Eat shit, lobbying to make simple tax returns something you have to pay Turbo Tax, H&R Block, etc for.
I don’t know much about investing, but i wonder if it would it be a good time to short those companies?
If you don’t know much about investing then you shouldn’t short anything ever. People who know about investing will tell you that even when your logic is 100 percent sound, the market isn’t that predictable and in general the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Isn’t shorting theoretically able to put you in infinite debt?
spoiler
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As a tax accountant, I sincerely hope this gets to a point where a vast majority of the population has no need for my services.
I used to play in the big leagues where none of my clients would ever qualify for this and their returns routinely took upwards of a hundred hours to complete. Those guys need to keep paying.
Now I play down in the minors a couple steps above the Block, and I hate seeing the owner sell these three or four hundred dollar returns that might take me an hour to complete in the first year and maybe thirty minutes in subsequent years.
That’s a very interesting transition. Was the catalyst neutral or happy one, or perhaps a sad one?
Mutual disdain was the catalyst. I did it for eight years and probably lost fifteen years of life expectancy from it. Ungodly toxic environment. Fuck big firm accounting. Fuck them all in the most demeaning, painful way imaginable.
I make roughly one third the money today, and I’m much happier for it. I still make a comfortable living where I don’t particularly worry about money, so what would the additional two thirds do for me outside paying medical bills it causes?
No matter how much I try to remove my name from searches, I still get recruited by ambitious young people on a regular basis. I generally make them stop with a response that goes something like this:
I would rather have my eyes gouged out by the white hot barbed penis of Satan himself while he spits in my mouth than return to public accounting for any amount of money.
Biden did that, among many other great things for the average american citizen
Eat shit [insert private company here]
I hope every CEO gets the worse form of cancer and dies slowly.
Also, the worst hemmeroids ever and a special CEO diet consisting of nothing but exlax and habanero peppers.
Even the founder of Costco (only stepped down as CEO a few years ago), a company famous both for how well it treats its customers, and its workforce?
It might have treated them well compared to the competition, but they didn’t get as large as they are without making massive profits off the work of their employees. There’s a difference between treating the well and treating them fairly.
making massive profits off the work of their employees.
Labor is a cost, not a source of profit, what kind of moronic statement is this? If employees were a source of profit, the notion of downsizing would never exist–why would a company ever lay anyone off, if workers create more value than their wage?
Labor is the source of all profit. How would the company make money if no one did anything? Companies use their control of the means of production to leverage workers into doing labor. They then sell what the labor creates to make money.
They didn’t create anything themselves. They had ownership of the means and that gives them ownership of the output that they profit off of. Money doesn’t just appear. Something has to be produced, which is done through labor.
Sure, sometimes an employee costs more money than they return. First, that doesn’t mean they created no value, just less value than they cost to employ. Second, sometimes this does decrease profit, but is done as a short term reduction of overhead while things change, or it’s just dumb business which isn’t uncommon.
Labor is the source of all profit. How would the company make money if no one did anything?
Charge the customer more for the finished product than what it cost to produce it. Obviously.
The simple fact is that if employees were a source of profit, businesses would all try to hire as many people as they possibly could, because not doing so would literally be leaving money on the table for no reason. But obviously that is not what goes on. When a business is in trouble financially, what’s more common, a hiring freeze, or a hiring spree?
why isn’t this constitutionally protected.
Can we pass an amendment for this shit? It’s actually kind of fucked up.
I have a couple of other constitutional amendments I’d like to advance before this.
idk man i think i disagree honestly.
Tax is one of the very few constants that we all have to legally deal with, aside from like, auto insurance.
Free if you have no other exemptions to file.
1099? Nope Depreciation? Nope Tax credits? Nope
Makes for a great headline though.
Im sure those of us that do have exemptions other than the standard will see our tax prep fees skyrocket
Some progress is better then no progress, and TurboTax et. al. losing in any way is a victory for the rest of us.
Wait really? What’s the catch?
Doubt there is one. The hard truth is that most Americans’ taxes are pretty simple and straightforward. We can stop pretending that copying some boxes from a W2 and a 1099 is difficult.
I mean, personally I wish we’d stop pretending that the IRS isn’t already fully aware of what you owe and could just do the filling for you, like in other countries, but until Grover Norquist fucks off forever we’re stuck where we are.
Right. Filing taxes should only be necessary if you have itemized writeoffs or wish to contest the IRS’s statement of your tax liability. They already know what you earned their your employer, what’s been paid in taxes, what basic credits your qualify for, etc. They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about. The only reason they don’t already do that or, at least until now, have a free public system for filing, it’s because tax companies have lobbied for decades to be able to milk the public for cash to help them file and navigate their tax liability.
The argument has been since free filing means only the wealthy will hire accountants, free filing would discriminate against the poor given a few mistakes will be made here and there.
I may not need to mention that disingenuous argument is made by the pirates at Intuit and their lobbyists.
free filing would discriminate against the poor
As opposed to the current system where the richest among us can hire a whole team of accountants to find every deduction possible?
Shhhh!!!
It should also be noted that if the vast majority of people do nothing special on their taxes and just accept the government’s assessment, then that leaves a much smaller group of people to be audited. And a much larger portion of those people will be those who are trying to weasel their way out of paying their share. Right now, with the IRS being criminally underfunded, they only focus on low hanging fruit, the small fries. With those people being boiler plater auto-accepting tax payers, that would mean the IRS has no reason to audit them and can focus on the big boys where the real cheats are. That’s another big reason we do not have that sort of system and why the IRS is currently so underfunded (despite every dollar spent on the IRS generating between 5 and 9 dollars in revenue from tax fraud/evasion). Those kinds of people pay to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Wow congrats USA for doing something that makes sense before Canada.
Mine was too complicated to file for free because I have retirement investments? Seems like a silly reason to force someone to use a paid service.
Sounds like having any 1099 is ‘too complicated’. So anyone with any sort of savings account that managed to get $10 of interest over a year… So if you have like a thousand dollars in a boring old savings account you are ‘too complicated’.
Not really. If you are filling out $10 1099s you’re probably taking a standard deduction so it never matters.
Wow, old comment.
1099 is income, not a deduction.
That’s a good point.
