The destruction of the tax prep industry in the US would make me so happy that it would overshadow any negative feelings I might have about my tax payments being more transparent to me.
The numbers quoted in the article are insane. Over $10 billion that could be spent on actual useful economic output, wasted. Hours and hours of individuals' time, wasted. It's disgusting.
In some ways I find the preservation of the tax prep industry to be even worse than Trump's recent attempts to protect/resurrect coal industry jobs.
You realize it's much worse than that right? Because $10 billion is just the direct cost of those firms, not the opportunity cost or the social cost, nor even the manhours and software cost. The six-billion man-hours alone I'd value at a ballback of $120 billion; though this is hard to truly estimate. Given that many figures simply assigned zero value time not spent working (and that's clearly nonsense), and that somebody earnign $20 is hopefully worth more; that sounds conservative to me.
Complex tax systems also encourage simply avoiding engaging in anything that would make tax burdens more difficult to figure; they cause stress (a public health issue that's still consistently ignored); and they encourage cooking the books to make life simpler - which in turn is an enabler for fraud.
The real-world cost of US tax complexity is likely at a bare minimum 100 billion dollars; possibly as much as 10 that; and that's excluding factors that are excluded from GDP; i.e. the value of things like lifestyle/stress but also more economic-oriented factors such as reduced economic agility.
The destruction of the tax prep industry in the US would make me so happy that it would overshadow any negative feelings I might have about my tax payments being more transparent to me.
The numbers quoted in the article are insane. Over $10 billion that could be spent on actual useful economic output, wasted. Hours and hours of individuals' time, wasted. It's disgusting.
In some ways I find the preservation of the tax prep industry to be even worse than Trump's recent attempts to protect/resurrect coal industry jobs.