'The IRS Says There's Always Next Year' (msn.com) 131
The tax agency again delays a vital software upgrade, at the cost of billions. WSJ's Editorial Board: Taxpayers endure drudgery to file on time each year, but the tax collectors seem less concerned with deadlines. A new Internal Revenue Service database, more than a decade in the making, will be delayed another year. And its cost is billions of dollars and climbing. The IRS told the press this week that it won't replace its Individual Master File until the 2026 tax year, at the earliest. That falls short of Commissioner Danny Werfel's goal of launching a new system in time for 2025 taxes, and the delay could mean another year of grief for countless taxpayers. The file is the digital silo in which more than 154 million tax files are held, and keeping it up-to-date helps to enable speedy, accurate refunds.
The code that powers the database was written in the 1960s by IBM engineers at the same time their colleagues worked on the Apollo program. The system runs on a nearly extinct computer language known as Cobol, and though it retains its basic functionality, maintaining it requires bespoke service. By 2018 the IRS had only 17 remaining developers considered to be experts on the system. The agency has sought and failed to overhaul or replace the database since the 1980s. It spent $4 billion over 14 years to devise upgrades, but it canceled that effort in 2000 "without receiving expected benefits," according to the Government Accountability Office.
The costs continue to mount. IRS spending on operating and maintaining its IT systems has risen 35% in the past four years, to $2.7 billion last year from $2 billion in 2019. These costs will "likely continue to increase until a majority of legacy systems are decommissioned," according to a report last month by the agency's inspector general. Each year major upgrades are pushed back adds a larger sum to the final tab. The IRS usually pleads poverty as an excuse for failing to stay up-to-date. Yet Congress gave the agency billions of extra dollars through the Inflation Reduction Act to fund a speedy database overhaul. Since 2022 it has spent $1.3 billion beyond its ordinary budget to modernize its business systems. Taxpayers will have to wait at least another year to see if that investment has paid off.
The code that powers the database was written in the 1960s by IBM engineers at the same time their colleagues worked on the Apollo program. The system runs on a nearly extinct computer language known as Cobol, and though it retains its basic functionality, maintaining it requires bespoke service. By 2018 the IRS had only 17 remaining developers considered to be experts on the system. The agency has sought and failed to overhaul or replace the database since the 1980s. It spent $4 billion over 14 years to devise upgrades, but it canceled that effort in 2000 "without receiving expected benefits," according to the Government Accountability Office.
The costs continue to mount. IRS spending on operating and maintaining its IT systems has risen 35% in the past four years, to $2.7 billion last year from $2 billion in 2019. These costs will "likely continue to increase until a majority of legacy systems are decommissioned," according to a report last month by the agency's inspector general. Each year major upgrades are pushed back adds a larger sum to the final tab. The IRS usually pleads poverty as an excuse for failing to stay up-to-date. Yet Congress gave the agency billions of extra dollars through the Inflation Reduction Act to fund a speedy database overhaul. Since 2022 it has spent $1.3 billion beyond its ordinary budget to modernize its business systems. Taxpayers will have to wait at least another year to see if that investment has paid off.
I'll call Mom (Score:1)
She still works in cobol.
Then it's gonna be 18 people who have a vested interest in not outsourcing themselves to the cloud.
Re:I'll call Mom (Score:4, Insightful)
Only 17 developers in 2018... been working on overhauling it since the 1980's... $4 billion over 14 years, ending in 2000... $2.7 billion last year, up from $2 billion in 2019... Since 2022 it has spent $1.3 billion beyond its ordinary budget
If those 17 people aren't multi-billionaires by now, where's all that money going?!??!!
FFS, hire a LOT more developers! With that much money and time on the line, setup multiple developer groups and have them each go at getting to a solution first. You don't even need to find competent COBOL programmers (you don't want this written in COBOL anyway).
And yeah... I know that's over simplifying, and those 17 devs don't necessarily account for the current development team, but come on! Billions each year? You could pay $1 million a year per developer and still have over 2,000 of them with $700+ million to spare (for management?).
These costs will "likely continue to increase until a majority of legacy systems are decommissioned," according to a report last month by the agency's inspector general.
And they're claiming the legacy parts are what's causing the increases? How has that not been shored up by now? That was a $700 million increase this year alone! ..."!??! Is this a threat of some sort, or just utter incompetence?
Also, "... likely to continue
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I'll call Mom (Score:4)
The cost is not the developers, Cobol or not. The cost start with the system predating databases and it being in fact a single text file that stores /everything ever/ since the sixties. This setup does not parallelize, so they basically buy a new IBM mainframe every few years to run it, and basically pay whatever the asking price is, hardware, licensing, the whole lot of it.
There really is no alternative but a complete rewrite, but even though you can start one, there is basically no way on earth one of sufficient quality could be produced by the modern software industry. The rewrite is just a run-of-the-mill milking of the govt cash cow, by whoever bribed themselves to get the job - good for as long as it lasts, then scrapped, rinsed, and repeated from the beginning by another opportunist.
Re: I'll call Mom (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: I'll call Mom (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Rewriting the COBOL may well be the least of the problem.
One is that this runs in the IBM mainframe OS utilities environment. Knowing the IBM job control and OS specific calls is another thing.
There's also that Ii's likely there's a good bit of assembler written for the 360 still lurking about.
Back then people often designed file record size to fit or be arithmetic multiples of the disk drive tracks in use at that time, not to mention the whole 80 column card thing. Or did they ever switch to 96 column card
Re: I'll call Mom (Score:2)
The "software industry" both is and isn't the problem. If you contract Oracle or whoever to do it then yes, they will fuck you. If you build a team and have them develop the new product, you have a chance.
The problem is therefore fascism. Corporations have such a stranglehold on us that we can't do it the right way. They buy/make the rules/laws that keep us contracting it all for billions instead.
Re: I'll call Mom (Score:5, Informative)
The cost start with the system predating databases and it being in fact a single text file that stores /everything ever/ since the sixties. This setup does not parallelize, so they basically buy a new IBM mainframe every few years to run it, and basically pay whatever the asking price is, hardware, licensing, the whole lot of it.
Tell me you are ignorant about mainframes without saying you are ignorant about mainframes.
There have been mainframe databases for years before the relational model came along. IMS/DB came out in 1966
The idea that "a single text file contains everything" is just asinine.
The idea that you just keep buying ever bigger mainframes year after year is nonsensical - you buy additional processor complexes and join them to what you already have.
And the job doesn't parallel process? FFS, you really imagine it serially process 175 million tax returns one at a time? Mainframes have been running "VMs" since the 1970s, first under the VM operating system, then MVS in the 1980s, and more recently System Z.
Re: (Score:2)
Hold on now, you're forgetting one thing.
After doing a Star Trek short they had to follow through with a Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager homage as well.
You gotta have the whole set, right?
Re: (Score:2)
Also, "... likely to continue ..."!??! Is this a threat of some sort, or just utter incompetence?
Ummm, this is a textbook case of corruption. Enjoy the show while nobody prosecutes. :)
COBOL is "nearly extinct"? (Score:5, Insightful)
If COBOL is nearly extinct then why is over a billion new lines of COBOL written per year?
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. COBOL may not be the new cool thing, but it is in regular use. Same for FORTRAN.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Any good coder with real experience in any classical imperative language can do Fortran with a few weeks of learning. Fortran is not that special or complicated. Add experience with OO or concurrent programming in any environment if that is part of the target application.
Expecting several years of coding experience in something reasonably similar is fine. But expecting several years with the flavor they need is just stupid.
Re:COBOL is "nearly extinct"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe. Or it is just concentrated stupid. Never rule that one out.
Re: COBOL is "nearly extinct"? (Score:2)
There is a difference in FORTRANs, the language has a 70 year lifespan.
Re: (Score:2)
There's nothing wrong with COBOL. But the technical debt they've acquired over the decades is definitely worth a rewrite. It still takes someone with COBOL knowledge to figure out what all the hacks and workarounds are actually doing and to get functionality moved to what's new. If writing from the ground up today, COBOL is not a likely choice just because of the number of people proficient in it.
Replacing monolithic systems all at once is really complex. If they don't modularize at least some of it, th
Re: COBOL is "nearly extinct"? (Score:2)
Most code written in any language before the 80s is unreadable by today's standards because the people writing it came up when people were counting bytes of memory and coders usually worked in assembly, so they took their spaghetti and inscrutable acronyms and abbreviations with them to fortran and c and cobol and whatever.
Java style guides in the 90s were a direct overreaction against this history.
So no, there's nothing wrong with cobol or fortran, but it's still a pain in the ass to deal with cobol or for
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> There's nothing wrong with COBOL
It is verbose as fuck. Too much signal effectively becomes noise.
Over time popular words tend to become shorter to minimize the time and brain power needed to communicate and parse them. COBOL is an archaic language designed under this delusion that verbosity is "better". It isn't. Pascal does the same stupid shit with BEGIN and END. C has a good balance between terseness and verbosity which is why it has lasted.
Re: (Score:2)
It's no surprise that COBOL has been supplanted with so much Java.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: COBOL is "nearly extinct"? (Score:3)
You can do perl in a way that winds up looking a lot like C with more operators.
Or you can write code that looks like line noise.
I can still understand all the perl I've ever written at a glance because it's meant to be read, and it has comments. That's probably mostly because I'm never a smartass about it, because I don't think I'm a genius.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
On the contrary, COBOL's purpose was to be an accounting language for military systems. Verbosely describing the business process was comical error or propaganda feature, espoused on the grounds that your manager could read and understand a COBOL program despite having no training in programming whatsoever. That's not a feature, it's a confused horror show.
It did have the advantage of allowing you to produce an immense volume of code, which probably looked good on your resume. Of course, it took you a hundr
Re: COBOL is "nearly extinct"? (Score:2)
Replacing monolithic systems all at once is really complex. If they don't modularize at least some of it, then they're going to run into the same problem next time.
Is the air traffic control system still running on UNIVAC computers?
Is the FBI still running Windows XP on desktops?
The federal government can't replace large systems , it just doesn't happen.
Re: (Score:2)
That's why they have to be eventually replaced with interconnected small systems. If they can ever replace anything.
Re: (Score:2)
If COBOL is nearly extinct then why is over a billion new lines of COBOL written per year?
If COBOL is nearly extinct and so many systems use it, then why hasn't anyone written a COBOL to Java converter? Sure it won't be perfect (or even very good), but at least Java programmers are readily available and you can use modern tools on your code.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I think it was IBM (later sold off) that came out with EGL and VG 25 years or so ago. It is its own language, and you generate either really nasty looking but working java code (and JSPs) or I would assume really nasty COBOL code and whatever it uses for front end stuff. Ties into Websphere, etc.
The place I work for is still dependent on it .... it isn't so bad, some of the things make sense (a record data type that can represent rows/cols on one or more db tables), some stuff would probably make mo
Re: COBOL is "nearly extinct"? (Score:2)
They did, then they realized JAVA sucks for typical mainframe applications.
There are COBOL to the latest 'Flavor of the Month' converters, but they don't solve the problem. The problem is the code is the documentation, and for lots of code not only has the original developer died, but their children have all retired, and their grand children aren't interested in learning COBOL.
Not exactly waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Inflation Reduction Act (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah yes, the act designed to reduce inflation by dumping another trillion dollars into the economy.
Early-1980s proposed "Postcard tax form" (Score:1)
Line 1: Total income/gains from all sources: $____
Line 2: Tax liability: [copy line 1]
Line 3: Total withholding: $_____
Line 4: If line 2 greater than line 3, taxes owed: [line 2 minus line 3], skip line 5
Line 5: If line 3 greater than line 2, refund due: [line 3 minus line 2]
Basically, 5 lines to say "how much did you make? send it all in."
This proposed "tax form" was not serious, it offered up by more than one late-night comedian.
There were other variations that amounted to a 100% wealth tax: "How mu
Re: (Score:2)
YES! A tax regime even the North Korean government could admire.
Re: (Score:2)
What if my employer gives me a car to do my work?
What if I use it for personal use?
What if my employer gives me housing?
What if there are roommates?
What if my employer flies me to Amsterdam, but I also hang out for a few weeks?
What if my employer grants stock that is distributed over a period and is also discounted over a period and is optional to exercise?
What if my employer gives me an "allowance" of $1000 per day for meals, but my wife and kids come along and I use the excess for the family?
IRA Funded Long Overdue IRS Funding (Score:3)
The Repubs have been starving the IRS of staffing and IT upgrades for years.
Finally the IRAct provided a boost in IRS Funding for more staff for audits and IT upgrades.
Expect these expenses to increase in the coming years. It's a good investment. First six months of increased audits brought in over $1 billion (from rich people).
IRA funding also allows the IRS to set up on-line tax filing so people don't have to pay for third party tax software. Last year was tested in several states. Will roll out to all states next year.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. And they've been starving the IRS because *they* want to cheat on their taxes. I saw a report last year, I think, where the IRS was saying it couldn't go after the wealthy, because it didn't have the personnel. to do so. Wonder what that means? Look at TFG's lawyers pushing absurd motions, anything, to delay an actual trial.
s/want to cheat/cheat (Score:2)
Re:IRA Funded Long Overdue IRS Funding (Score:4, Insightful)
The Repubs have been starving the IRS of staffing and IT upgrades for years.
If a starvation diet is in the form of 40,000 man years (at $100k per man year) worth of "upgrade" that have thus far failed to produce anything useful, I would hate to see what "fully funded" would look like.
Re: (Score:2)
I would hate to see what "fully funded" would look like.
It was fully funded in the 1980s... it was so well funded, that Congress became afraid of the IRS in the 90s. They have since defunded it because if it is strong enough, it can hurt them.
On the bright side, low level citizens such as yourself no longer have to deal with out of control auditors taking everything you own so you are incapable of even defending yourself. No money, no lawyer, automatic win for the IRS. It was a bleak and grim time back then. Please do not bring it back even if watching Congress
Re: (Score:2)
The IRS is wasting BILLIONS but some how they are starved for IT funds? How do you square that logic?
That's right up their with crying about education spending without realizing we're the 5th highest spender on education in the world. I got that info from this link https://nces.ed.gov/programs/c... [ed.gov]
We don't have a funding problem. We have a spending and accountability problem. We've no accountability so we just keep spending more money thinking that will some how fix the problem.
Also, it's not hard to imagin
Blame IRS funding cuts (Score:2)
Remember when IRS funding was cut by 25% [politico.com] last year? Do you honestly believe that didn't impact large projects like this?
If you want to blame someone for the delay then you need only look at the congress critters that demanded cutting funding to the IRS or they would cause the US to default.
Went to class with a bunch of them in the 90's (Score:2)
Vital IRS software upgrade (Score:2)
Vital tax software, surly a contradiction in terms
composition vs inheritance (Score:2)
Can they not wrap the old system with another, pass on anything mundane to the old system and handle anything new in the outer new system. Sure they may need to continue to fix some bugs in the old system but as time goes on the outer new system will take more and more of the load.
The outer system can even have a go at doing some of the old-inner system's functions and compare its output.
Why is the sytem so hard to replace? (Score:3)
Lets assuming you need 100 developers. You need another 15 IT people, and 10 DevOps, DevSecOps, and aux employees. We'll add in a margin of 25 additional employees for what ever, and all of them make 200k/ year. That's 150 x 200 000 or $30 000 000 / year. What else do you need to add? Cloud? Okay, let's factor in 50k/month for infrastructure, of another 600k/year, With a fairly unreadable, but probably defendable, $30 600 000 / year, being required, even if took 3 years to build the system, that's $91 600 000, so where is the rest of the money?
If you're given $100 million dollars, and can't deliver, it's either outright fraud or fraud through incompetence. I would love to hear an excuse that will hold up, and make sense for how the transition hasn't been accomplished.
Maybe there is little documentation? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not jo
How secure is all that COBOL code? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I wrote a lot of COBOL (and fixed it) back in the day. To hack it, first you have to have the code to work from... and a hell of a lot was all written in-house. Second, since late eighties, you can run COBOL on PCs, but how many crackers will do that?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Well when you elect criminals who don’t pay taxes that isn’t a surprise. I thought republicans liked being tough on crime and love law enforcement? Lock up that welfare queen but haha it’s funny when a rich person doesn’t pay their taxes.
Is there something wrong with paying your taxes? Look how much was already recovered from the tax cheats when the IRS is funded. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/i... [irs.gov]
Hey, when you're poor like me, the IRS is bad. (Score:2)
When the rebuild is complete, aim the IRS at the wealthy 3%, not me. That's where the money is, and - unlike me - they can afford it.
Of course, they still may not catch Trump. He may be bankrupt this year, I'll have to check and get back to you.
Re: (Score:2)
Our tax system makes chasing after the rich really difficult and they have better accountants. You need to vastly simplify the tax system if you want to get more out of the rich.
The rich also already pay most the taxes but they also pretty much own everything as well. It would be healthier for society if we all owned more but also all had skin in the game for paying taxes.
I'm sure some smart people could come up with a system but since our elected representatives are so corrupt, it wouldn't be implemented.
Re: (Score:2)
private business can make 30%-500% profit and that is ok. But if government makes even 50% profit that is corruption because it's a non-profit; even so, that wasteful bloat is still lower than the profit of many corporations (and I'm including bloated CEO pay as profit not an expense.)
As far as I am concerned, government can waste plenty as long as it's on par with corporate profits... I at least have a little say in government operations.
Re: (Score:2)
Our government better not waste to much, we're already spending more on out our interest payment then we do on defense. At what point does it all come crashing down, and the global economy right behind it?
Re: (Score:2)
You'll never know - unlike anybody else at this point in history, the world needs to prop up the USA so the global economy doesn't die. It clearly can go further than is normally possible. Plus it's a complex web of everybody owing everybody else along with banks making shit up... and monetary inflation and exchange rates making actual debt values shift. Then you have lending nations possibly crashing someday and paying them off becomes cheap and doubles as a bailout for them... deals such as arms etc.. w
Re: (Score:2)
Here is a link. https://www.pgpf.org/monthly-i... [pgpf.org]
Scroll down a little and there is a nice bar graph showing Net Interest cost us roughly $843B each year. We spend $797B on National Defense.
Re: (Score:2)
$798B on national defense.
Re:One of the good things Donald Trump did. (Score:4, Insightful)
Look how much was already recovered from the tax cheats when the IRS is funded.
Funded by whom? Oh, right, tax payers. So let me get this straight. Tax payers pay IRS to spend money on agents and efforts to try to collect taxes from other tax payers. Got it.
Additionally, they've spent multi-billions over the years just trying to figure out how to write a big database. MULTI BILLIONS.
Then some non-trivial amount of money was allocated to fund the efforts to collect what amounts to a SINGLE billion from those evil millionaires that forever find ways to avoid paying taxes (note to self, make sure to mention that the entire legislative branch is made up of these very people). And this is deemed a shiny success?
It's truly baffling logic.
No, we do NOT need to continue increasing funding of the IRS. We need to GUT the entire system and start over with something more sane that people with less than 10 years of dedicate financial education and experience can decipher. Continuing to pump more and more money into a complex system that keeps getting more and more complex is just not rational.
Re:One of the good things Donald Trump did. (Score:4, Informative)
Correct, the IRS with its additional $60/80 billion in funding (over 10 years) is expected to return $180B over those same 10 years (in addition to the marked improvements in customer service). The last 2 years since the IRA passed has so far proven this out as true.
Whats baffling about that?
Re: (Score:2)
You are talking about two different parts of the IRS though. He's talking about the massive waste in designing a database and tax accounting system and you are talking about money used to hire accountants to help increase tax revenue from those who are skating by. It's likely different buckets of money we're talking about. The wage bucket is not the same as the IT/development budget.
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong. We are talking about the IRS in general which is what i was responding to.
What else could they mean by "We need to GUT the entire system and start over with something more sane that people with less than 10 years of dedicate financial education and experience can decipher. ". Hes not talking about gutting the database, lets be real here.
Re: One of the good things Donald Trump did. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well when you elect criminals who don’t pay taxes that isn’t a surprise. I thought republicans liked being tough on crime and love law enforcement? Lock up that welfare queen but haha it’s funny when a rich person doesn’t pay their taxes.
Is there something wrong with paying your taxes? Look how much was already recovered from the tax cheats when the IRS is funded. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/i... [irs.gov]
You are welcome to send as much extra to the Feds as you want, if you think that is so virtuous; they will take it [treasury.gov].
But no, like everyone else, you try to minimize what you pay in taxes.
Re: (Score:2)
Spotted the time traveler.
Sorry, but your mistake was that you didn't even take a basic time reading after materialization, you lazy bum. Get a fucking calendar!
Re: (Score:1)
Well he sorta tried but like most things Trump he is too lazy and too ego-centric to actually get things done and then Biden with the IRA bumped up staffing and services which has actually been quite "profitable".
Compared to 2023, the IRS answered over 1 million more taxpayer phone calls this tax season, helped over 170,000 more people in person and saw 75 million more IRS.gov visits fueled by a new and expanded Where’s My Refund? tool. Taxpayers waited, on average, just over three minutes for help on
Re: (Score:2)
This like what he did to the Post Office or closing the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit — responsible for pandemic preparedness are examples of cutting government that is penny wise and million dollar foolish.
We are all OK with cutting waste, but Donald Trump is a wrecking ball. You don't burn down the house when you want to remodel it.
WakeTFU
Re: (Score:2)
There are potentially lots of good reasons to burn down houses instead of remodeling. Extreme termite infestation for instance. It all depends on how bad you believe the current damage is relative to how much investment is required to repair the existing structure. The IRS is broken. Beyond repair? Maybe not, but it needs serious restructuring.
Re: (Score:2)
Ease, down. I can see I need to stick my tongue further into my cheek.
Incidentally, the other good thing DT has done is not so much an act as an effect. He's like human litmus paper - wave him over the country and watch parts glow brilliantly in blue and red . . . and this includes a lot of people who before around 2015 were (rightly) careful not to tell anybody how they really felt about things. An old joke is that peep shows and polling booths are the same - what you do once you pull the curtain shut
Re: (Score:2)
I think if they really cared about tax cheats, they would change the tax code to remove all the loop holes. Since they don't, how serious are they really about tax revenue? Giving the IRS more money to hire more agents is more about appearing to do something about the problem instead of dealing with the root issue, which is the exploitation of an overly complex tax code.
Re: (Score:2)
I wish he had done it by sending each state an itemized bill for federal services rendered and letting them collect the taxes instead of the IRS, but that would disproportionately bankrupt many of the red states. [washingtonpost.com]
Hopefully, yes. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The 16th Amendment cleared the Senate on a 77-0 vote and the House 318-14. Even considering the abstentions or absences, that's a very bipartisan vote. And it wasn't Democrats pushing it through the Legislative Branch. Republicans held 59 of 91 filled seats in the Senate and about 55% of the House in the 61st Congress.
After that, it went through the states comparatively quickly, with the required 36 approvals taking place in 42 months (with 19 of those 36 happening within a 6-month period in 1911 and 26 wit
Re: (Score:1)
No, money has marginal utility. Progressive taxation makes sense, a flat tax is wildly regressive and would lower receipts (which i know is the point underpinning these ideas, it's just starve-the-beast in tax form) as well as being actually unfair. [wikipedia.org]
A person making $1M can afford to pay more in tax receipts because they have by nature of making that $1M benefitted from the collective productive wealth we all contribute to. You benefit the most, you can pay the most, you will still be rich by the end of it.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, we tax business on profits not on gross income, it makes sense to tax people the same way. So deduct anything that a business would be able to deduct, food, utilities, travel and accommodation, morale-boosting expenses, etc. Maybe save some paperwork by figuring out a standard deduction.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe save some paperwork by figuring out a standard deduction.
Good idea, the IRS should look into that.
Re: Just use a Flat Tax (Score:2)
Maybe save some paperwork by figuring out a standard deduction.
Have you never filed a tax return?
Re: (Score:2)
it *will* create more earnings for more people circulating in the private sector than it would through direct redistribution.
This is true! That's why we give tax advantages to putting your money into investments and other things rather than just stashing it in savings. Taxes tend to increase the velocity of money as it's more advantageous to keep it moving and invested to defer taxes. Also one reason why we tax business profits and not revenue, a business losing money is spending money.
people's hard-earned money isn't really their own
What's printed on the money? What makes it worth anything than the paper it's printed on?
some people can be compelled into shouldering the burdens of people who may be relieved of the responsibility to pull their own weight.
I'm gonna meme but it's true, we do in fact "live in a
Re: (Score:2)
The social contract was so popular back in the day, that they ended up making it default to opt-in.
Also, having basic civil rights default to on, turned out to be an insanely popular safety feature, more popular than seat belts. Until sliced bread was invented, every cool invention was exaggeratedly praised as "the best thing since civil rights being on by default."
Re:Just use a Flat Tax (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't solve any of the problems that the IRS are facing with this project. It, in no way, eliminates the opportunity to cheat, the need for audits, nor the needs for credits, exceptions, and other sorts of special handling to support things like single moms, small business owners, property investments, and on and on.
There are places where some simplification of the tax code would provide some benefits, but this one in particular would benefit rich people the most...the more rich the greater the benefit. It's true that the wealthy would be paying more in absolute dollars, but that amount is significantly less burdensome to them than the same percentage is for a poor person struggling to make ends meet.
I suspect that this endless stream of delays is, ultimately, the result of a lack of compelling motivation. The people in charge of the conversion project have a system on-hand that works. Sure, it costs a lot to maintain, but those costs don't come out of the decision-maker's pockets. They come out of the taxpayer's pockets. It's "other people's money." So the motivation to upgrade is weak. Other issues that cross their desk have more impact on their day-to-day, so they tend to focus on those and to divert budget to resolving those and to allow this project to slip and slip and slip.
There might also be a competence issue on the part of the project managers. A huge project like this can't be successfully managed by just anyone. The labor pool is full of wannabe managers who think they can do this, who really have no clue how to get something like this over the finish line. I have no idea who hired the project managers for this or how competent they are, but when projects consistently fail like this it is invariably and primarily the fault of leadership.
They might like to blame their implementers, but that is still on them for poor hiring, motivating, and disciplinary practices.
Re: Just use a Flat Tax (Score:2)
To take a line from a popular movie:
"Forget it Jake, it's the federal government"
Really, Really big IT projects are not something they can do...
Remember the healthcare.gov website fiasco? They threw what, a half-billion dollars at it and it was, well, a fiasco.
Re: (Score:2)
And how do you tax companies? Same flat rate? 10% on millions of businesses that have a net profit of under 5%? Congratulations, you've just put a majority of the US workforce out of work.
Let them deduct costs? That's what we do now.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Politicians on both sides like to add tax break incentives for various things, creating a pile of rules. It would be hard to stop them from adding such.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Judaism and Catholocism aren't trying to run a nation-state (well, the Catholics used to).
Re: (Score:2)
Ahh i did forget about Vatican city
But VC isn't funded by tithes but rather the massive amount of propery the Church owns everywhere.
If we are talking about Israel the lowest tax rate is 10% and the highest is 50%
Re: Just use a Flat Tax (Score:2)
The lowest tax rate is probably 0%
Re: (Score:2)
Damn, TIL.
Does that go back to the vatican or just the local diocese though?
Re: (Score:2)
No, that would be double-dipping. The exemption as described would be $30,000, not $45,000.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it's a policy intended to incentivize marriage? Double dipping would be a feature, not a bug.
Hey, my hypothetical reading of this, is better than my competing hypothetical "Criminalize Loneliness" platform. I'd go with the lesser of two evils.
Re: (Score:2)
Bank interest and capital gains is where the rich make most of their income. No, ALL income must be considered ordinary income for a flat tax to work.