In my country (Netherlands), the IRS itself provides the software. Once a year, you download and run it. Everything is prefilled: income from work, bank accounts, mortgages.
So if you're a boring, financially stable person, the entire process is literally next -> next -> next -> submit.
Filling out tax forms is not a value-add economic activity, so I have no idea why you'd insist on free market, nor do I understand the classic American anti-government stance.
If we have solved this a decade ago, why can't you?
Your question is, why isn't the federal government of the United States, a country of 330M people, as efficient and effective as the government of the Netherlands, a country of 17M people?
Large organizations are less efficient than small organizations. This is true even in private enterprise. Large bloated, centralized government bureaucracies are the most inefficient of all.
Part of the "classic American anti-government stance" comes from the realization that American society is too large and too diverse to be effectively governed by a centralized bureaucracy. This is why you hear people complaining about "state's rights".
However, for people who explicitly wish to control society and don't care about efficiency, centralized power is great. It means they only have to win one argument to impose their will on 330M people, not 50 separate arguments. This is why so much attention is paid to the federal government in the US, as opposed to state or local government.
You just made me roll my eyes back into my head. If the situations were reversed, you'd be saying "you're expecting a tiny country to compete with the vast resources of the United States?!".
Fact is, there's literally no reason we can't or shouldn't be doing this. My tax returns are super boring, and the IRS already knows what they are. Just send me a damn form that says "this is what we think you owe, if we're correct sign and return it".
The only way your argument has any merit is if we start talking about going back to no income tax. Which is an argument worth having, but your current argument is simply absurd.
> Your question is, why isn't the federal government of the United States, a country of 330M people, as efficient and effective as the government of the Netherlands, a country of 17M people?
Holy fuck, can't you Yanks just fucking stop pulling this idiotic non-argument out of your arses every time a comparison with any other country is made?!?
Sure, your pool of people to be taxed is X times bigger than some other country... But your pool of people who could be tax administrators IS ALSO exactly X times bigger than theirs! Holy fucking fuck, how stupid does one have to be not to see that?!?
No, I'm just countering your assumption, because that seemed to be your objection.
In actual fact, of course, you wouldn't need anywhere near that many: This is all done by software nowadays, not bespectacled men with green eyeshades, quill pens, and big ledgers. Sure, being so much bigger, you might have more weird edge cases and exceptions... But although your population is twenty times bigger than the Netherlands', your number of kinds of edge cases and exceptions will be far lower than that. And you only need exception code for each kind of edge case. So your larger population will actually allow you to use fewer resources, proportionally, to build an equivalent system; not more.
...which is why I'm against having an entire corporation like Intuit inserted between me and the government I'm trying to pay taxes to. Your opinion that administrators are suddenly fine when they're a corporation is absurd.
Sometimes large organizations are less efficient than small organizations due to bureaucracy, and sometimes they are more efficient due to economies of scale. In this case, a large country is more diverse than a small country, but it also has a better access to the necessary expertise.
Coming from a small European country, I'm familiar with a failure mode that does not exist in the federal government of the US (but can be seen in smaller states). Sometimes the government performs badly, because it would need expertise that is not available in the market. Everyone who is good at a specific thing already has a job and is not interested in getting a new one.
I believe the root issue here is that efficiency is not a fundamental value in the US in the same way it is in many European countries (I'm thinking Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and the Nordic countries). Meanwhile, decentralization is a fundamental value. Americans on the average do not want the government to be efficient, because it would require a level of centralization they would be uncomfortable with. For example, with centralized reporting, it would be reasonable to expect that 80-90% of people do not have to file taxes in any particular year, because the government already knows every relevant piece of information about them.
Another issue is that the US is already far more centralized than the EU. The federal government is a major actor, with an almost 20x bigger share of the GDP than the EU. There is an uneasy balance of power between the federal government and the states, with neither party clearly superior to the other. Nobody has an indisputable authority to change things, which I guess is another reason why American bureaucracy is so inefficient.
Population size doesn't matter for taxes, yet having many different types of rules (perhaps at state level?) could indeed be a complicating factor. If that's the case, I'll take your word for it.
But do hear me out once more. The dutch tax system is anything but simple. It has an extremely complex rule set.
And because it is so complex, leaving the understanding of it to citizens has led to an enormous burden of processing and correcting faulty entries, staffing massive support desks, and so on.
So they solved complexity, centrally. The rules are just as complex as before, but the process and UI make it a breeze for a good 75%.
With this I mean to say that complexity is in fact another reason to solve things centrally. Why would you want to spread complexity around?
I'm not talking about taxes in particular, I'm just talking about government in general.
The US federal government is 20x larger than that of the Netherlands. The US is also more economically, socially, and ethnically diverse than the Netherlands. Larger systems are harder to manage.
In my country (Netherlands), the IRS itself provides the software. Once a year, you download and run it. Everything is prefilled: income from work, bank accounts, mortgages.
So if you're a boring, financially stable person, the entire process is literally next -> next -> next -> submit.
Filling out tax forms is not a value-add economic activity, so I have no idea why you'd insist on free market, nor do I understand the classic American anti-government stance.
If we have solved this a decade ago, why can't you?