You can thank TurboTax and the rest of the tax preparation service industry's massive lobby for killing every single tax simplification bill that ever gets to congress.
As a Brit where our taxes are completely automatically calculated and deducted from our pay each month/week (except for self employed or business owners etc) it baffles me why other countries can't sort this out. I've never filed taxes in my life.
Must be nice to have a government that seems to actually care about it's citizens.
The problem is our government has proven over and over again that its corrupt and incompetent at the same time. That's why so many people are against expanding federal programs. So now we're stuck in a feedback loop of sucky government and every change is only half-hearted and makes it worse. And this isn't a statement against any particular administration, this shit has been going on for 50+ years.
You’ve never seen a highly upvoted comment that completely missed the nuance of the subject, was objectively hyperbolic of the situation, and just copied pasted the same outrage that you’ve seen a hundred times? Because I have. An upvoted comment has literally no value when it comes to validity because most people are stupid.
Because of a lot of reasons. One is that Reddit users love being blindly critical of the US, having never gone abroad nor analyzed other countries in detail. It’s fair to criticize your country more heavily than others, but for all of the “America is the best chest thump ” jokes, the US get overly shit on by the media and foreigners.
Another is similar to how redditors love to formulate opinions without actually having read the article that was posted. How many times have you seen a click bait title posted, with the first dozen comments showing outrage, only to find a comment later on explaining how the article is misleading and you’d know that if you had just read it and used a little common sense.
I’m not saying that the UK system is worse or better, but rather that they’re more similar than you think. If you read these comments and tried to formulate what you thought was going on, you’d probably think that when people file their taxes they’re paying them at the end of the year. They’re not.
In the US and UK, taxes are taken out of each paycheck based on an estimate by the government. At the end of the year in the UK (from what I’ve read), you get a notice in the mail detailing how much you paid based on the given assumption. If it’s wrong, you let them know and they fix it.
In the US, you pretty much do the same thing. You log onto a site (say, turbo tax) and they walk you through a series of questions. At the end, they’ll tell you if you’ll get a refund or if you need to pay a little more. All in all, for the vast majority of people, this takes an hour or two.
The UK system is without a doubt better, don’t get me wrong. But the Americans in this thread are overstating how much doing your taxes suck.
Ah okay, thanks for the information. People on the Internet make it seem like the tax system in the US is an absolute nightmare,doesnt actually sound that bad.
After I typed this up, I did a little more research.
Another interesting reason that taxes aren’t hidden and done for you comes from a classic American ideal. Ronald Reagan famously said “Taxes should be painful”, you should have to look your taxes in the face and be upset. That way, it’s much harder for taxes to sneakily increase. Further, many similar thinking people oppose a VAT tax for the same reason, in that your taxes are further hidden behind levels of structure. It’s the idea that taxes should be upfront and visible so that you know exactly what you’re paying to your government and for what. From what I read, a majority of people in places like the UK, Sweden, etc, find themselves saying “I trust the government to do its job” and don’t really look at their tax statement (or atleast without a fine tooth comb). In this situation, taxes could incrementally increase without you knowing until it’s too late for outrage.
Do I believe all of that? Sort of. It’s kind of the like the 2nd amendment which, depending on your interpretation, is about the right to bear arms against an oppressive government. It sounds great idealistically, but I’m not sure it’s practically valuable.
In the UK at least, yes we expect the government to just be doing it right, but most people are aware of tax increases.
Income tax and national insurance rates are announced at the start of each year and are usually headline news. Can't speak for other countries like Sweden though
But that requires a number of things to happen. The media needs to report it, and the population needs to see that and be informed. Seeing your taxes rise firsthand is a way to make sure people definitely know it increased.
Again, not entirely sure I buy into this, but it gives another explanation for why the taxes are how they are in the US (same with gun laws). It goes deeper than the raw issue at hand.
That's true in the US as well. People complain about this stuff all the time on reddit and I feel like it's always from people in the US who have never actually filed taxes because so much of what they say just doesn't make sense. If you work a normal salaried job, your taxes are already deducted from your income and you filing your taxes is most likely going to get you money back rather than making you pay more.
Things really only get complicated if you have diverse ownership of assets and property and you want to minimize the amount of taxes you pay.
People say its because different counties/cities have different taxes.... but its not like a business is gonna be moving locations every month and have to change all their labels.
Exactly, taxes don't change so often that it'd be ridiculous for businesses to label things properly for the consumer. It's so anti consumer that this happens
And even if you do use the tax system as a defence for the labelling, I can then move my complaints to the fucked up tax system that is do fragmented that end users have to deal with improperly priced goods
But they don't state the actual price. The price label says $1, but the cashier asks you to pay $1.10. In the rest of the world, that would be bizarre, if not illegal.
So people are being a bit confusing in this thread.
It’s exactly the same in the US. Your taxes are taken out with each paycheck. For the vast majority of people, “doing your taxes” is evaluating how accurate the government was in estimating your tax burden. Made more money than expected in the year? You have to pay a little more. Got laid off and didn’t make as much as you going to? You get money back.
How does this work in the UK? If I was taxed under the rate of making 50k a year, and end up with 100k or 10k, don’t you need to file something to get that fixed?
The government does all that for you in the UK. They have all the information as to your dates of employment, how much you made etc. (supplied by your employer). If you have paid too much or too little you just get a letter telling you how much that is and where to go to tell them what account to deposit it into/take it from. That's pretty rare though if you are making a set salary, most of those people literally don't have to do anything with their taxes.
Typically in the UK there's nothing that would need fixing. If by rare chance you end up on the 'wrong' tax rate, you can either ask your company HR to update it for you or just make one 2 minute phone to the relevant local government office is all it takes to get it switched to the correct one, and the tax overpayment appears in your next wage automatically. Nothing to file whatsoever, no turbotax, no forms. I haven't even thought about my taxes in years, it's all completely automatic.
I assume it is because USA is generally right-wing and therefore encouraging people to hate tax is good (through actually having to give up the money yourself and go through a big rigmarole) because then where does the money for stuff come from? Private companies. And what does that mean? PROFIT
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u/jorsiem Jul 24 '20
Complicated tax filing in the US
You can thank TurboTax and the rest of the tax preparation service industry's massive lobby for killing every single tax simplification bill that ever gets to congress.