This story is disingenuous. For people with "simple" tax situations (no itemized deductions, etc) the forms are already very simple.
The scenario they paint with chasing down form after form simply does not happen for most people. For most people it's one page.
But the idea that your taxes can be pre-computed by the IRS is fantasy beyond that, unless the tax code is significantly changed.
Sure they know your W2 income and some other standard stuff. How do they know your self-employment or business income? How much you gave to charity? How do they know what unreimbursed expenses you had? How do they know how many kids you have? How do they know your marital status?
I guess most of that could be addressed by just eliminating all deductions and allowances but even at that there are a lot of things they simply cannot possibly know until you, the taxpayer, tell them.
In the UK you only have to file if you have particularities like that which you describe. For everyone else, the PAYE system seems to deduct the right amount ("withholding" in the U.S.). It's simple enough that not everyone needs to file: https://www.gov.uk/self-assessment-tax-returns/who-must-send...
Not really. The IRS really does know your W2 and all your bank and investment income. If you've worked for several different companies, you often have scattered investments that you have to chase down that, in fact, they already know. There's really no reason why they couldn't provide you with pre-filled forms for all that stuff. Sure, there's stuff they don't and can't know, but for most people those are the simple things (how many children, marital status.
> How do they know your self-employment or business income?
If it's 1099 income, they know it for the reason that the 1099 gets filed with the IRS, as well as a copy going to you.
> How do they know how many kids you have?
That doesn't change very often, and there is interaction with the federal government which easily could be, if it isn't already, shared with IRS for the most common reason for changes in the positive direction.
> How do they know your marital status?
Again, that doesn't change frequently, so mostly they have a good basis for it by assuming whatever it was he previous year.(For this and the preceding, and a lot of similar status issues, it would be easy enough to move the data collection to a pre-filed form—for regular workers you could collect it, or changes to it, as part of the W-4—instead of the equivalent of the current retrospective tax return, expanding the accuracy of precomputed taxes and reducing the need for supplemental retrospective filing.
But, yeah, you'll probably always need an option for at least supplemental filing for information that differs from information the IRS has from other sources or is outside of it.
Most people do not have income that doesn't already show up in the IRS records. Yes, there are those of us who are self-employed and would still have to fill out stuff. Charity? Most people don't itemize and if you don't charity doesn't matter. Unreimbursed expenses? Didn't that get eliminated this year? Kids? Same as last year, if that changed you modify the return. Marital status? Same thing.
Personally I wouldn't gain that much from simply a pre-filled return (I'd keep B and D and chuck the rest) but many would.
For most people that’s not a problem in the UK. Partly that’s because all employed income has to be reported to HMRC by your employer, and party we just don’t have the same system of tax deductions - you can’t write off charity donations, and expenses are only deductible by companies. For children you have to register for child benefit payments with the government.
Even for the self employed it’s generally a pretty simple process of filling in your income and expenses and then everything else is calculated for you.
If you have other income you can just go to the HMRC web site and fill in the forms on-line. I've had to do it a few times, and its not a big deal.
If you have a simple one-off event (like a capital gain when selling something) then you can just write a plain ordinary letter telling them about it and they will sort out the tax bill for you.
Running with a minimalist shoe helps protect your knees. You learn to strike with your middle foot rather than flat-footed or heel first. The shock is absorbed by the muscles and tendons in your calf rather than by your knees.
Going back to when I was a teen I've never been able to keep up a running habit on pavement for more than a week before my knees hurt too much to keep going, but I've never had a problem running on trails and broken ground.
I did parkour for years, and at my peak I could jump from 12 feet up to pavement, everyone told me I was going to wreck my knees, it never happened. at 42 my knees are great but for the fact that I can't run regularly on pavement, and never could.
Yes, but...
Please don't jump into minimal shoes and expect to do your normal mileage. Or, use them as your first running shoe, if you aren't a runner. Transitioning to them too quickly can lead to different overuse injuries (due to your body being used to heel-striking, and now you'er doing it without cushion). Start with a short run, on the track if you can, with PERFECT form.
As a semi-serious runner (sub-20 5k at 42 years old, ~20 miles/week), I've found it best to rotate shoes, not just to minimize wear on a given pair (cushioning can take a day to fully rebound from a long run), but also "horses for courses". Cushioned trainers for long runs. Light-weight racers for speed work and races. Trail shoes for off-road. Etc.
I still don't get it. CGI scripts would run with reduced privileges. The CVE description says "code executing in less-privileged child processes or threads (including scripts executed by an in-process scripting interpreter) could execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the parent process (usually root) by manipulating the scoreboard"
It’s basically the list the master process keeps of the worker processes it has spun up. The workers can report back some stats that the master tracks about each. Apparently something in that report back process could be exploited to run arbitrary code.
While it might not be relevant to this particular issue (though it might, I didn’t dig too deeply), there’s a long standing history of running everything inline with Apache. I mean look at mod_php... sure we’ve all (hopefully) learned our lesson there, but it’s a hell of a hole to dig back out of as long as things keep working.
It’s one of the reasons I’m always suspicious any time I run into a company that runs Apache rather than nginx or one of the many other alternatives. There is absolutely nothing wrong with running Apache, but it always makes me wonder exactly why they are... is it because they’ve got this one app that won’t run on anything else because of crap like this? More often than not...
I think it's been very common for 15 years to use Apache's "suexec" to run each CGI process as the individual user rather than as a user related to Apache.
There's also suPHP which allows you to do the same thing for PHP processes.
You can't really have a setuid "script" anyway. But you can, at the bare minimum, launch CGI scripts via suEXEC. This prevents them from being able to attack the httpd worker processes, since they won't be running as the same user.
> Giving everyone $10K/year would just inflate prices until $10K was the zero baseline for income.
That doesn't make sense. A downward redistribution (which UBI is) is going to inflate prices of goods with disproportionate low-end demand and deflate those with disproportionate high-end demand somewhat, but in any plausible scenario it will still (before considering any effects of reactive production shifts) increase the buying power on the low end and decrease it on the high end, even after the effects of price level changes.
> Luckily, [[new research]] on a program in Mexico gives us a real-world test case for this idea. And it strongly suggests that giving out cash doesn’t cause inflation — or if it does, the effects are very, very mild.
> If, however, you funded a UBI with graduated taxation, you would effectively be redistributing wealth from the wealthiest to the population in general. Depending on the tax code, people somewhere in the middle of the scale would receive about the same amount in UBI as they pay in tax increases.
I'd expect the opposite. Giving a UBI would suddenly give the poorest people a voice in the market, and industries that are currently bottom-feeder would become inclusive and thriving. Eg payday loans becomes small business loans. Dollar stores get better fresh produce, etc.
If you look at communities where large portions of the population have their basic medical care, food, and housing all provided or paid for by the government, you don't see hotbeds of creative and entrepreneurial activity. You see cesspools of drugs and crime.
I'd phrase it as "massive taxation reduces the reward of doing business" and therefore, assuming equivalent risk, some number of potential entrepreneurs (and their investors) will decide it's not worth it.
Yes that is how human nature evolved. Competition for scarce resources so you and your offspring can survive. This extends to supporting society to the extent it helps your personal survival.
Exactly. Those are time killing activities to keep from staring out the window and losing your mind. Which is also a big problem for the elderly and unemployed.
Or, we could view them as “happiness activities”. In labor economics it is called leisure and the goal of people is to optimize between income and leisure.
I know lots of employed people who spend their days “staring out the window losing their mind”. It seems we have over optimized in the wrong direction (towards work and away from leisure).
They already are subsidized in plenty of places (sports stadiums and public parks for example).
It raises a fundamental question about the government's role and it's goals. We tend focus on maximizing productivity and other countries focus more on maximizing health/happiness. Even the way Americans talk about education is through the lenses of creating more productive workers as opposed to something like creating more enriched citizens.
It's complicated but in general if somebody is willing (or has to) to pay you it's not per se productive. In a society where everyone's basic needs are guaranteed to be covered we both would have made different choices.
The scenario they paint with chasing down form after form simply does not happen for most people. For most people it's one page.
But the idea that your taxes can be pre-computed by the IRS is fantasy beyond that, unless the tax code is significantly changed.
Sure they know your W2 income and some other standard stuff. How do they know your self-employment or business income? How much you gave to charity? How do they know what unreimbursed expenses you had? How do they know how many kids you have? How do they know your marital status?
I guess most of that could be addressed by just eliminating all deductions and allowances but even at that there are a lot of things they simply cannot possibly know until you, the taxpayer, tell them.