major I also debate this shit extensively online. I've picked up a lot of info on Iran-Contra, the "Was it Reagan or Volcker" debate over the end of Stagflation, Carter proving an entirely morality-based policy increases immorality by an order of magnitude, etc.
Moreover you're ignoring my argument. I am not saying that Reagan was a bad guy, or that I won't understand what you mean intellectually if you tell me "so-and-so is the new Reagan," or "such-and-such-policy is the most Reaganesque" I'm saying it has zero emotional resonance for me. I get the logic, but logic alone ain't never changed a vote. If it did nobody would talk about Reagan, because he would have been unnecessary.
I really think Republicans would have much better luck with my generation if they realized that everything I know about Reagan is shit my dad said. My 8th birthday was a few months into Bush I's term, so I really truly have absolutely no memory of what Ronald Reagan actually did. I was in my early teens when Ken Burns the Civil War was on TV; so Buchanan, Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant are much more real to me then Ronald Reagan. Hell, add Jeff Davis to the list.
Are you speaking about the policy or the political implications? Because the policy is doing precisely what we wanted it to do. 1) almost everyone is covered; 2) cost increases in the system as a whole are no longer going up by double-digits each year, 3) there is no three because we weren't trying to do a third thing.
And my rebuttals are
1) There's still a lot of uninsured and Medicaid is reducing its actual benefits - I think within ten to twenty years, it will effectively cease to become health insurance for most of the US.
2) Cost still increases faster than wages and we need to remember that we're still in a period of an unusually poor economic recovery - worst since the end of the Second World War.
3) Who is paying for the subsidies and the additional people on Medicaid? The rich aren't that rich.
You've just changed your argument. None of these things (particularly 1 and 2) prove Obamacare is (present tense) a disaster. They're potential problems for the program long-term, but that's not unusual.
Present tense, the various sources of funding are clearly enough for the program, because the deficit is shrinking and Obamacare's lower cost is part of that. Medicaid is real insurance, and the rich are clearly able to afford their bit of the bill because they just keep getting richer.
You've really got to stretch credibility to argue that a program that is perfectly sustainable during a massive recession will magically become unsustainable in the next decade.
4) As to not having any ulterior motives for Obamacare, I think that's been disproven by now. One of the architects, Johnathan Gruber indicates that the so-called "Cadillac tax" is a stealthy way to eliminate tax deductions for health care benefits. And I suspect some people may have intended Obamacare as a means to introduce single payer. After all, a natural consequence of the program is to dump more people on Medicaid.
I don't think you understand what single-payer means. Some Medicaid is single-payer, but quite a bit of it isn't. Both Arkansas and Ohio have multi-payer Medicaid systems. The Stealth single-payer provision was supposed to be the public option, but Lieberman killed that.
As for the employer tax exclusion, you should note that a) everyone who seriously thinks about health policy thinks it's a dumb idea (righties because it's a huge market distortion they believe drives up demand for healthcare, while alienating consumers from it's true price; lefty for a whole host of reasons) and b) if Boehner had called up on Jan 1, 20909 with a plan that would pass with GOP permission that would reduce cost growth, and get us to 100% enrollment by doubling-down on the employer health system the major political problem would have been convincing Progressives to up their stealth-single-payer public option.
Politically we thought it would be a vote-winner by now, and it clearly isn't, but if you think that we would trade health care reform for 70 Senate seats and 2/3 of the House you don't understand us at all.
I agree. And I'm thankful every day that the US public isn't similarly suicidal.
Moreover if we can't use them for health reform, there's probably an extremely strong fiscal conservative streak in that 70 Senate seats and 290-odd House seats, which means we can;t spend on space either.
I don't have a problem with that. I don't think the point of government is to give us "nice things" that we could get for ourselves.
You're making that "could" word do a lot of work in this argument.
Which leaves me with a simple questions:
Can you name single country which has actually had either a) universal health care, or b) a manned space program without the government footing the bill?
People like you are why this country sucks.
The sentence you quoted is a two-parter. The first part includes the phrase is about taxes. We could raise taxes, and pay for nice things. Yet your entire argument is focused entirely on the second bit. Seriously. I have heard no proposals for NASA expansions that are more expensive then $10 Billion a year. $10 Billion a year in taxes is 0.06% of GDP. If you think adding jacking up taxes by 0.06% of GDP would result in a significantly different economic outcome then the alternative you are fucking insane.
And even pretending you didn't ignore half my argument, your counter is incredibly weak. Interest on the US Debt is below inflation. Has been since 2010. This means the market would literally be paying us for the right to lend us the money we'd be using. Now if the market refuses to give us sub-inflation interest rates after we pass a few "nice things bills" (say $10 Billion for NASA, $20 Billion student loan debt relief, $20 Billion to shore up pension funds, maybe some tax cuts, etc.) we'd have a bunch of very nice things we didn't have before, and here's the key thing:
Our fucking bank would be paying us to buy them.
You'd be a much more effective troll if you had basic reading comprehension skills.
For example, you accuse me of "deriding the opposition" in the original post, but I'll be damned if I can figure out which side you think I consider the "opposition."
Then you start on a one-party system. That might have made sense, if we were 12. But since we're adults, we know that many long-established Democracies have one-party government most of the time. The Canadian version of multi-party government does not actually have multiple parties in the government, because Canadian parties have never formed coalition governments.
The "wants money out of the pockets of the people" thing is equally silly. In this post I supported more space spending, even through deficit spending. And deficit spending does not come from the pockets of the people.
I do have to give you points for tiptoeing around Godwin's law by using the word "Fascist" instead of "Nazi." But the ad hominem is remarkably weak, there's no creativity involved, and you did;t bother to tailor the insult to either this conversation or it's target. For example, if I was to bother insulting you I'd have to go with "infantile moronic loon," or "guy who think's Luke's Bat'leth was the best thing on B5," but really you aren;t worth wasting a good insult on.
So overall this troll warrants one star. You have some promise, but you really need to start reading the other person's post before you can truly troll properly.
c) not particularly enamored with government spending on principle,
Wrong. They give lip service to it, but pork projects abound with th GOP. Especially if it feeds spending/defense etc in their home state.
Republicans are a lot less likely to propose spending, and when they do it is a lot smaller, then Democrats. This is true even if you factor in military spending (even relatively anti-military Democrats don't think we should fire half the Army, OTOH it's not hard to find a Republican claiming he wants to fire the entire Department of Education).
That does't mean Republicans oppose all spending increases all the time, in all circumstances, but it does mean that somebody proposing $5 Billion a year to create a new space shuttle is gonna have more trouble from a GOP Congress then a Democratic one.
Now if the President, and the Congress were the same party; and a) the low-taxes hawk, b) the deficit hawks, or c) both could be convinced to shut up for 10 goddamn years and let the government pay for nice things (note: in the 60s we had much higher taxes and much higher government spending due to 'Nam and LBJ's Great Society) we could do something about that.
"Pay for nice things"? You had your chance in 2009-2011. They paid for a health care train wreck and some faux Keynesian spending. They couldn't muster the political will for any sort of space-oriented funding.
Similarly, there's a really good chance you'll get another case of disappointment in 2017-2019 too from the other side of the US political system. If the US government weren't pure shit at spending money, you wouldn't have a problem with low taxes people or deficit hawks. But it is pure shit at spending money. That's the real reason you never get nice things.
Health care train wreck?
Are you speaking about the policy or the political implications? Because the policy is doing precisely what we wanted it to do. 1) almost everyone is covered; 2) cost increases in the system as a whole are no longer going up by double-digits each year, 3) there is no three because we weren't trying to do a third thing. You will note that all three of these things are objectively true. You can quibble about the magnitude of the success (and I'll agree to an extent: we clearly wanted Texans to get expanded Medicaid and they haven't), but you can't seriously argue that it isn't doing precisely what we wanted in policy terms.
Politically we thought it would be a vote-winner by now, and it clearly isn't, but if you think that we would trade health care reform for 70 Senate seats and 2/3 of the House you don't understand us at all. What good would 70 Senate seats do us if we can't use them to pass healthcare reform? Moreover if we can't use them for health reform, there's probably an extremely strong fiscal conservative streak in that 70 Senate seats and 290-odd House seats, which means we can;t spend on space either.