I hate how this story is always framed as the fault of evil TurboTax/Intuit. They are simply lobbying for their continued existence. Countless companies do that. The real villains of this story are the politicians who TurtboTax/Intuit have successfully lobbied.
The problem isn't people trying to influence the government to do the wrong thing. The problem is the government can so easily be convinced to do the wrong thing.
> The problem isn't people trying to influence the government to do the wrong thing. The problem is the government can so easily be convinced to do the wrong thing.
It's both.
If you tried to change the government to fix lobbying, every company would lobby against it. It wouldn't pass.
Also I don't really want to hear about how American citizens need to fix their government when they have no time for civic engagement. Independent polls show the US Govt has misaligned priorities to what the people want, and they often have a rock bottom approval rating.
Let's start by making voting days holidays, guarantee a livable minimum wage, guarantee time off like the rest of the sane world, let that marinade for a while, then let's criticize people for their lack of engagement.
Trending outrage seems to be the only way to move the needle at the moment so trying to undermine this article is also undermining progress.
>Trending outrage seems to be the only way to move the needle at the moment so trying to undermine this article is also undermining progress.
I am pointing out the root of the problem is not TurboTax/Intuit but instead the government. Your comment is effectively the doing the same thing to my comment that I did to this article so I don't understand your criticism that I was "undermining progress". It isn't like "making voting days holidays, guarantee a livable minimum wage, guarantee time off like the rest of the sane world" is a much easier to accomplish political goal than "fix lobbying".
I certainly do blame our politicians for bowing to this type of lobbying, but I think it's a little weak to claim that the companies that do the lobbying deserve a pass. Asking your government to adopt policies that is actively against the interests of most of the people in the country is immoral, regardless of the reasoning behind it.
> Asking your government to adopt policies that is actively against the interests of most of the people in the country is immoral, regardless of the reasoning behind it.
To solve the problem, you can either liquidate all immoral people, or harden government against the desires of immoral people. Eliminating Intuit would just result in a new company picking up where they left off. Blaming and condemning Intuit is a no-op and a waste of time.
"It's not my fault slavery is legal and I'm profiting off of it!"-Thomas Jefferson, probably
Fully agree with you that saying "This rent seeking entity with a will of its own and deep pockets to spend on lobbying, is solely a byproduct of a broken system and not also fundamentally culpable at this point for the continuation of that system". Governments and corporations are made of people who make a choice. If a company choses to profit off a bad thing the government wants to do, we can decry the industry as well.
At some point there was a complex tax code, and TurboTax et. al. didn't exist yet and were not to blame for it. At this point, they do exist and they must share in the blame.
>Asking your government to adopt policies that is actively against the interests of most of the people in the country is immoral
My point was that this is something we all do. I have never met a single person who was always on the side of the greater good for every single political issue. I don't think voting or lobbying for your own interests is inherently immoral. If it is, basically all of democracy and capitalism is immoral.
Who cares? Complain to the Pope about immorality, and he'll make sure they go to Hell. While you work on that, hopefully someone is working on making tax filing simpler, and preventing lobbyists from blocking that effort.
So every time you have decided to drive your car somewhere instead of take public transportation you are being immoral? The reason we need nuance here is without it we are all evil people contributing to the destruction of the planet.
Well, yes, that was the point. I was highlighting the ridiculous of the previous comment’s universal statement that anything selfish that harms others is immoral. There is nuance here that a statement like that ignores.
If you tried to change the government to fix lobbying, every company would lobby against it. It wouldn't pass.
That's primarily because it would be unconstitutional to "fix" lobbying, at least they way detractors of the practice would likely consider adequate. It's right there in the First Amendment next to freedom of speech:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Totally. I've had this argument with some of my lawyer friends. I admit that "fixing" lobbying is a complex issue that does not have one simple answer.
But one thing it shows is that the American democratic process is supremely broken, because we don't seem to be able to punish our bad politicians who are accepting bribes. All you have to do is look at the average age and tenure of the senate compared to approval ratings and it tells it's own story.
My last point is that money is not speech, corporations are not people, and one person equals one vote. If you etched all that in legal framework you would totally still have lobbying, but I'd like to think it would help.
Bribery is illegal. Even of the form often presupposed on HN threads: "Congressman, if you vote for this bill, Exxon will make sure you have hundreds of donors contributing thousands each to your next campaign." I'm 100% sure such quid pro quos still happen, but because they're unambiguously against the law, they represent at most a tiny fraction of the lobbying dollars that flow through DC.
Most lobbying is boring stuff like proposed amendment drafting, outreach to Congressional and agency staff, highly targeted issue & message test polling, ...
"Independent polls show the US Govt has misaligned priorities to what the people want"
are you saying you think people in power care about the people they rule over?
"Let's start by making voting days holidays"
if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow you to do it. they literally shot JFK, the elected president, almost 60 years ago. the idea that everything is not completely fucked at this point, is so incredibly naiive.
> if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow you to do it.
They don't have to disallow it, just make it difficult and inconvenient. The loud part is "election security". The quiet part is "voter suppression".
Like, why the hell do so many states only allow a SINGLE day to vote? I can understand not trusting the mail-in voting that Oregon and some other states do, but certainly we can all agree that letting the polls be open for multiple days with long hours would be a good thing, right?
> "Let's start by making voting days holidays"
I hate that there has been such a push for this. It's not going to increase turnout. It will not increase turnout from people that work emergency services, and will lower turnout for people that work customer-facing jobs like retail and restaurants. Just ask your cashier how easy it is for them to get Labor Day, Memorial Day, or Independence Day off of work. They will laugh in your face.
Companies are not alive. The human beings running Intuit are lobbying for the continued existence of an unnecessary and harmful organization. That is unethical/immoral/evil behavior. Accepting their bribes is also evil behavior. There's no need to pick the "real villains", everyone involved is a villain.
It's true that some employees would be hurt if Intuit went out of business, but paying someone doesn't magically make their behavior acceptable. You can't pay someone to harass people on the street and then say "sorry, I can't stop or my harasser will lose their income, the real villains here are the police for letting me do this."
>I hate how this story is always framed as the fault of evil TurboTax/Intuit. They are simply lobbying for their continued existence.
Fascinating way to reframe this as a natural survival instinct of...checks notes... a corporate entity. An entity that exists at the government's pleasure, and whose charter can be revoked by said government.
Let's reframe your own logic:
> The real villains of this story are the politicians who TurtboTax/Intuit have successfully lobbied.
The politicians did nothing illegal by accepting the lobbying on behalf of TurboTax, after all. Under what rule or law would you punish them? Surely you can not fault politicians for earning money to continue to survive in politics, no?
You can go in circles with this kind of thinking.
Instead, we should look at outcomes. What do we want to happen with taxes? Ideally the government sends you pre-filled paperwork. Who is opposing this outcome? Intuit. Hence they are villians.
>The politicians did nothing illegal by accepting the lobbying on behalf of TurboTax, after all. Under what rule or law would you punish them? Surely you can not fault politicians for earning money to continue to survive in politics, no?
First off, I never said anything about a legal punishment. Secondly, politicians are ostensibly supposed to act for the good of their constituents. Corporations are motivated to act for the good of their shareholders. In this situation TurboTax/Intuit is operating as it is expected/supposed to act while the politicians are not.
I'm confused why you are holding politicians to a standard that you are unwilling to apply to corporate entities, who serve politicians explicitly via the government and their corporate charter. Either both are acting according to their interests and we should examine outcomes, or neither are, and the system is broken.
Because the corporations are acting amorally while the politicians are acting immorally. Corporations are not obligated to better society. Politicians are. The corporations are ignoring something that is outside their responsibility. The politicians are ignoring something that is within their responsibility.
"Corporations" don't act. The people who manage them do. These acts are not amoral; they have real consequences for real people, and need to be judged as such.
Corporations may not be obliged to better society, but it is entirely reasonable for me to look upon them unfavorably when their management intentionally and knowingly takes actions that make life worse for most people.
It is very strange that you believe that an entity can engage with a government but then be absolved of all responsibility for the outcome of that engagement.
This weekend I drove to the beach when I could have just sat in my house all day. I personally benefitted by receiving a relaxing afternoon at the expense of creating extra pollution for everyone else on the planet to deal with. By your definition that is evil and therefore we are all evil.
I think this is where you erred in your reasoning:
> The corporations are ignoring something that is outside their responsibility.
Intuit is actively lobbying about tax preparation, ergo it is their responsibility, ergo they can be judged for their actions on it. In general you are correct, in the specifics here, you are incorrect.
>"this as a natural survival instinct of... checks notes ... a corporate entity"
There is no need for the glib "checks notes" snark on a forum like this. I feel like it undermines the argument and makes the post come across as adversarial rather than constructive.
Truly. At some point, there is a person with far more money than their family would ever need, even only counting annual interest earned instead of principal.
Current CEO has net worth of >$100 million. In fairness, the poorest board member of intuit has half a dozen positions earning $150,000 to $350,000 and _may_ not have accumulated true financial independence. But other board members have over $200 Million.
Those people make the following decision Every. Single. Year: “let’s try to get the government to make taxes far harder and riskier for hundreds of millions of Americans so that I can be even more rich than I already am.”
It would be more excusable if they merely hadn’t lobbied for Americans at all, someone else did, and they reacted quickly to additionally reap the benefits of the same policy.
But when you are already well past having all the money your family could ever need, and choose to try to get the government to fuck over hundreds of millions of people, then the blame
lands on you just as much as the politician.
I think if you are going to be charitable, they aren’t just looking after their own bottom line. Intuit employs 14,000 people, so they are also doing as much as possible to keep their jobs.
Of course, that is still a drop in the bucket compared to how many people suffer because of their lobbying, but it isn’t about simply one person being greedy for themselves.
TurboTax/Intuit are bad guys for other reasons. Like trying to mislead customers like the article details, but I don't think lobbying the government to ensure their industry is not eradicated is necessarily immoral. They have perfectly reasonable motivations there. Most of us would act the same way in their position. It isn't their job to consider the societal ramifications of those laws. It is the governments job to see that lobbying and not let it outweigh the clear societal harm in just acquiescing to TurboTax/Intuit.
Perhaps the real bad guys are those same politicians, or others, that make the tax code so damn complicated that 50% or more of the population don't stand a chance of comprehending it.
If you're W2, and you have kids or 1099s the gov already knows about, there should be no need to file at all. State and local governments should tap into the federal feed, and there should also be no filing there. Any discrepancy that results in a bill or refund gets automatically sent out.
The amount of time wasted to do taxes, even a simple 1040EZ, is staggering. The fact that people with relatively simple tax situations are persuaded to use expensive filing services (H&R) or crappy software is criminal.
> ...people with relatively simple tax situations are persuaded to use expensive filing services (H&R)...
And when you go to an H&R Block office, you're talking with someone who doesn't really know taxes at all. They are just filling out forms like you might do yourself.
When my ex-wife and I had separated but were still legally married, she went to an H&R Block office and the tax preparer told her that she could file single. (No, you can't. It's married filing jointly or married filing separately.)
She also said our adult daughter didn't need to file at all because her income was below the filing threshold. (Yes, she did need to file because at the time she was on an ACA/Obamacare health plan.)
It's bad when I know more about taxes than the "expert" at H&R Block.
The problem isn't people trying to influence the government to do the wrong thing. The problem is the government can so easily be convinced to do the wrong thing.