Yeah, I brought up this idea in my parent comment, but the part I'm unsure of is whether or not there's broad public support for making taxes simpler. The devil is in the details here. If making taxes simpler included removing the mortgage interest deduction or maybe the child tax credit, I could imagine the proposal being extremely unpopular. I think some republicans have included simpler taxes on their list of campaign promises, but there hasn't been a swelling consensus around the issue. Finally, complicated tax deductions are a way for the govt to incentivize certain behavior or have some fine tuned controls over revenue, so there's a reasonable justification to keep some complications. tldr I agree that turbotax (and probably others) have lobbied to keep taxes complicated, but unless there's evidence that the broad public really cares about this, I'm unsure that those donations really did anything. It's easy to vote in your donors' interests when the vote doesn't matter (or if you were already voting that way!)
No comments yet.