Globalism has ruined that entirely, and there’s no amount of implying these people are closed minded or incurious that will make them change their mind on this issue.

But since you asked, here you go: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/microsoft-...

Because other government programs waste money, it must be okay that this one did too?

Congress put $15M in the Inflation Reduction Act for the purpose of a study. If they wanted to spend $41M or $400M, don't you think they would have written that number into the law instead?

> But I do not understand why creating a system and letting people use it would be a problem

I don't know how to say this in any other way: it's because it was not authorized by law. That reason alone is sufficient.

This attitude of "well it was for a good cause, I suppose we can just ignore the law in this instance" is the root of many of our problems in this country. At its root it's really just "the ends justify the means" thinking.

Today it may be something you support. But tomorrow it's deportations or illegal recess appointments or unlawful searches and seizures. When you allow certain laws to be enforced and others to be ignored you set the stage for tyranny.

In many ways we are reaping the harvest of this lax attitude toward how laws are executed in this country. I hope this program serves as an object lesson in why complying with the law may seem tedious but is actually the bedrock of our constitutional order.

No one is forcing me to use such a system today, but I was also assured that if I liked my doctor I could keep my doctor, and that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You are naive if you think the government will act altruistically.

> I do not because it won't be a black box anymore than your tax preparer is a black box

How can you say that with any amount of certainty?

Congress asked the IRS to conduct a feasibility study and instead they went and created a full blown system to accept and process tax returns, in violation of what they were statutorily required to do, spending millions beyond what they were legally authorized to.

If they can't even do the study correctly and in good faith, what assurance does anyone have that they won't build a system that will be used to abuse taxpayers? If the government wants me to trust them, then they should act in a trustworthy manner.

> I'm going to make a guess that you've never lived outside of the US.

I'm going to make a guess that you've never studied history.

> If it means that the lowest incomes now get their $1000 dollar credit and get to keep it, I think that's a lot of money for a lot of them.

I too like it when poor people get money they're entitled to. But that doesn't mean we need to bend over backwards and give the IRS massive new powers to accomplish that goal.

There are tradeoffs involved that need to be seriously considered when giving an agency that has consistently abused its power for at least a century more power in the service of that goal. [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_allegations_of_misuse_...

All slopes are slippery. The question is to what degree, and my contention is that this slope is far more slippery than most people want to admit. You are welcome to make the argument that the slope is actually not that steep, but you're going to have to bring more to the table than the insult that my concerns are no more than "religious belief."

A buddy of mine took the home office deduction for a few years in the late 1990’s. He read the law and was in compliance with it. The IRS audited him and claimed he was not eligible. He lawyered up and spent thousands of dollars fighting it. He was ultimately successful, but his subsequent distrust of government was entirely merited.

Tax preparers at least have incentives to compete with each other on price and quality of service. They also often guarantee return accuracy. Tax law can be complicated and there are legitimate questions about how to treat certain kinds of income or expenses. These are questions you really don’t want the government making unilaterally.

And if you really hate tax preparers, you can always file a paper return for free using forms available from the post office, as my father and I do to this day. And honestly, if a taxpayer doesn’t owe federal taxes, submitting a paper form 1040 is the simplest route. Slap your W2 income on there and fill the rest out and you’re done. No fees, just a stamp and envelope.

A direct file system will inevitably morph into a black box where the government tells you an arbitrary tax liability amount and 99% of taxpayers just accept it at face value and pay it. You really see no problems with such a system?

Arguments of the form “everybody else is doing it, can’t be that bad” are not compelling, in my opinion. Slavery was common everywhere for a long time. I suppose that made it a good thing?

The government entrenches its power by implementing programs that hand out benefits at the cost of your liberty. Those benefits are always popular, and the loss of liberty is only realized after it is far to late to ever get it back.

But hey, the government claims people saved an average of $240 a year and 6 hours of tax preparation time because of this system. What a smashing success!

Despite Congress appropriating only $15M to do the study, the program managed to blow through at least $41M, likely more.[1] This included advertising costs in some states to encourage taxpayers to use the system.

This would be like your boss asking you to send him an email about the pros and cons of adding a feature, and you going and implementing the feature, pushing it to production, and then asking customers for feedback on it.

Whether or not the feature was a success is 100% irrelevant. That’s not how things should be done. We are a nation of laws, and even if the program was a smashing success, there needs to be accountability.

1. https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/131/Report-Replacemen...

Given the massive amount of IRS shenanigans over the years, it is easy to imagine certain groups unfavored by the government conveniently being led to file returns that cause them to miss out on subsidies they are actually eligible for, or to pay higher taxes based on filing their return in correct but unfavorable ways resulting in higher tax payments than necessary.

This risk is particularly high given that the program was intended for and marketed to low income filers who typically rely on their tax preparer as an advocate to ensure their tax payment is as low as legally possible.

As other comments have mentioned, the program also exceeded statutory authority. Congress authorized the IRS to study a direct file system, not implement one on a permanent basis. It is a good thing when our government is restrained after it oversteps legal boundaries.

This is especially true in the case of this program because it was being intentionally implemented on a massive scale in order to make it politically unpopular to shut down. A program that allows 10% of all tax payers in 25 states is obviously much more than a study.

I wouldn’t class this IRS project as anywhere near the the magnitude of complexity or impact of the projects you mentioned though.

Go read up on the Final Solution. The nazis tried to expel the Jews before killing them. The industrialized genocide they’re infamous for didn’t start in earnest until 1942, right when significant US combat involvement began. The pace of killing increased as they saw the writing on the wall and realized they would likely lose the war.

In 1940 there were plans to send the Jews to Madagascar but the allied blockade made such plans untenable. The general state of combat in Europe toward the end of the war also made leaving on foot impossible.

Additionally the US did next to nothing to stop the genocide throughout the course of the war, save accept some Jewish refugees. US involvement accelerated Hitler’s desire to kill the Jews quickly but did nothing to prevent Hitler’s death camps from operating. Railways to the camps were generally not considered strategic objectives and weren’t bombed, despite ample knowledge of what was happening.

None of this is to excuse any of the actions taken by the Nazis, but again, history is path dependent, and absent US involvement things turn out very differently. Jews might have been mostly deported en masse instead of killed on an industrial scale in concentration camps. Many of them are more able to escape on foot because Europe isn’t blown to bits and swarming with allied troops fighting the Nazis.

Many East Germans, Hungarians, and Ukrainians would vehemently disagree with your claim they were better off with the postwar “peace.” The concentration camps the Nazis invented were perfected by the Soviets, and given perfect hindsight, it’s not clear to me most would choose a to be “liberated” by the Soviets in a war to destroy the occupying Nazis knowing how everything would turn out.

Were the Nazis evil? 100%. Did the US have to fight them when and how they did? Or even at all? To reiterate my original point, the answer to that question is much less clear and a good argument can be made that US involvement was counterproductive.

The history of Europe is one of unending conflict all the way back to Roman times. So what if Hitler controls all of Europe?

From an American perspective very little changes. Had Hitler not been beligerent toward the British and allowed trade with the US to continue there was basically no reason for the US to be involved.

Everyone would likely have been better off: 30 million civilian deaths could have been avoided, the iron curtain moves much farther east and millions more avoid the purges and starvation under the rule of the USSR after Europe us divided at the end of the war.

An alternate universe exists where Operation Barbarossa is successful because Hitler is not fighting a war on two fronts, and the USSR is either fragmented or controlled by Germany and the Cold War never even commences.

Additionally, Europe doesn’t become defacto occupied by the US for decades and atrophy to the point where half their cities are smaller than they were a few generations ago.

I personally don’t think such an outcome would have been better, but a strong argument can be made, and making it doesn’t mean you’re a nazi.

Oh, if that’s how you build hardware then sure, hardware isn’t hard to do at all.

DAs used to go after particularly egregious offenders and throw the book at them. This creates incentive effects for all the other would be criminals. It doesn’t take all that much enforcement before criminals get the idea and stop or are put in jail for decades.

Instead we have prosecutors going after all the wrong kinds of crime. Murderers are getting no cash bail while guys who cut down a tree in their yard are getting visits from the police and court summons for non-crimes.

This is intentional policy from DA offices. Pay attention next time your DA is up for reelection, they impact your quality of life far more than your representatives.

In the short term they can increase their profits by reducing quality and designing their product so that it must be serviced at an OEM shop, but this will come at the expense of future sales when customers take these increased repair costs into account and buy from other manufacturers who don’t engage in these tactics.

This is why competition is so important: without it, buyers have no alternative and manufacturers have no incentive to provide value instead of fleecing thier customers by providing an inferior product with expensive repair options only.