• Empricorn@feddit.nl
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    5 months ago

    Eat shit, lobbying to make simple tax returns something you have to pay Turbo Tax, H&R Block, etc for.

    • School_Lunch@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I don’t know much about investing, but i wonder if it would it be a good time to short those companies?

      • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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        5 months ago

        If you don’t know much about investing then you shouldn’t short anything ever. People who know about investing will tell you that even when your logic is 100 percent sound, the market isn’t that predictable and in general the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

          • bamboo@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            Theoretically, yes. A short is sorta a negative stock. When you hold a normal stock, the price can never go below zero. But when you hold a negative stock, there’s no maximum value that stock could rise to.

        • Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 months ago

          Plus, the news of this would already be priced into the stock, so if anything the price is already low and these companies would need to pivot their business (which would increase the value again) or die (which would lower the price marginally, to zero). Either way, shorting is a bad strategy in this case.

      • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Even the founder of Costco (only stepped down as CEO a few years ago), a company famous both for how well it treats its customers, and its workforce?

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          It might have treated them well compared to the competition, but they didn’t get as large as they are without making massive profits off the work of their employees. There’s a difference between treating the well and treating them fairly.

          • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            making massive profits off the work of their employees.

            Labor is a cost, not a source of profit, what kind of moronic statement is this? If employees were a source of profit, the notion of downsizing would never exist–why would a company ever lay anyone off, if workers create more value than their wage?

            • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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              5 months ago

              Labor is the source of all profit. How would the company make money if no one did anything? Companies use their control of the means of production to leverage workers into doing labor. They then sell what the labor creates to make money.

              They didn’t create anything themselves. They had ownership of the means and that gives them ownership of the output that they profit off of. Money doesn’t just appear. Something has to be produced, which is done through labor.

              Sure, sometimes an employee costs more money than they return. First, that doesn’t mean they created no value, just less value than they cost to employ. Second, sometimes this does decrease profit, but is done as a short term reduction of overhead while things change, or it’s just dumb business which isn’t uncommon.

              • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                Labor is the source of all profit. How would the company make money if no one did anything?

                Charge the customer more for the finished product than what it cost to produce it. Obviously.

                The simple fact is that if employees were a source of profit, businesses would all try to hire as many people as they possibly could, because not doing so would literally be leaving money on the table for no reason. But obviously that is not what goes on. When a business is in trouble financially, what’s more common, a hiring freeze, or a hiring spree?

  • GodlessCommie@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Free if you have no other exemptions to file.

    1099? Nope Depreciation? Nope Tax credits? Nope

    Makes for a great headline though.

    Im sure those of us that do have exemptions other than the standard will see our tax prep fees skyrocket

    • Stern@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Some progress is better then no progress, and TurboTax et. al. losing in any way is a victory for the rest of us.

    • thermal_shock@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      are you not capable of taking a win? it’s a HUGE step towards disassembling predatory cpas and tax software.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        it’s a HUGE step towards disassembling predatory cpas and tax software.

        Its a regular sized step, as its targeted primarily at simple filers. But the cutoff is incredibly low. You can’t use it if you’ve got retirement savings through an IRA, if you’ve got deductions for college expenses, or if you’re claiming the child care deduction. I’d wager that’s at least half the people who bother to file returns.

        Definitely good news for folks that H&R Block likes to fleece - anyone collecting EITC or Child Tax Credits and not much else. But hardly universal.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        5 months ago

        Some people in the USA want a solution that immediately fixes every possible problem, and don’t quite get the concept of starting small and fixing other stuff over time.

        It’s the same with gun control. Some states want to tighten gun laws, and some people are like “that won’t solve all the problems! We need nationwide laws!”. Sure, but why not accept the win that more and more states are starting to do something, rather than complaining that some problems still exist?

    • PseudorandomNoise@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Doubt there is one. The hard truth is that most Americans’ taxes are pretty simple and straightforward. We can stop pretending that copying some boxes from a W2 and a 1099 is difficult.

      I mean, personally I wish we’d stop pretending that the IRS isn’t already fully aware of what you owe and could just do the filling for you, like in other countries, but until Grover Norquist fucks off forever we’re stuck where we are.

      • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Right. Filing taxes should only be necessary if you have itemized writeoffs or wish to contest the IRS’s statement of your tax liability. They already know what you earned their your employer, what’s been paid in taxes, what basic credits your qualify for, etc. They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about. The only reason they don’t already do that or, at least until now, have a free public system for filing, it’s because tax companies have lobbied for decades to be able to milk the public for cash to help them file and navigate their tax liability.

        • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksOP
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          5 months ago

          The argument has been since free filing means only the wealthy will hire accountants, free filing would discriminate against the poor given a few mistakes will be made here and there.

          I may not need to mention that disingenuous argument is made by the pirates at Intuit and their lobbyists.

          • PseudorandomNoise@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            free filing would discriminate against the poor

            As opposed to the current system where the richest among us can hire a whole team of accountants to find every deduction possible?

              • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                It should also be noted that if the vast majority of people do nothing special on their taxes and just accept the government’s assessment, then that leaves a much smaller group of people to be audited. And a much larger portion of those people will be those who are trying to weasel their way out of paying their share. Right now, with the IRS being criminally underfunded, they only focus on low hanging fruit, the small fries. With those people being boiler plater auto-accepting tax payers, that would mean the IRS has no reason to audit them and can focus on the big boys where the real cheats are. That’s another big reason we do not have that sort of system and why the IRS is currently so underfunded (despite every dollar spent on the IRS generating between 5 and 9 dollars in revenue from tax fraud/evasion). Those kinds of people pay to make sure it doesn’t happen.