We should file all of our taxes ourselves through the paper option. No digital taxes this year. It’s not that hard if all you have is a W2, it takes longer but it also will mean you file for free and more importantly takes the government longer to process it. You can get the papers for free from the library.
Throw dirt into the gears.
This didn’t happen overnight. For over 20 years, Intuit has fought tooth and nail to stop Americans from having a truly free, government-run tax filing system. Back in the early 2000s, they lobbied Congress and cut a deal with the IRS. They were promising to offer a “Free File” option so the government wouldn’t build its own system. Then they turned around and buried that option so deep most people never found it, even using code to hide it from Google.
When people did try to file for free, they were steered into paid versions with deceptive “free, free, free” ads. They were so deceptive that Intuit had to pay $141 million in settlements. Now, after decades of manipulation, Direct File is being terminated. This is exactly what they’ve wanted all along. It’s the result of relentless lobbying, lies, and corporate greed, all to keep Americans paying for something that should have been free from the start.
Agreed. Probably for most filers, the IRS (and state governments) could just automatically do the work. They already have most of or all of the data. The idea that you have to pay some no-value-add middleman for the “privilege” of filing your taxes is crazy.
For people that have more complicated scenarios, and are trying to take every single deduction, have to hire a CPA and so on…that’s maybe where these middlemen provide something of value.
Man, I wish I owned a government, must be cool to make your money by forcing your serfs to give you their money for free stuff
I cannot think of even but one single thing that Donald Trump has done to benefit the working class. Not even a single thing, no matter how small or petty.
Banned those harmful artificial food dyes.
Aaand that’s about it.
This seems alright, no?
The executive order directs the HHS and the Treasury and Labor departments to ensure hospitals and insurers disclose “actual prices of items and services, not estimates” and take action to ensure “pricing information is standardized and easily comparable across hospitals and health plans” including prescription drug prices.
Unironically yes, and it’s sad that that’s the case. However, he did issue a similar EO in 2019 which didn’t do much; the administration claims that it lowered costs on the most expensive procedures by 6%, but whether that’s true or not the cheapest procedures became about 3% more expensive. Something like 20% of hospitals and insurers were ever in compliance, which Trump of course blames the Biden administration for; and attempts to make the EO a law went nowhere on the Hill.
But yes, healthcare price transparency is a good thing. Still, I’m a bit suspicious; because the insurance companies actually welcomed the EO when it was first signed. I can’t figure that one out.
Hospitals would often have two prices - the insurance price, and the cash price. If you told them that you didn’t have insurance, the price could go down drastically from the estimate. Now they’re required to charge the insurance company and the uninsured the same amount.
I believe that’s always been the case, officially. It certainly was about fifteen years ago, when I worked in pharmacy. I know there are some ways that hospitals had of getting around it (like charging the full amount and putting it on a payment plan, but then immediately forgiving the remaining balance after one payment), but I don’t think those loopholes have been closed even still.
He’s getting rid of the Mexicans taking their job…
The jobs that none of them want to do in the first place…
For wages none of them would accept…
Wait…
Some of them burned a few calories standing up from the couch and walking into the polling station to vote. They’ve burned through more savings to pay for groceries and everything else because of all the trumpflation in both terms, but they at least burned off most of a French fry.
You just knew when these assholes kept using obviously-coordinated terms like “waste, fraud and abuse” and kept parroting phrases like that when Elon was doing stupid shit like waving around a chainsaw while in a k-hole, that this is the kind of thing they are talking about.
Of course, this saved americans money. The only thing they like doing more than starving poor Americans, is making people pay more for shit so their corporate owners make money.
Thanks Intuit. Absolutely not using TurboTax ever again since I learned they lobbied to maintain the complicated tax code so they get to keep selling their software.
That effort is what finally pushed me to the super sketchy-sounding freetaxusa. Its actually been great for the last few years - easier than TurboTax and cheaper
Of course they are.
I predict a lot of people are going to just not file taxes, and I expect the IRS won’t have the resources to do anything about it.
If you don’t have vehicles to manipulate your assets like the rich, they will need only glance at your papers to see the mistake. The IRS loses money hiring auditors and experts to understand if a business is a business or a charity a charity, those are the common tricks the rich use.
You aren’t going to hide what your employer paid to you and how much tax you paid the IRS. Even putting in your IRA or house deductible is easy to automate and thus easy to check.
Cash app has free filing though, would recommend.
Unfortunately what’s been shown in the past is the less resources the IRS has, the more likely they are to just go after the smallest issues, they can automate and garnish wages on people who don’t have the resources to fight it. Then they just avoid the rich because they don’t have the resources to go up against well paid tax attorneys
Too bad most of us have already been paying taxes and need to file in order to get a refund.
If the gubment knows what I owe or overpaid, why the fuck do we do our taxes, except to pay a corporation?!
I mean, the point now is just the end of your comment
pay a corporation
The super rich are trying to collapse governments and turn society into religio-corpo-city-states where they can be neofeudalist kings where their family line maintains through history no matter how technology changes. No different than kingdoms of the past where it’s mostly suffering combined with war, except they’ve convinced crypto bros and other idiots that they’d be knights in this system and are spending boatloads of money to achieve their goals.
The more popular plan among them seems to be this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
If you read through it you’ll find a lot of the things in project 2025 that came out of nowhere (like taking Canada, Greenland, and Panama) are actually goals of the movement
Oh, and Elon’s Grandpa was in the movement, and the heritage foundation was started by the same group
I tried to use it, but it was useless anyway.
