PLEASE PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP, REPUBLICAN PARTY AND GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS, ARREST OUR FATHERS FOR CHEATING ON OUR MOTHERS, BAN INFIDELITIES, AND ARREST HOME WRECKERS AND BUDDIES OF OUR FATHERS WHO CONVINCE OUR DADS TO CHEAT ON OUR MOMS! US DISABLED AMERICANS ARE USING UP SOCIAL SECURITY, SSI, MEDICAID, AND FOOD STAMPS BECAUSE THE HOME WRECKERS, OUR SEX WITCH AUNTEYS, FLIRTATIOUS COUSINS, AND FATHERS' BASEBALL BUDDIES ARE WANTING TO STEAL OUR FATHERS' FORTUNES FROM US WHILE TAX PAYERS PAY FOR US! US DISABLED AND OUR MOTHERS, FATHERS, SIBLINGS, NIECES, NEPHEWS, AND CHILDREN MIGHT GET KILLED BY PUERTO RICAN, DOMINICAN, CUBAN, AND ALL OTHER HOME WRECKERS, SO SEND THEIR IMMIGRANT FAMILIES BACK TO LATIN AMERICA!
"Pox Americana" – surprised I hadn't heard that before. But it's an accurate way to refer to the Trump administration.
In case you haven't heard: Tariffs Are Taxes. And Donald Trump just imposed the biggest tax hike in US history.
Disagreement over tariffs has opened the first tiny crack in the GOP Senate since Trump took office. Enough Republicans temporarily left the cult to keep Trump from imposing additional tariffs on Canada.
Though most Republicans on Capitol Hill are still going along with Trump's tax hike on consumers. Lawrence O'Donnell provides some history on Republicans and taxes.
Turbotax is blitzing Congress for the right to tax YOU
Every year, Americans spend billions on tax prep services, paying a heavily concentrated industry of giant, wildly profitable firms to send the IRS information it already has. Despite the fact that most other rich countries have a far more efficient process, many Americans believe that adopting this process here is either impossible, immoral, or both.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
That puts tax preparation in the same bucket as other forms of weird American exceptionalism — like the belief that we’re too untrustworthy to have universal healthcare, or that we’re so violent that we must all have assault rifles to protect ourselves from one another.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with how they do it in, say, the UK, here’s how it works: your employer submits all of your paystubs to the tax authorities; likewise the custodians of your pension and other people who send you money. The tax authority also knows about your major deductions, like your kids or other dependents.
The tax authority uses this information to fill in a tax return for you and they mail it to you. It’s simple and easy to understand. If they missed some information, or if your tax status has changed, or if you’ve got new deductions, you can amend this return — or throw it away and start over by yourself or with a tax professional.
For the vast majority of Britons, filing their tax returns takes a few minutes once a year, and it’s free. For the minority who don’t fit the standard form, the system works like it does in the US — you either tackle it alone, or do it with professional help.
The IRS could easily do the same thing. Even in a world where many of us are being “casualized” and have income coming in as independent contractors, the IRS knows about it, thanks to the 1099 form. Sure, the IRS might make mistakes, and if you’re worried about that, you can either manually review the precompleted return or pay someone to do it.
It’s a no-brainer, or it would be — if it wasn’t for decades of lobbying by the massively concentrated tax-prep industry — wildly profitable corporate giants like HR Block and Intuit, the parent company of Turbotax, who spent 20 years lobbying congress, spending millions to ensure that Americans would have to pay the Turbotax tax in order to pay their income tax.
The tax-prep industry couldn’t have done this on their own — their astroturf campaigns were joined by a grassroots of useful idiots, betwetters like Grover Norquist and his acolytes, who openly demand that tax preparation be as difficult and painful as possible, to drum up support for their campaign to “get the US government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
These extremists are joined by many independent tax-prep specialists, who are seemingly convinced that every taxpayer has 11 dependents, four different kinds of pension savings, and six all-cash side-hustles, two of them international. Some people do have complicated taxes — as a writer with income from all over the world, I’m one of them — but most people don’t.
The point of getting the IRS to send you pre-populated tax returns isn’t to deny you the opportunity to pay excellent, knowledgeable tax-prep specialists if you need them — it’s to spare most of us from the needless expense of paying Intuit and HR Block to perform the rote form-filling by which the rake in billions in profits.
In reality, the campaign to defund the IRS isn’t — and will never be — about helping “the little guy.” As Propublica’s IRS Files demonstrate, the defunded, shriveled IRS is a billionaire’s plaything, which is why America’s top 400 earners pay less tax than you do:
The commonsense utility of the IRS supplying you with prepopulated returns is so obvious that the tax-prep industry has had to really work to hold it at bay. The most successful scam was Freefile, a program cooked up by the tax-prep cartel that claimed it would provide free tax-prep to low-income Americans.
Freefile was a literal fraud: Intuit and its co-monopolists used a raft of deceptive “dark patterns” to trick people — students, veterans, retirees, and the poorest among us — into paying for services that they were entitled to use for free. Almost no one managed to find and use the Freefile offerings they’d hidden in a locked filing cabinet in a disused subbasement behind a sign reading “Beward Of the Leopard.”
This was so obviously crooked that the companies were eventually forced to give it up, but they weren’t done — their eye-watering, voluminous terms of service contained buried binding arbitration clauses that prohibited the people they ripped off from suing them:
Despite — or, more realistically, because of — the rising fury at the tax-prep industry’s years of unchecked corruption, Intuit has actually increased its lobbying spending this year: Open Secrets reports that in 2022, Intuit showered lawmakers with a record $3.5m:
Their target? The $15m that the Inflation Reduction Act allocated to the Treasury Department to explore free tax filing. Intuit’s line is that this would be “a waste of taxpayer money” and a “conflict of interest” — the same tired boomer nonsense that Norquist has been shoveling since the Reagan administration. Once again, the proposal isn’t to ban Intuit from offering tax prep services — it’s to create a public option that lets people freely choose to pay for tax prep if they think they need it. It’s a breathtaking act of paternalism to claim that we’re all sheeple, too stupid to spot the IRS’s greedy attacks on our pocketbooks.
Here’s a choice quote from Intuit: “Creating a government run tax preparation program would be a waste of taxpayer dollars and further disenfranchise low income taxpayers. A direct to IRS tax prep system is a multi-billion dollar solution looking for a problem.”
Unsaid: the tax prep industry rakes in billions of dollars from American taxpayers every single year. The $44.8m the cartel has spent lobbying against free filing since 1998 is a fantastic investment — for them. The dividends they reap from it come out of all of our pockets.
Another bargain? Hiring ex-government officials to work for Intuit, lobbying their former colleagues:
The neoliberal economists’ theory of regulatory capture is a kind of helpless nihilism, grounded in the Public Choice Theory doctrine that says that regulators will always be captured, so we should just get rid of regulators or make them as weak as possible, so they won’t become cordyceps-ridden puppets of the industries they oversee:
But capture isn’t inevitable. Sure, if you have a referee that’s weaker than the teams, you’ll never get a fair game — nevermind what happens when the ref either used to work for one of the teams or is sure of a cushy job with them when the season’s over. If you want a small government, you need small corporations — need to block the anticompetitive mergers and predatory conduct that lets companies grow so large that they can fit their regulators into the little change pocket in their blue-jeans.
Anyone who lived through witchhunts, torture and mass surveillance after 9/11 has good reason to want their government small enough to be accountable — but a doctrine of small governments and giant corporations is a plutocrat’s charter — a recipe for regulatory capture so grotesque it is indistinguishable from farce.
[Image ID: An ogrish, tophatted, cigar-chomping giant holds the US Capitol building aloft contemptuously, pinched between the thumb and forefinger of a white-gloved hand. He stands at a podium bearing the Turbotax checkmark logo, yanking a lever in the form of a golden dollar-sign. He stands before a IRS 1040 tax form.]
intuit, turbotax, irs, taxes, death and taxes, corruption, monopoly, freefile, grover norquist, regulatory capture,
You Won't Believe How Much Federal Stimulus Money Kanye West Took
The right-wing is full of hypocrites. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.
Read more here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...
Kanye West's Yeezy company received more than $2 million through the Paycheck Protection Program, the Small Business Administration disclosed on Monday. Yeezy, an LLC formed by the musician and clothing designer, received a loan between $2 million and $5 million, according to the SBA. The company disclosed that it saved 106 jobs because of the program, meant to help businesses struggling during the novel coronavirus pandemic."
The Young Turks
Jul 7, 2020
Republican Insiders: It's OVER For Trump
Republican insiders are not hopeful about the 2020 election. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.
Read more here: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics...
"Shooting rubber bullet grenades at protesting priests. Catastrophically botching the pandemic response, resulting in a public health and economic calamity. Tweeting “white power” memes. Ranting in front of empty arenas about how he navigated a “slippery ramp.” Being MIA while his Russian benefactors put out a hit on American soldiers in Afghanistan. The last 3 months have been a political dumpster fire for President Trump, and the flames have engulfed Republicans up and down the ballot. But while pockets of Republican resistance have roasted Dear Leader, elected officials in D.C. and their svengalis in the consultant class have remained steadfast."
The Young Turks
Jul 7, 2020
Tucker Carlson Attack BACKFIRES
Tucker Carlson is a right-wing hack. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.
Read more here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...
"WASHINGTON — Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., who lost both legs in a 2004 helicopter crash during the Iraq War, hit back at Fox News host Tucker Carlson by asking if he wanted to "walk a mile in my legs" after he suggested she and other Democratic leaders "hate America." "You're not supposed to criticize Tammy Duckworth in any way because she served in the military," Carlson said in the opening monologue of his Monday show. "Most people just ignore her. But when Duckworth does speak in public, you're reminded of what a deeply silly and unimpressive person she is." "These people actually hate America," he said, adding later in the show that Democratic leaders "despise this country."
The Young Turks
Jul 7, 2020
HORRIFIC Trump Family Stories in New Book From Niece Mary Trump
More unbelievable stories from Mary Trump's new book about the Trump family. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.
Read more here: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07...
“A new book by Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump describes the president as a person likely afflicted by multiple psychological disorders who is profoundly unsuited to be president. Mary Trump is the daughter of the president’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., an airline pilot who suffered from alcoholism and died of a heart attack at 42. She is a clinical psychologist who holds a Ph.D. from Adelphi University in New York.
The Young Turks
Jul 7, 2020
Trump: All Statues Matter! Vows To "Protect" A Religious Statue...That's In BRAZIL!
Trump vows to "protect" a statue of Jesus that IS NOT IN THE U.S.A. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.
Read more here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-c...
"President Donald Trump’s determination to preserve iconic statues and monuments is so profound and all-consuming that he’s apparently extending his policy abroad. In a round of new digital ads, the Trump re-elect asks people to support the president as he stands up to the angry mobs trying to tear down iconic memorials. In one specific ad, the endangered statue that the campaign spotlights happens to be the famous Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil."*
We just need a President to sign this stuff. ... Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become President of the United States.
Conservative strategist Grover Norquist, speaking to the American Conservative Union on February 11, 2012
From the Star: Shrinking government, not deficit, drives #Ford | #TOpoli
via thestar.com
For Mayor Rob Ford, no matter what he says, this painful budget exercise is not about slaying Toronto’s annual deficit.
Ford’s actions and words, to the public and those around him, are not those of a bean counter trying to solve a financial puzzle. While real, the hefty “structural deficit” is his ammunition, not his target.
The colourful gut-led ideologue is on a mission to…
