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Land of the fee™
Home of the slave.
for some perspective:
canada’s federal tax website lists all of the free services that you can utilize, and they even include NetFile so you don’t have to upload or submit any of your docuements.
i hear we’re looking for new provinces…
I’d vote to join a Canadian union if it ever shows up on my state’s ballot. It never will but I would. The South is a disgusting backwater of “divine” hatred.
i don’t want to sound like an old fuddy, but you sound just like some of your great-great-granparents :P
My great great grandparents didn’t live in America. There’s also the difference that I’d want to leave to escape a culture of greed, fascism and hatred while the Southern states wanted to secede to continue owning other human beings as livestock.
A million dollars is all it takes to buy whatever laws you want? That’s a really good deal for Intuit.
Remember all those (exactly) 1 million dollar “donations” all those CEOs were giving to Trump’s inaugural campaign? Those weren’t donations, they were bribes and kissing of the ring. Pledge loyalty (and pay a small fee) and the government will work for you.
Except if you’re Google or Facebook. Trump will accept your money and still fuck you over. Why anyone trusts him is beyond me.
They don’t trust him, but they don’t want to get on his bad side. They’re basically hoping that he’ll ignore them or forget about them, and focus his attention on his other enemies.
Worked out for Apple. Timmy Cook was able to get an exemption on the tariffs for cell phones.
There are a huge swath of self-serving, inwardly thinking, assholes that see themselves in Trump. That’s why they love him. With him leading they can be unabashedly racist and sexist… in other words they get to be themselves.
Politicians are cheap, I remember once seeing a list of how much a lobbyist buys support from politicians for and the list was like $5k $2k $3k $6k. It’s ridiculous
That’s affordable. Maybe I’ll buy one
Now you need to save it for your tax filing fees
It’s much more complicated than that though. The lobbying firms hire people who are former politicians or former senior staffers who have all kinds of contacts all over Washington. Getting those guys on the payroll is extremely expensive.
Then, those lobbyists generally don’t just go off and bribe someone. They build and strengthen relationships. They know all the pain points that the politicians have, and they just make things easier. If a politician’s staffer is having trouble finding a good place to live in DC, the lobbyist knows a guy who knows a guy who can get them a great apartment.
Eventually, the lobbyist isn’t this guy who tries to get the politician to change some laws. He’s basically part of the team. So, when new legislation comes up, the whole team works on it together, including the lobbyist.
The end result is that the $5k or whatever is only the direct contribution to the politician’s re-election campaign or something. Most of the spending is hiring the lobbyist and paying all his/her various expenses that make them indispensable for the politician, so that they can step in at the right time.
They’re cheap because they fully believe in ideologies that screw everybody else. They’re not doing it for the cash but for their god.
Politicians get their jobs through an eagerness to bootlick capital.
If only voters were smart enough to vote for better people.
That’s the number we get to see.
your political system is already based on legalized bribery and this is where you draw the line? lmao. Lobbying has destroyed america for a century.
This is from 1889. Literally nothing has changed. Go back 1000 years and it’s the same fucking shit. Even 3000 years ago in Egypt. It’s always rich vs everybody else just in different outfits.
Karl Marx
The Civil War in France
Written: July 1870 - May 1871Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate, powerful section of the nation than in North America. There, each of the two great parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions.
Here we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it.
I want another Teddy Roosevelt in office.
Fuck man even after trust busting, those companies were then and still are stupid big and powerful and maddeningly enriching to the 1%
At least we have shiny toys now built on the backs of global labor exploitation. That’s cool.
We really should be moving to direct voting.
Representative democracies are tool of the ruling class to subvert control from the working class.
The fact <0.00001% of the people you come across mention direct voting in a democracy should be an indicator at how successful the ruling class has been at controlling the narrative.
I’ve realized why this is the case.
Nations are modern-day fiefdoms. If you’re not a member of the ruling class, then you’re not supposed to have any say in how a nation is run. Modern politics is a song and dance around serving the ruling class as much as possible while convincing workers it’s in their best interests.
Class traitors need to be ostracized more often.
Legalized bribery is only bad when the other team is in office. When your team is bribed, it’s handy so they can run again in 4 years. Just don’t ask them to do any campaign promises that go against their donors.
What other team? A non shit country has like 10 parties that come and go regularly as time moves on.
Amen
It was founded on lies and lobbying. Remember “taxation without representation”? Americans were on a 90% tax discount compared to the British. America was founded off the back of the particularly idiotic, greedy and gullible, and they’ve continued on that path to present. And some fool gave them weapons.
Fuck Intuit!
It’s a little late now, but don’t forget that FreeTaxUSA is free for federal and cheap for state. Also much less annoying to use than Intuit TurboTax. They don’t do those fake loading animations like “checking the best deal!” As if a computer can’t do like a billion of those a second.
If I had to guess, this is a holdover from the 90s where people didn’t trust a quick calculation, and probably doubted the application was properly choosing the standard or itemized deductions.
Usually it’s to fool people into thinking something is happening when nothing is happening.
It’s also to make them think that something is more complicated than it actually is.
They don’t do those fake loading animations like “checking the best deal!”
This shit should be fucking illegal, especially with something like tax filing software.
Genuinely amazing. They are easier to use than turbo tax in my experience.
Turbo tax made 1.6 BILLION in income. And that’s not enough. They need to lobby and change the landscape of the countries tax system to generate even more profit on top of the profit they already made.
This isn’t capitalism anymore this is something else entirely. It’s a metal disorder. A disease.
This isn’t capitalism anymore this is something else entirely.
That’s the thing, it is capitalism. It’s always been about those who have more exploiting those who have less.
The problem is this generation of workers has been duped into believing that corporate profits are a good thing, rather than an indication of workers getting taken advantage of.
It’s all bass-ackwards by design. I stopped trying to find rhyme or reason and just settled on “most people are dumb as shit.”
Capitalism demands that line must always go up.
Line goes up means businesses are taking advantage of customers.
Line goes down means customers are taking advantage of businesses.
Why are customers cheering when line goes up and angry when line goes down? Oh yeah, they’re useful idiots.
Well also, most people have been forced into a retirement system that makes line go up make everyday person happy. Cutting off the nose to something…
And this is just taxes. Capital also do this with our health, water, air, etc.
Intuit has been doing this for a long time, just in case anyone was wondering why $1 million seems like a low bribe. And it goes beyond preventing you from filing your taxes for free, with one of their goals being to make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible, so you are too frustrated to do it yourself.
This if from a 2019 Pro Publica article:
But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.
For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that, according to internal company and IRS documents and interviews with insiders. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.”
Internal presentations lay out company tactics for fighting “encroachment,” Intuit’s catchall term for any government initiative to make filing taxes easier — such as creating a free government filing system or pre-filling people’s returns with payroll or other data the IRS already has. “For a decade proposals have sought to create IRS tax software or a ReturnFree Tax System; All were stopped,” reads a confidential 2007 PowerPoint presentation from an Intuit board of directors meeting. The company’s 2014-15 plan included manufacturing “3rd-party grass roots” support. “Buy ads for op-eds/editorials/stories in African American and Latino media,” one internal PowerPoint slide states.
Imagine paying to file taxes, lmao
That’s called bribery in my country. It’s disgusting and very prevalent here but at least we don’t embellish the idea with polite terminology 😂
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
Trump could have held the Saudis up for $50 billion on Inauguration Day 2016. Five minutes with the ambassador and he could have walked away with plenty of loot.
Yosemite Sam could have figured it out.
Some of this is about accepting bribes. A lot more is simply ideology.
Trump’s people do not believe the IRS should exist and they are trying to dismantle it. DirectFile is just low hanging fruit, intended to make people more frustrated with tax filing and more easy to radicalized in an attempt dismantle and replace with tariffs.
Like, this is a real decades long project that goes way beyond Trump. Abolishing the income tax was Goldwater’s wet dream.
I agree with you that the Project 2025 folks are important, but I’m talking about Trump in particular.
The shoes, the NFTs, and the crypto schemes are all about fleecing his own people.
There was a lottery where the top prize was dinner at the white House with POTUS. They ran it for months and there was never a single winner.
I think he really likes stealing from poor people. Either that or he’s too chicken to go toe to toe with someone who might hit back.
Add to that that Grover Norquist runs an organization called Americans for Tax Reform. GOP politicians all have to sign a pledge with them that they will never vote for a tax increase or for anything to make filing taxes easier.
Supposedly, this is because if taxes are easy to file, Americans won’t hate them enough and it makes it easier for the government to raise taxes. But, it’s awfully convenient that this is exactly what Intuit, H&R Block, etc. all want too.
I don’t you understand who actually controls the petrol-dollar.
There’s… there’s a tax on taxes??
They might call it something like a convenience fee.
Funniest part is how they’re bribing the government with the money they took from customers. Now they can take more money from customers, which is more money for bribes.
It also means they didn’t need to charge customers the prices they charged, since they have enough money to operate their business and bribe politicians.
It’s like, you’re paying them to work against you.
So backwards, but that’s by design. Don’t be a useful idiot.
If you know someone who works for one of these companies, you should ostracize them.
Stop giving free passes to people making our society worse.
I mean I feel like it depends on their role in the company. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing the work they do. I know at least a few people who work in billing for a healthcare company that don’t want to do that work and understand it’s bad but don’t really have another choice as they couldn’t get any other jobs. I’m not gonna blame someone for working at a bad company unless they’re like an executive or other high up person who could take their skills to a different industry.
Anyone who advocates for ostracizing fellow workers indiscriminately is doing it in order to keep the working class bogged down in endless internal feuds instead of organizing. Solidarity is the only solution.
Solidarity should also involve being united on what work is acceptable and what is not.
This doesn’t seem indiscriminate to me. I think we 100% should judge people who work for evil corporations, regardless of what their position is.
Wait, so I wasn’t supposed to punch that guy in the janitors uniform in the dick just because he said Intuit (turns out he was saying “into it”)?
Then they should do their job exactly as half-assedly as it’s possible to do without actually being fired. Steal coffee and creamer from the kitchen. Steal toilet paper. Accidentally deleted System32 on the office computer. Open all file attachments and links in emails. Crop-dust the bosses office. Start office rumours to sow discord and erode company loyalty. Slip and fall on a stair, go on extended paid medical leave. When fired, sue for wrongful termination, crowdfund the legal fees
That’s a fair strategy if you actually can organize with other people at your work to do things like that. But it still does rely on having enough stability to get fired and not end up homeless while getting a new job or trying to sue. Crowdfunding can work if you happen to get lucky and your story gets picked up by lots of people, but it can also reach no one and leave you with nothing. So at the end of the day it’s gonna come down to organizing, if only there was some kind of organized body of workers you could form to fight policies that are bad for people in general along with being bad for the workers.
Million dollar is practically nothing for this kind of company, they will net billions from this.
Even their corruption is incompetent.
Historically senators and representatives side with companies who’ve only given them thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in contributions. It’s very cheap to buy a vote.
Though often there’s also the understanding that a career spent supporting them will be rewarded with a cushy, high-paying lobbying job once they leave politics. Or paid speaking gigs if you’re the President.
It’s not incompetent to give someone a penny and have them give you back $100. That’s a great investment. So I would have to say their corruption is very confident if they can give a million dollar bribe and get back a billion dollars of revenue.
I meant that the administration (i.e. Trump) is incompetent for selling the country for pennies.
Art of the deal baby
I think they mean the government corruption. How cheap it is to buy votes. You can buy a Supreme Court justice with an RV.
I’ll stick to FreeTaxUsa even if they charge me. Fuck Intuit.
