Just Who Is The Government To Tell Me I Can

Why won’t the government just tell me how much I owe in taxes?

For the IRS to determine how much taxes you owe would require an unacceptable government intrusion into the details of your life. To say nothing of the cost.The government knows how much your W-2 wages are, and your interest and dividends. That’s it. They do not know how much you paid for stocks that you bought ten years ago. They don’t know how many children you have, or whether they qualify as dependents, or what their dependent care costs might be. They don’t know what the closing inventory in your business is. They are not reading your car’s odometer. They don’t know what your medical bills are, nor should you want them to.Now, they can find out all this if they want to, and sometimes they do. This is called an audit or “examination”, and it often takes months of work and lots of hassle to the taxpayer. Sure enough, an audit ends with the government “telling you how much you owe”.What you are suggesting would be the equivalent of auditing every single person in the country.

Why do I have to figure out my taxes? Why can't the government just figure out what I owe and bill me?

In the USA, the main obstacle is tax preparers (Intuit who makes TurboTax, H&R Block, etc.) who lobby fiercely against “voluntary auto-filing” because they would lose a lot of business if filing taxes were simpler. So they consistently spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to prevent this from happening:How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing (Business Insider)The Tax Complexity Lobby (Forbes)TurboTax Maker Funnels Millions To Lobby Against Easier Tax Returns (TechCrunch)The tax-prep industry lobbies hard to keep Tax Day a torture for you (LA Times)Tax preparers lobby heavily against simple filing (Sunlight Foundation)Filing taxes could be free and simple, but H&R Block and Intuit are still lobbying against it (ProPublica)Here’s an excerpt from the last link above that summarizes one proposal for automatic filing from a few years back, and refuting some objections about easier filing. It’s pretty clear that the only losers from this proposal are tax preparers and others who have a vested interest in tax preparation staying complicated."It's voluntary," Austan Goolsbee, who served as the chief economist for the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, told ProPublica. "If you don't trust the government, you don't have to do it."Goolsbee has written in favor of the idea and published the estimate of $2 billion in saved preparation costs in a 2006 paper that also said return-free "could significantly reduce the time lag in resolving disputes and accelerate the time to receive a refund."Other advocates point out that the IRS would be doing essentially the same work it does now. The agency would simply share its tax calculation before a taxpayer files rather than afterward when it checks a return."When you make an appointment for a car to get serviced, the service history is all there. Since the IRS already has all that info anyway, it's not a big challenge to put it in a format where we could see it," said Paul Caron, a tax professor at University of Cincinnati College of Law. "For a big slice of the population, that's 100 percent of what's on their tax return."Taxpayers would have three options when they receive a pre-filled return: accept it as is; make adjustments, say to filing status or income; or reject it and file a return by other means.It should make us all very angry that our collective time is being wasted so a few companies can make a few more dollars!

Will the government ever tell the truth about UFOs?

I do not think so and I will tell you why.Just for argument's sake, let us pretend, that UFOS are alien spaceships with crews, doing research on earth.There are two possibilities.1.The Government knows about the problem, and has acquired advanced technology during intense negotiations with the visitors.2.The Government knows that alien craft are breaching American airspace, bur they have no clue where the visitors are coming from, what their intentions are and they are not able to stop the incursion on their airspace.I think, you will already catch my drift and you will know, what I am getting at.If the Government states on a live CNN press conference, that they know everything about the alien presence engaging the human race, they admit they have lied to their citizens for over 50 years.They risk citizens starting lawsuits against the government, in particular people who have suffered from the abduction phenomenon.On the other hand, If, during the live CNN press conference the Government openly states, that the phenomenon is real, but that they are at a loss on how to deal with the situation, that they do not know anything about the visitors or their intentions, blind panic amongst the population might ensue.If the Government freely admits, that an unknown alien force is free to breach American airspace with impunity, twenty four seven and there is not a thing they can do about it, that will not help in encouraging more trust in the Government(to say the least).This is the reason, why the Government is in a bind and why they consider it in their best interest to keep on denying the alien presence.Greetings,Robert.