Very basic analysis by da bot says it costs the government roughly 226$ per filing vs a private company 40$.
Would love to hear the opposite argument but the point I first saw online is saying the same, that it cost more tax payer money to run than it saved those tax payers.
Scale problem? Open to hearing the opposite argument.
It was a pilot and was open to a small subset of taxpayers. It was intentionally not benefiting from economy of scale to incrementally deliver value rather than probably badly trying to hit every use case the first go around.
The cost per filing criticism is generally posited in bad faith, by people who don’t understand incremental software delivery, or both
Why should a malicious third party have our financial records? Why would a third party know filing reqs better than the IRS?
They already know the data anyway. Other countries have done this for decades already, cheaply.
Your "226" includes the one-time initial development costs. You're comparing $40/yr in perpetuity versus something like $220 once, $6/yr after that - and I suspect the actual costs of running the system are far lower.
Again, assuming the government can outcompete on price vs private industry.
It's a real point but I don't know an example of that happening elsewhere. The US government outcompeting private industry is exactly why communism doesn't work
You’ve already received the answer to this. The platform was already built. There’s every reason to think it would require only very small operating costs from now on, whereas a company has every reason to maintain profit margins with a fixed price.
The government outcompetes the private sector in almost everything it gets into. Healthcare, mail delivery, fire relief, and far more. The private sector is all about slashing quality and raising prices.
It’s not communism. It’s literally how most of the rest of the developed world file their taxes.
Given taxes are a government system, and one that’s complicated enough that you shouldn’t expect the average tax payer to need to understand it nor have the money to afford an accountant, it’s actually insane to argue that this should be operated in the private space.
This is exactly the kind of thing the government should operate in capitalist societies.
Those who fund their government branches are generally doing better than those who are not. America being the prime recent example of this.
And those who’s government places policies which benefit their voters generally have a better quality of life than those who accept lobbying, and corruption dictate government policies.
America is doing awful. Income inequality, oppression of minorities, visible corruption, the wholesale destruction of the scientific and policy infrastructure that made it a world leader, abandoning important technologies such as renewable energy, destroying the social safety net....should I go on?
Well there's the root of the disagreement. I view it as the opposite, that the US is setting itself up to be the dominant world power for the next 100 years. Energy, space and AI if US doesn't fumble those we're looking at a golden age the likes of which we've never seen.
Also fyi the US science budget has literally not changed. So luckily the orange man can kick and scream but our budget for science isn't going away (not to say it's not disrupted).
SpaceX needed to happen because US had fallen behind the rest of the international community. And the USs advantage in AI shrinks year on year; presently estimated at only 6 months ahead.
Also, all these technologies are owned by corporate entities, many of which are ran by exactly the kind of people America is trying to deport (ie not birth citizens). So who’s to say they wouldn’t just move their tech to Europe or china is they were to outbid the US?
Meanwhile the middle and lower classes are getting poorer.
None of this screams prosperity. All you’ve done is traded your national wealth for words of good faith from a small subset of known liars. And by all independent accounts, it’s already costing the US billions.
Yes Europe is struggling too. But a large part of that is because we depended on a US alliance and you can see Europe shifting away from that in favour of building its own sovereign technologies. It will be hard, but if successful that would be the final nail in the coffin for America.
Just remember that Russia used to be a superpower on equal technology footing as America. North and South Korea used to be equally prosperous. Countries can fall behind significantly when managed by egotistical and corrupt despots. Which is ostensibly who you have in charge of America right now.
Other countries, when in the position America is now, are usually faced with two options:
1. Spend decades rebuilding international trust
2. Go to war, ultimately lose the war because it’s basically you vs the rest of the world, and then fall back to option 1 after a suitably humiliating defeat and millions of lives lost from all sides and critical infrastructure and manufacturing destroyed.
It very much feels like America is going for option 2. So I wouldn’t be trusting your long term plans to the orange buffoon if were you. The best case scenario is this downwards spiral is a blip. The worst case scenario is you’ll drag the rest of the glob into another world war.
On basically all metrics the US is most prosperous country on earth. Our middle class turned into upper class. It's a pretty bad argument when the poorest part of the country are richer than basically anywhere else in the world. The only argument I could entertain on this line of thought is that the US has reached it's peak (today) and may decline. That atleast has merit because there's a good argument the AI bubble popping could lead to a chain reaction causing long term decline. But saying the US has currently declined is crazy when seeing the previous 2 years. Maybe the argument is that the craziness the US has been doing is "burning" its potential for short term gaibs for long term damage. Totally possible but there really isn't an argument to be had that the US is currently some weak or lost cause as of now.
EU is struggling for a lot of reasons the US was supporting the bad design. I do believe it's a kind of learned helplessness though and youre right. If EU stopped social spending reduced regulations rebuilt their military they could actually make a come back in like 15yrs. Sounds like a long time but that actually is really good and their recent discussions on actually rebuilding their militaries is a glimmer of hope. But the greatness of europe like it was in the past? As of now a totally lost cause and that's cultural. Until the current generation dies and people who want to see europe be a real power again come up there's no way. France would be my bet on this front.
An actual failure of a super power is britain. That's what it looks like when a super power has "lost" the only question to ask is wether US is currently in it's 1700 British empire mode or 1940 one.
Everyone has said how the us is failing for literally my entire life now. They intensified in 2016 with oramge man's first term and continued to now. But again, in realistic terms the US is not less than it was a decade ago and in obvious terms it's in a better position today since the 80s.
The most obvious example is energy. Middle east and venuzuela were basically light advesaries. Saudi was leaning towards china. Now? US essentially controls the majority of oil in the entire world. Nobody else can put a fleet of ships on the output of ME like that. Sure Iran can commit terrorism on civilians but nobody can drop an army anywhere in the world like the US. Our arab allies have heavily realigned to the US. Our oil is the highest output ever. Venuzuela is ours so in 15yrs so is the next middle east of oil output.
So again. World energy dominance for the next 50yrs minimum. We have the largest datacenter capacity by a stupidly large margin. Possibly in 20yrs a complete monopoly on industrial space flight. Those 3 things together to me are a near garauntee dominance. Even one of those things could be enough to stay a super power but all of them? All at once? That's a wild combo. No other country even has one of those (i suppose ME countries with oil is the only one).
We'll see how Iran turns out though. That would be the chink in the output above. State sponsored civilian terrorism is a hard thing to stop but they have succeeded in aligning every arab ally against them pretty good.
> The only argument I could entertain on this line of thought is that the US has reached it's peak (today) and may decline.
That’s literally the point we are discussing ;)
> An actual failure of a super power is britain. That's what it looks like when a super power has "lost"
Yeah, Britain definitely falls into that category too. But it’s also worth noting that the empire was literally build from conquest and exploitation. Which brings me back to my previous comment about war.
Reasonable take then. You think oil, ai, space aren't the deciding factors of the next 50 years? An interesting argument against is maybe the big one is who can produce the most cheap robots and drones (China). It's unsure if that is decisive but it's clearly a big factor.
Sure but so is every super power. The question to ask is the alternative. US is "nice" compared to previous powers in history. Even the British were "nice" for their time period. They ended slavery almost worldwide as easily the most obvious win. They did alot of good as well as sucking pretty hard, kinda philisophical question at that point though.
If America had control over oil then there wouldn’t have been a war in Iran. Nor Venezuela.
Western AI is a bubble. Whether it pops or just fizzles remains to be seen. I obviously hope for the latter. But either way it’s not sustainable in its current guise. Add to that Chinese models being an estimated 6 months behind American frontier models and European leaders agreeing the importance of domestic AI, I think you’ll find Americas ownership of AI will diminish. And if the current political climate is anything to go by, there are strong enough incentives not to ship data to American data centres that there might be real change over the coming decade.
The space program is a bigger asset but that’s largely private and I wouldn’t bank on Musks loyalty.
Europe is producing some high quality military drones too. It’s been well reported in the Ukraine war. Plus I personally know of someone who works in that specific industry.
I’ll concede that it’s impossible to have any confidence in any geopolitical predictions given the current climate. But if I were a betting man, I’d bet against the current administration making America great again.
America's dominance in science and technology (and art, and other fields) was due to an atmosphere where the smartest and best people from around the world wanted to come here. We have actively worked to drive them away and broken the processes in ways that can't be fixed with the stroke of a pen.
Our economic influence was based around being a stabilizing force and soft power - both of which we have destroyed. The world was willing to forgive us for 2016-2020, but now they know we are not to be trusted - that we will abandon and publicly abuse our allies no matter how close, that our policy changes based on whichever dictator last talked to Trump, and they know that the other two wings of our government are spineless and powerless sycophants who will never put a stop to any of it. They are forming trade relationships and infrastructure without us, and we will never get back our preferred status.
We have given up generational advantages and are not set up to be a dominant power in anything. We are an empire in accelerating decline.
Outdated... Let me know when planes fly on solar, shipping containers on wind and your chair isn't made of plastic.
Drones have made terrorism hard to stop in iran. But it's not over let's see where it goes. The positives are that Iran has effectivelt made lifelong allies of our arab neighbors. They used to lean toward china but now china is supplying weapons to the country bombing their people. Additionally israel and arabs may actually normalize diplomacy between each other as a result which would also be a massive win.
If US can collapse Iran we're looking at it being the strongest it has ever been and likely the strongest power to have ever existed. If not then it's roughly british empire at its peakish as of now.
You mix that with Russia getting it's asses kicked and every single country around china massively aligning with US and that's a recipe for success.
EU honestly is the downside here they are upset but also the sad truth is europe is no longer a world power. A regional one at best.
You could argue that america will BEGIN to decline as the recent policies take effect but as of now really the only negative is we don't do enough social spending and our supply chains aren't secure enough. Let's see how EU does over time if they are forced to build their own military again and population collapse hits their tax base that social spending is gonna get argentina like real fast.
Is this fixed cost per filling, or does it include cost of developing the system? I somehow doubt that for all Americans to fill taxes it would cost 6.5b$ (163x40)
I think its like building a bridge analogy, when it costs you to use ferry only 0.01% of price of the bridge. But when its built its essentially free and ferry goes out of business.
Yes that I'd like to hear. It's possible it would be cheaper over time if we assume tax filling is artificially held at a higher price by companies but competition says that shouldn't be true.
But also, the "bridge" is built? There are tons of companies already doing this.
This ignores the time cost of having to find the right private company to file your taxes (everyone loves price shopping!) and manually funnel all your data into it, data the government probably already has. Tax prep costs me at least an entire day of my time every year.
P.S. When citing that you had AI do a basic analysis of something, specifying what you analyzed and which AI you used would be nice so other people can reproduce it or dig deeper.
The government inefficiency is in doing the small pilot program and using those costs as per filing costs. Of course it's going to cost more if you only do a handful of them. The first iPhone cost a hojillion dollars to make, but Apple sells them for $1,000 and make a ton of money at that price point because they've made millions of them. This is so true for government spending that the shipyard building aircraft carriers did a press release begging congress to buy two at once because it would be cheaper than buying one and then waiting a long time and then buying a second one anyway.
Governments regularly do things cheaper than private industry. And regularly do things more expensively.
Turns out, governments can be efficient and run things well. You just have to tune the incentive structure correctly.
(Aside, I don't care about cheaply as an axis nearly much as I care about "for the benefit of many". I'd take expensive programs that help everyone, every time.)
Public transit is a great example. Pretty much every attempt to privatize transit worldwide has resulted in, if not failure and subsequent deprivatization, at least higher prices and worse service for the people using the service.
The interstate highway system, which replaced a complex system of partially privately owned roads, is another.
In most countries, healthcare is another great example. And arguably education as well - public schooling produces generally pretty good results worldwide for not that much money per student, and outside the US, higher education is often public and incredible value for money.
US public transit is a finacial disaster far beyond any other country.
Road maintenance is normally cheaper/faster with private.
Healthcare is a can of worms but you could be right. The real problem with public health is what happens when these gov can't afford it anymore. US is likely in the wrong now but I want to see the results 50yrs from now when social spending cannot keep up with rising costs and decreasing taxes in EU (population collapse).
Post delivery. You can send a letter anywhere in the us for less than a dollar.
Broadband. Look at municipal broadband in Chattanooga. EPB is cheap and offers high quality service.
Health care. Typically socialized systems are cheaper. Medicare pays one tenth the administrative costs private health insurance does.
Insurance. National flood insurance for instance simply isn't offered privately because private insurers charge so much.
Loans, in particular student loans. Private loans are so expensive relative to government ones.
Transit. I use the bus and the train when I'm not biking. It costs me $3 to take a 60 minute train to the airport. It costs me $120 to take a 45 minute Uber. Trains are capable of managing stadium traffic, commute traffic, I can put my bike on board. They are clean and safe.
Would you like to see how private industry would handle city water system, and how much subscriptions would cost? They probably could do it cheaper, but they would charge the hell out of the end consumer as profit. Because thats the idea of private industry - profit.
Even if that's true, there's no reason it can't be streamlined over time. The true scaling problem is profit. The government has an interest in accurate tax collection -- not collecting a service fee.
the billion dollar tax prep industrial complex as a group spends the most lobbying dollars on tax policy -- in particular, suppressing any effort eliminate or even reduce filing complexity -- and lobbying ops like theirs don't happen because their service's value to tax payers speaks for itself
I mean it's right there in the price? Not doing rocket science analysis here.
I do wonder on the point of making it complicated on purpose though. Like is there actual evidence of that? Government naturally makes all sorts of stuff overly complicated all on its own.
Would love to hear the opposite argument but the point I first saw online is saying the same, that it cost more tax payer money to run than it saved those tax payers.
Scale problem? Open to hearing the opposite argument.