US taxes arent complicated because of tax software lobbiests. In fact they are already very simple if you actually value simplicity. But people dont - they value paying the least in taxes as possible (as they should).
You can dumbly supply a small amount of information and be in complete compliance with the law. Virtually all complexity comes from proving ways in which you don't owe taxes and calculating how much. Thus, reducing complexity necessarily increases taxes for most cases. That means reducing complexity will always have lots of normal people rationally opposing it.
Tax complexity reductions need to be accompanied by tax cuts across the board.
Unfortunately your take is wrong, rather than controversial.
I do my taxes every year, sometimes long-form, sometimes with software like TurboTax. The complexity of my taxes is entirely the fault of the way in which I am required to provide information to the IRS, most of which they already know, even though I take the standard deduction and don't do any "tricks". A simply example is if you have any sort of stocks/bonds or other tradeable asset holdings. Reporting this is a massive pain in the ass, because despite the fact that Schwab/Etrade/et-al already report this to the IRS, they make you list the cost basis, date of purchase, and sale price of every transaction that occurred within the tax year as part of calculating whether or not you're eligible for long-term capital gains or are taxed at your marginal income tax rate (short term capital gains). Very closely related is transactions dealing with RSUs, which every tech worker (most of HN) has to deal with. This is despite the fact I work a relatively normal white collar job on a W-2 and don't even file a base 1099 on a yearly basis.
Taxes are complicated in the US because our tax code is bonkers and we're forced to precisely input a whole lot of spreadsheet bullshit that the IRS already knows so they can auto-check our work against their database rather than just telling me I owe them an extra $2k because despite having maximum withholding, the government wants to fuck me a little deeper in the ass. Exactly none of this is optional, I am /obligated/ to report all of this complexity, whether I paid enough or not, or I am legally penalized.
Taxes /could/ be simple, but they are not, for anyone who makes more than about $60k/yr, which is nearly half the country.
> You can dumbly supply a small amount of information and be in complete compliance with the law.
This is not only factually untrue, anyone who follows this advice is putting themselves in significant legal jeopardy.
> Unfortunately your take is wrong, rather than controversial.
Right/wrong and controversial/uncontroversial are not mutually exclusive. Look at the amount of people in favor of the notion that tax lobbiests are to blame for tax complexity. It's always the dominant narrative
> A simply example is if you have any sort of stocks/bonds or other tradeable asset holdings. Reporting this is a massive pain in the ass
Actually you just proved me correct. You could simply declare this income as regular income and forego the tax-advantage of the capital gains rate. But you dont want to pay extra in taxes. There is no penalty. The government might actually send you a higher return than your tax return indicates. And besides all that, that aspect is more tedious than complicated. You just write down whats in the box.
>> You can dumbly supply a small amount of information and be in complete compliance with the law.
> This is not only factually untrue, anyone who follows this advice is putting themselves in significant legal jeopardy.
What is factually untrue about that? I feel like I actually wasn't specific enough to be falsifiable (what exactly does "small" constitute?) so calling it factual untrue is funny.
> You could simply declare this income as regular income and forego the tax-advantage of the capital gains rate.
No, you can't do that. It's reported by the investment broker as investment income, and you must declare it as investment income and provide the specific details /whether or not there is any tax advantage/.
> There is no penalty.
Prove it. Show me where the IRS says that you can submit investment income as regular income when it was already submitted on the backend by a broker as investment income and how that will not result in a penalty for misfiling.
> more tedious than complicated
This tells me you've never done it. Depending on your broker (and sometimes you don't get to choose, for instance as part of an ESPP or for RSUs) they may not provide it to you in a nice clean way and it's rather annoying to determine, for instance, the correct cost basis. At some point "tedious" and "complicated" are the same thing.
> complete compliance with the law.
Actual tax attorneys barely know what qualifies as "complete compliance from the law". You should probably simply refrain from giving legal advice about taxes if you are not in fact a tax attorney and the reader is not in fact your client.
US taxes arent complicated because of tax software lobbiests. In fact they are already very simple if you actually value simplicity. But people dont - they value paying the least in taxes as possible (as they should).
You can dumbly supply a small amount of information and be in complete compliance with the law. Virtually all complexity comes from proving ways in which you don't owe taxes and calculating how much. Thus, reducing complexity necessarily increases taxes for most cases. That means reducing complexity will always have lots of normal people rationally opposing it.
Tax complexity reductions need to be accompanied by tax cuts across the board.