This is the proper approach when deciding whether to use any type of tool or technology. Is the increased amount of cognitive overhead for someone with minimal exposure to your system (who will have to maintain it when you’ve moved on) worth the increased performance on a dollars-per-hour basis? If so, it may be a good option. If not, it doesn’t matter how much better the relative performance is.
1. If the government is in charge of deciding the tax policy and collecting the taxes, it creates a potential conflict of interest if they are also in charge of telling you how much you owe. In theory, they could charge you more than they're legally allowed to, but how would you know unless you (or someone else) also calculated your taxes? A common suggestion to this is to have the government give a return that shows what they _think_ is owed, but this creates a conflict if the government accidentally underbills you, since you're not likely to correct the mistake. In order to ensure compliance on both sides, both the government and individual need to prepare the tax return. Otherwise, one party risks being overcharged/underpaid.
2. Tax evasion is an effective law enforcement tool for catching criminals, so by putting the burden on the individual to report taxes, you add another tool in the law enforcement toolkit. From the state's perspective, it is more compelling to tell a jury "this person owed $5 but only paid $1" than "this person owed $5, but only paid $1 because we told them they only owed $1." Tax evasion is how famous gangsters like Al Capone and other shady-characters have historically been caught[0]
The tax prep industry is lucrative largely because of lobbying and consumer ignorance. There are plenty of free-file options for folks below certain income thresholds, as well as non-profits who will do your taxes for free. There are also lots of free tax-prep sites, but they are being drowned out by the advertising and lobbying of the for-profit tax-prep industry.
To add my own 2-cents: if your income comes from investments, 1099, or W2, you likely can do your own taxes in about an hour. I personally use TaxHawk [1] since it's free for federal and $16 per state return, and has the same kind of interface as turbotax and the like. If you want to save on that $16, you could use TaxSlayer [2] instead -- I've used all of them, and personally prefer TaxHawk. Just remember to decline any of the upselling they do just before you submit your refund. You probably don't need the premium service, a dedicated tax pro, nor audit protection.
#1 works fine in stores and restaurants. Why would the government be different?
#2 isn't a strong enough reason to justify the significant out-of-pocket costs and lost productivity of the US tax system. If the tax collector is regularly finding only $1 of $5 tax obligations, that seems better solved by improving the collector's record-keeping, not hanging civil and criminal penalties over the heads of 350 million citizens.
> works fine in stores and restaurants. Why would the government be different?
I'll posit a hypothesis:
Scale and morality interpretation differences.
I've yet to have a > $1000 restaurant bill (not even close), and the experience I got and the reciprocity instincts in me compel me to correct it if say they were to forget to charge me for my guac or give me more change than i was owed.
Whereas in the Gov't there is scale that tempts people to choose immoral paths, and also there's a morality of efff the government in a lot of people's minds. It's an abstracted entity of which we mostly do not enjoy the experience and cannot treat humanely (it's not a person).
I get where you're coming from. But I don't know which is cause and which is effect.
Suppose your friendly neighborhood restaurant stopped giving you the check at the end of the meal, and instead had a stern sign on the table saying "Pay what you owe. Underpay and we call the cops."
I’m building a tool to automatically move deposits into new bank accounts with better rates and fees. It will operate continuously, so I never have to search for the “best” bank account — I’ll always have it. Think wealthfront for checking and savings.
I work in software now, but I was an accounting major, CPA, and worked in Public Accounting for 4 years before making the switch.
Accounting actually is more of a trade, and I felt like the majority of classes they taught helped me on-the-job as an accountant. People who like systems engineering would enjoy accounting, because it's getting to the nuts-and-bolts of our financial system and understanding both the how and the why. Whether you're international conglomerate Apple, Inc or software engineer calderarrow working a day job, the laws of accounting still apply.
But I would not recommend paying more than you need to for an Accounting Degree. The Big 4 will recruit anyone from anywhere, and as long as you have a degree (which is usually required for the CPA License) and a 3.3+ GPA, you can get a job in any major city. Assets + Liabilities = Equity whether you're at community college or Harvard, so get the cheapest degree you can get.
Also, try to squeeze 150 credits into your undergrad curiculum, as some CPA licenses require 150 credit hours. This is typically 4 years of undergrad (120) + 1 year of a master's (30). The added cost of tuition for those classes isn't that much, but being able to get out and start working a year sooner is a ~$60k decision that is worth it if you can do it.
As for why I left accounting: I started learning Python to help me automate some of the boring parts of my job [0] and fell in love with software. It just clicked for me in the same way that accounting did, and now I work in fintech, where I'm able to blend the two.
I used to be, for most of the same reasons as you. What ultimately convinced me was realizing that our judicial system can never be 100% perfect, so we would always have a non-zero number of innocent people executed as long as capital punishment is on the table. To me, I think the cost of keeping people incarcerated is worth the cost of accidentally executing innocent citizens.
Put a bit more personally: would you support capital punishment if you had to pull the trigger, and you would be killed if you executed an innocent inmate? Most people I speak with would be fine pulling the trigger, but no one I’ve talked with would be okay with taking responsibility for mistakes.
I used to think that false convictions were rare. In capital cases like this one it is close to 4%! That made me think, is it worth killing 4 innocent people to avoid having to imprison 96 guilty ones for the rest of their life? If I went out with a gun and killed 100 people, 4 innocent and 96 justifiably, I may as well be number 97.
I'm curious what percentage of false convictions are caused by LEO and DA omitting or destroying evidence.
I suspect, ignorantly, that it's north of 70%. If anyone should be getting the death penalty, it should be those that abuse power granted to them by the people.
I guess false confessions are a huge issue. In addition, our system is mostly designed to around the needs of the rich and corporate interests. Prosecution for crimes against the poor and disenfranchised is critically underfunded. Public defenders offices are even worse off.
Assume the justice system is perfect and only guilty people are executed. However, by law for every five or ten guilty executions, a random innocent civilian is also executed.
That system is obviously abhorrent and unjust. However, that's how the system works right now. For every N truly guilty people executed, there's a truly innocent person executed. The only difference is we justify it by calling that person guilty even if they aren't.
This is true of any punishment, though: if we want to hold people in prison, we're going to have innocent people in there too. Why draw the line specifically at "death"?
With capital punishment, we remove the possibility of fixing our mistake if someone is innocent. But if we lock someone up for 30 years, they have the opportunity for justice to be served, and we have mechanics to _try_ to make it right.
Right? Like if you run with the argument that people are making then we can't give people a life sentence because they may die in jail when they're innocent.
So, it's better to potentially completely ruin the life of an innocent instead of killing him.
From a humanity standpoint the first option is much more barbaric.
Besides, what is the chance an innocent gets out if he was convicted in the first place?
I believe it's so low that the mistake is not giving a decent out (and avoiding large costs to society) to problematic peoples on the off chance that you might get an innocent released 10 years earlier.
If he was truly innocent, his life is ruined already, he would have to live with the consequences for the rest of his life...
i think you missed my last line. That should answer your question. The government can never be perfect, and killing and innocent is a tragedy. However, you cannot cripple the whole system for this vanishgly small chance or you have an equal chance of success across the system. If you keep making those compromises, putting systems in place to correct the errors of past systems; it quickly becomes a losing game. Put more simply, If you lose trust in the system, you can't rely on the system to fix it.
This argument always falls flat because those that claim state-sanctioned killing of innocent citizens is a necessary tragedy, never seem to say that they’d be willing to be murdered themselves in that scenario. It’s more like “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
So why not just select random citizens by lottery and publicly execute one for every 50 or 100 convicts executed?
You're willing to accept that if the random citizen is labeled as guilty even if they're not. If it's acceptable for innocent people to be executed, what's the difference in having a random death lottery?
That's the whole point of the system is it not? We accept that there is a vanishigly small chance that a innocent person may be locked up and imprisoned. The point i was making is that we are already making that choice by the allowance of jails and prisons. So if we accept that, the sentencing does not matter. They were proven guilty in the court of law. There is a handful of studies, i'm sure someone could pull up about such cases where people on death row were found innocent after 20 years. However, those are exceptions and 99.99% of cases are not that way and are mostly because we "discovered" dna evidence as a thing.
It's death by a million cuts as soon as you start second guessing the system and trying to use the same system to fix it's inherent imperfections. Proven guilty by the court of law needs to mean something.
I think put yourself in the shoes of someone about to be executed innocent of their crime. Then make your argument. It sounds like “some of you die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” otherwise.
Perhaps I misunderstood it, but I read that as you not finding the value of avoiding accidental executions as worth the cost to avoid them. And if so, then I think that’s a perfectly valid position. But it’s subjective, since others may find the value worth it.
I’m curious though: is there an error rate where you would feel like capital punishment would be off the table? For instance, if 90% of people executed were innocent, would you still want it for the 10% who deserve it? I admit that if we had a 100% success rate, I would be open to capital punishment, so we may actually agree that there’s a threshold where the system shouldn’t be allowed to use that as a form of punishment, and only disagree about about the percentage.
Off-topic, but did anyone attend Johns Hopkins CTY camp as a kid? I did it for 9 straight summers, and while the name is a bit pretentious, it was one of the best experiences I had. I am curious if anyone is an alum, since the overlap of CTY and HN seems pretty unique atm.
I'm not trying to say that the US educational performance is great, just that it's not terrible. I think there's a lot of room for improvement, but there's a narrative that US schools are failing horribly and that just isn't true.
Wouldn't you agree that "failing" is relative? Given just how much money the US has, wouldn't you agree that we should expect better outcomes? Wouldn't it be a failure that despite our massive wealth, we are below OECD average in any subject?
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