Put big money on big money interests to win the fight over free government income tax software

Opponents offer transparently self-interested and wildly paranoid argument against giving citizens the option

7-27-2023,(issue No. 98)

This week

• The IRS wants to help you file your taxes — The tax prep companies are opposed

• Last week’s winning tweet

• News and Views

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• John Greenfield defends the idea of lower speed limits in Chicago

• What are you going to do with that money? Buy a nicer coffin?

• Mary Schmich — Quoting E.L. Doctorow

• “The Mincing Rascals” preview

• Re:Tweets — Featuring the winner of the visual tweets poll and this week’s finalists

• Tune of the Week — “Fourth of July” by Sufjan Stevens, nominated by Colleen Kujawa

File this idea under ‘sorry, not gonna happen’

It’s absurd when you think of it: We pay taxes in part to support a government tax collection system that’s so off-putting that most people have to pay a private company if they want a simplified online interface to help them fill out the tax forms.

Shouldn’t the Internal Revenue Service offer its own, user-friendly but free version of TurboTax? Maybe even one with much of your interest and income data — which the government already has! — already entered for you?

The answer is yes. An obvious, thundering yes. Such a program should be an option.

Of course the IRS should harness technological know-how and American ingenuity to create and maintain an optional, dirt-simple web interface, one that guides taxpayers through the annual process, asking all the right questions, searching for deductions and credits, providing the tips and suggesting the forms to use, just like TurboTax, H&R Block and other commercial tax software programs do.

The vast majority of taxpayers in relatively uncomplicated financial situations ought to have little trouble completing accurate returns quickly and at no additional cost.

From The Associated Press:

Nations like Germany, Japan, the U.K. and other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries already offer their taxpayers some form of pre-populated tax document. … Research conducted last year by a group of Treasury, Federal Reserve and other academics shows that the IRS could pre-populate 42 to 48% of all tax returns.

And so the IRS announced in May plans to pilot Direct File, a new, free online tax return program that would pose a grave threat to the deep-pocketed software companies that have cowed many lawmakers, bureaucrats and certain paranoiacs to oppose the idea.

From ProPublica, which has been all over this story:

In 2002, Intuit (makers of TurboTax), H&R Block and other tax prep companies signed a deal with the IRS to provide free tax filing services to millions of (lower-income) Americans. In return, the IRS agreed it would not create its own tax filing system that could compete with the tax prep companies.

A government-run tax filing system, often known as return-free filing, is already a reality in many countries around the world. With a return-free filing system, the government fills out the tax forms with the information it already has, and taxpayers simply have to review the forms for accuracy. This is not the case in the U.S.

Switching to such a system would devastate tax prep company profits. That’s why Intuit and other members of the industry spent millions through the years lobbying to preserve the Free File agreement, particularly the part that restricts the IRS from creating its own free filing system.

That’s not all Intuit did to limit the scope of Free File. Intuit purposefully suppressed its own Free File product. It added website code to block its Free File page from showing up in search engines and used manipulative marketing patterns to trick customers into paying for TurboTax even when they qualified for Free File. It later removed the code.

Internal documents previously obtained by ProPublica show these strategies were intentional on the part of Intuit and H&R Block.

The result, according to the Associated Press: “A Government Accountability Report in April 2022 found that 70% of taxpayers were eligible to use an existing free-file program but just 3% actually used the service.”

These businesses do not have the best interests of taxpayers at heart, in other, obvious words.

In 2010, a White House advisory board estimated that Americans spend 7.6 billion hours and $140 billion (nearly $200 billion in 2023 dollars) every year just to figure out their tax obligations.

But lobbyists have successfully beaten back every effort to get the IRS into the tax bprep business, generally by throwing up a lot of nonsense about big government, conflicts of interest and even creeping socialism.

In a recent letter to the Tribune, Dylan Bellisle, researcher on the Project for Middle Class Renewal at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign wrote:

There is no evidence for claims by tax industry critics that Direct File would expose vulnerable taxpayers to unfair treatment and lower refunds. Instead, research by the Government Accountability Office and the IRS found that close to half of returns prepared by paid preparers contained errors.

When Barack Obama was campaigning for president in 2007, he pledged to implement a simple return system at the IRS.

“No more worry,” he said. “No more waste of time, no more extra expense for a tax preparer.”

No way, said the lobbyists.

No way, echoed the invertebrate U.S. Congress.

But objections to the idea don’t pass the smell test.

Too much government? Many agencies have citizens fill out online forms for various purposes and calculate such levies as property taxes without requiring them to perform their own calculations.

Likely to cheat you? Making federal and state income tax programs optional and subject to independent review assures that they won’t be secretly designed to maximize amounts owed.

Does the IRS have the best interests of taxpayers at heart? Maybe not, but public and private oversight of any Direct File system would go a long way to assuring that it’s as fair and accurate as possible. And those who just can’t ever trust the gummint nohow will remain free to shovel money at TurboTax.

Gotta be worth a try, right?

Again from the AP:

(The) idea faced the immediate threat of budget cuts from congressional Republicans.

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee in June proposed a budget rider that would prohibit funds to be used for the IRS to create a government-run tax preparation software, unless approved by a group of House and Senate committees. … Civil society groups recently launched a coalition to promote the move toward a government-run free-file program. (But) tax preparation firms … have been pouring millions into trying to stop the idea cold.

The advocacy groups are exponentially out-monied. …

Leaders from Public Citizen, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, Code for America, the Economic Security Project and others launched the “Coalition for Free and Fair Filing” on (July 19).

“The overwhelming majority of people demand a free-file option,” (said said Igor Volsky, executive director of the liberal Groundwork Action advocacy group) “Now the question for us is how do you channel that into effective political pressure?”

Aw, you don’t.

That’s so cute, though. No way are our lawmakers brave enough to stand up to the tax prep lobbyists throwing money at them.

Intuit spent at least $25.6 million since 2006 on lobbying, H&R Block about $9.6 million … In contrast, the NAACP has spent $140,000 lobbying on “free-file” since 2006 and Public Citizen has spent $110,000 in the same time frame.

Still, free and easy tax filing is a nice thought, isn’t it?

Last week’s winning tweet

At the grocery store some old lady seemed like she was hitting on me. Turns out we went to school together. — @fozzie4prez

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

News & Views

News: Anti-democratic Ohio Republicans have scheduled an Aug. 8 vote aimed at thwarting the will of the state’s pro-abortion rights majority.

View: The profiles in shamelessness story here is that a USA Today Network/Suffolk University poll earlier this month found that 58% of likely voters in Ohio backed an amendment now headed for the state’s November ballot that would establish a right to abortion similar to the right in effect under the Roe v. Wade decision that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned last year and invalidate a strict new anti-abortion law passed by Ohio’s Republican-led legislature.

It would require a simple majority to pass. So this same Republican legislature called for a special election early next month to change the law to require a 60% supermajority to change the state’s constitution. Even though, as The New York Times reported:

The Republican-led legislature passed a law earlier this year banning most August elections, saying they were needlessly expensive and had such low turnout that they were anti-democratic.

Their hope is that energized opponents of abortion rights will turn out during the dog days of summer to block the will of the majority of Ohioans to ease restrictions on abortion. The cynicism is breathtaking.

News: Northwestern University President Michael Schill refers to himself as “a standup leader” in an interview with the Daily Northwestern.

View: Nice try. Schill, speaking belatedly to the media about the hazing scandal that seems likely to dog NU for months to come, tried to explain how he went from imposing a modest, two-week suspension on head coach Pat Fitzgerald on a Friday to firing him outright on a Monday:

The Daily: At what point over the weekend did you decide to fire Fitzgerald? Were there specific things that changed over the course of the weekend?

Schill: I recognized that I wanted to rethink it. I wanted to signal to the community that there was going to be something more in all likelihood. I spent Sunday reading and rereading the report. I also met with the executive committee of the Board of Trustees, and we discussed this. 

In addition, on Monday morning, I met with the investigator and her associate, and what I did there was I asked them to provide me with details from the raw testimony of each person they spoke with. So we went person by person. I wanted to make the right decision with as much information as I could, and the report was a summary of the raw material. 

But when you hear it, one by one, one instance of bad behavior after another, the magnitude of it hit me even more. I decided that the only choice, the only moral choice, was to terminate our relationship.

It’s indeed the mark of a stand-up leader to rethink a position based on new evidence. But there is a disquieting “verdict first, evidence afterwards” quality to Schill having carefully studied the report of the outside investigator then meeting with her and getting raw details after having announced Fitzgerald’s punishment.

Then late Wednesday came this report on Twitter from the Daily Northwestern:

Jim Foster – NU’s 2022-23 head baseball coach – was not fired, as had been reported by many outlets including The Daily (on July 13). President Michael Schill told The Daily Foster has been placed on “indefinite suspension.” “He wasn’t fired,” Schill said. “He won’t be coaching again.”

I’m not saying Schill should lose his job over this appallingly poor crisis management, but he clearly has yet to engage the critical questions of what the other members of the coaching staff knew about the degrading, sexualized hazing rituals in the football program and which, if any, current players were victimizers and should be put off the team.

Did the investigation not go that deep? If not, why not? When is he going to set aside another weekend to study those issues?

And how do you fire/not-fire your baseball coach and allow the misapprehensions and confusions about that linger for two stinkin’ weeks?

Is “shitshow” one word or two? I want my kicker here to be perfect.

News: Mick Jagger turned 80 on Wednesday.

View: Eek!

News: Mike Schur, co-creator of "Parks and Recreation" and creator of "The Good Place" says about the writers/actors strike, "Everyday that goes by where nothing is getting made is another day where (the streaming services) have nothing new to offer their subscribers"

View: I’m all for the writers and actors here, but as a viewer whose “to-watch” list is already intimidatingly long with putatively excellent shows I’ve yet to see, this doesn’t sound the least bit ominous to me. I’m far from desperate for new content.

News: Oakland A’s appear very unlikely to set a modern record for futility.

View: A pity. Early in the season the dreadful A’s looked to be on track to have the worst winning percentage in modern baseball history, and watching that would have provided some extra interest to long-suffering baseball fans here. But after Tuesday night’s loss, with 63% of the season over, the A’s were nevertheless 72% of the way to 39 wins, a mark that will save them from setting the record.

It remains interesting to me that baseball is such an unpredictable sport that one of the worst teams of the last 123 years is still likely to win at least one game out every four, or 25% of the time. The worst NFL teams have gone winless for the season. The worst NBA and NHL teams have won just 11% of their games in their seasons of infamy.

Land of Linkin’

• “Will Durbin Run in 2026?” At The Illinoize, Patrick Pfingsten wonders if the senior U.S. senator from Illinois is preparing to step aside. Richard “Durbin raised around $115,000 in the second quarter of the year, ending June with about $1.5 million cash on hand. He was far outpaced in fundraising by Illinois’ junior Senator, Tammy Duckworth. Duckworth raised around $570,000 in the last quarter and had about $1.7 million cash on hand, even after running for re-election last year. … Durbin would turn 82 a couple of weeks after the 2026 election. “

• Amanda Marcotte in Salon: “Elon Musk's absurd Twitter rebrand: Has the far right finally broken his brain?” “The darling bluebird of happiness has been replaced by a logo that looks like it belongs on a stormtrooper's helmet in a bad science-fiction dystopia. … Musk, who is 52 years old, seems to draw his design inspiration mainly from the brain of a teenage virgin who views Joaquin Phoenix's version of the Joker as a role model.”

• My take on X: “Twitter by any other name is still my favorite social media cesspool — Elon Musk can call it what he will, I ain't leaving yet”

• People: Everything to Know About Jason Aldean's 'Try That in a Small Town' Music Video Controversy

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ ‘If and when that pipeline ruptures, it would suffocate all of us.’ The Tribune takes a deep dive into the existing and planned vast underground carbon dioxide storage areas and pipelines that have already caused at least one Illinois disaster.

■ This month’s storms set a Chicago record for 311 calls about flooded basements …

■ … and yet, WTTW reports, “Chicago’s neighbors southwest of the city could soon be facing a water shortage.”

■ The Conversation: Freshwater megafish are dying off.

■ Disney’s magical content purge. The Lever explains that streaming services are yanking shows and movies to avoid paying creators—and to position themselves to claim tax breaks …

■ … and turns a spotlight on the Catholic church bought by “dark-money operative” Leonard Leo, former President Trump’s judicial adviser, who helped select and confirm three of the court’s six justices.

■ ‘Carmakers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips.’ Author and tech watchdog Cory Doctorow details the auto industry’s—to use his word—enshittification.

■ ‘Something was off.’ Columnist Matt Baron shares his frustrations in buying a new car from a dealer he says he won’t patronize again — but he exacted a small amount of revenge.

■ “You better bring our cart back if you ever want to see your quarter again, buddy.” Columnist Neil Steinberg is taken aback by the penny-pinching milieu at a new Aldi store.

■ In a promotion for another chain over the weekend, David Letterman ate food off a store floor.

■ ‘A hotbed of brand misinformation.’ NewsGuard analyzes the torrent of TikTok videos spreading falsehoods about companies including Target, Kohl’s, Anheuser-Busch, Barilla, Bud Light, Chick-fil-A, Heineken and Hobby Lobby

■ Media watchdog Tom Jones assesses Fox host Greg Gutfeld’s approving comments about the Holocaust.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Greenfield: In defense of lowered speed limits

In “A Blueprint for Creating a More Just and Vibrant City for All,” Mayor Brandon Johnson’s transition team recently recommended that Chicago “lower the default citywide speed limit to 20 mph generally and 10 mph on residential streets.”

That sounded insanely utopian/dystopian to me, but I wanted to hear the views of Streetsblog Chicago editor John Greenfield, bike advocate and student of public transportation matters, for the views of someone who thinks more deeply about such matters than I do.

His response:

It's great that Johnson's transition plan's transportation committee has proposed significantly lowering speed limits. This idea could greatly decrease traffic injury and fatality rates for all road users, and make it easier and more comfortable for people who don't own cars to get around Chicago by walking, transit, and biking.

While a 20 mph arterial and 10 mph residential speed limit may sound crazy to a lot of Chicagoans, similar strategies have long been used in other countries with low traffic injury and fatality rates.

A 20/10 speed limit may be difficult to pull off in a relatively car-centric city like Chicago. But maybe the idea was to propose something very progressive so that a compromise could be reached that would still be beneficial for safety. Federal studies show that people struck at 30 mph have a 45 percent chance of dying, while at 20 mph that drops to only 5 percent. So if a 20/10 speed is proposed but a 25/20 limit is passed by the City Council and enforced, that compromise would still be a traffic safety improvement.

The challenge for Chicago is that enforcing these speed limits in a way that would greatly increase traffic tickets would result in a major backlash from drivers, including arguments that the policy is inequitable, even though our city currently offers lower-income drivers a 50% discount on traffic tickets through its Clear Path Relief Program.

So the best approach would be combining the speed limit changes with infrastructure improvements that force drivers to slow down instead of just fining them for speeding. On main streets, this could mean raised crosswalks and "road diets" — converting excess travel lanes to wider sidewalks and/or curb-protected bike lanes.

Residential streets could get "traffic diverters," concrete infrastructure that prevents drivers from using side-streets at "cut-through" alternatives to congested main streets for crosstown trips, but has openings to allow bike riders to continue to use these streets as lower-stress alternatives to arterials.

Chicago has previously proposed this approach on some of its Neighborhood Greenway side street bike routes, like Berteau Ave. in the 47th Ward and Manor Ave. in the 33rd, but neighbors shot down those plans because they didn't want to have to alter their driving habits.

But with Johnson's support, traffic diverters on side streets could become common in Chicago, like they already are in many West Coast cities. And there was some great news at Tuesday night’s community meeting on the planned Wood Street Neighborhood Greenway in West Town. The Chicago Department of Transportation and local alderperson Daniel La Spata, 1st, announced that traffic diverters will be piloted on this side street bike route. Many local cycling advocates are excited about that. 

Your thoughts?

You can’t take it with you, grimly rephrased

We visited legendary Chicago journalist Rob Warden and his wife, Jennifer Alter, in their Michigan home over the weekend and admired the design on the Louis Vuitton mug Rob was drinking from (above).

He explained that he’d seen and admired the mug at a Near North store while on the way to their friend Barbara Melcher’s house, but he quickly set it down when he saw the price: $38.

He remembered that when he later told Melcher about it and said there was no way he would ever pay that much for a mug, she said, “Why not? So you can spend another $38 on your coffin?”

He immediately went back to the store and bought two.

Melcher responded to my fact-check request:

I did not coin the phrase. Many years ago we were in Italy with my husband’s family when my mother-in-law fell in love with a bracelet at a beautiful jewelry shop. She couldn’t decide whether or not to buy it and we were all getting very annoyed. Finally the shop keeper just blurted out, “What are you going to do, buy a nicer coffin?”

Needless to say the incident has certainly had an impact on me. And for the record, she couldn’t whip her credit card out fast enough! Not a terrible life lesson, right? And that Rob fell for it is truly priceless.

Photo by Mary Schmich

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. She’s busy with another project this week, but here, reprinted with permission, is a brief entry from Wednesday morning:

The weather right now reminds me of a passage from E.L. Doctorow I read years ago in the New Yorker:

Chicago to my mind was the only place to be...And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, o​f course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from.

Minced Words

Jon Hansen served as guest host for “The Mincing Rascals” this week. Brandon Pope joined partway through. Austin Berg, Anna Davlantes and I were there from the jump. Topics included Jason Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town” and the “benefits” of slavery. Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

NOTE — THIS WEEK’S WINNER WILL BE POSTED NEXT WEEK

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• "Doctor, doctor, I think I'm turning into a terrible, pushy parent” "Daddy, why do you keep calling me 'doctor'?" — @MooseAllain

• Who you are when you find the empty ice cream sandwich box in the freezer is the real you. — @GingerHotDish

• Anytime I need to leave my name for a server to yell out later when my order is ready I always say it’s “Marco.” — @wakeupangry

• If the Barbie movie were anything like real life Barbie there would be a lot of decapitation scenes. — @BuckyIsotope

• I love the morals of “The Ugly Duckling.” "It's OK that you look different. There is beauty in your uniqueness. Your worth comes from within -- oh you got hot, LOL, thank God, I was just saying shit." — @ronnui_

• There are many ways to skin a cat. But cats only have one way to skin a human. And it's horrific. And they're excellent at it. — @_pessimusprime

• X = $44,000,000,000 - $44,000,000,000 — @RickAaron

• Pretty sure at this point Twitter is powered by its employees’ eye rolls. — @WilliamAder

• Oppenheimer? I hardly know her. — @Kateness8

• The zoo on two edibles: Nature is so amazing . The zoo on three edibles: I think that gorilla wants to fight me. — @rusty_coach

A couple of notes here. I like the “Marco!” joke so much I used it the other day at a sandwich shop. Didn’t have the nerve to respond, “Polo!” But someday.

Vote here and check the current results in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Tune of the Week

This week’s nominator is Colleen Kujawa, a Tribune opinion content editor and esteemed former colleague.

"Fourth of July" by Sufjan Stevens is from the album "Carrie & Lowell," named after Stevens' mother and stepfather. Stevens' mother died from cancer in 2012. He was estranged from her; she was schizophrenic and suffered from substance abuse. During his childhood, she was a highly charged and unpredictable presence; abandonment always loomed large.

It is a lyrically and musically beautiful song that makes me cry. It makes me think about my dad. It makes me think about family and the need for love and tenderness and how tenuous it all can be. It's unflinchingly about death. Flat-out hits you in the face with it. 

The narrator of the song seems to switch repeatedly between a mother, lovingly calling her child pet names and speaking with the voice of a wise authority who wants to help her child navigate life, and the adult child recalling the mother's decline and death.

Did you get enough love, my little dove
Why do you cry?
And I'm sorry I left, but it was for the best
Though it never felt right
My little Versailles

The hospital asked should the body be cast
Before I say goodbye, my star in the sky
Such a funny thought to wrap you up in cloth
Do you find it all right, my dragonfly?

Shall we look at the moon, my little loon
Why do you cry?
Make the most of your life, while it is rife
While it is light

We don't understand the flaws of our parents and how forgivable those flaws are until we walk in adult shoes. (I mean, if we're lucky, we come to understand.) And maybe that understanding comes too late.

The myth-making in families is hard to escape — for the child and for the parents.

— Colleen Kujawa

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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