IRS plans to make its free tax filing program permanent

IRS plans to make its free tax filing program permanent #news #usnews #irs #taxes

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/30/politics/irs-direct-file-free/index.html

IRS plans to make its free tax filing program permanent

The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday that it will continue and expand its free tax filing program in 2025.

CNN

Aint it limited to destitute wage slaves pretty much?

W2 only?

So I thought to myself, well that's a weird comment. It's nonsensical in a couple of different ways.

  • Creating a program that does something good that wasn't there before doesn't somehow become a bad thing if there are ways in which it doesn't do enough. Almost every real action which takes place in the real world represents some kind of imperfect step towards an ideal future, not like a "we got it perfect the first time and every single nook and cranny of the objective is satisfied by this, the first attempt we made to improve things."
  • People who draw mostly W2 income actually aren't "destitute" necessarily. I don't even know where the connection came from. Most people who are struggling in life have simple taxes. Most people who are doing well have complicated taxes this doesn't apply to. Your complaint, even taking the rest of it at face value and using some un-addressed population as a reason not to address things for the 140,000 people in the pilot program or however many millions will be addressed by this second phase, is backwards.
  • So I sort of wondered to myself: Why would someone be so aggressively negative in this specific way about something that almost any normal human being would look at and say "hey that's good," and for such weird and counterlogical reasons?

    And so I looked three comments back in your history and said oooooohhhhhhhh okay I get it it all makes sense now.

    Joe Biden's chances of winning election plummet after debate - Lemmy.World

    Normally I would disagree with you, but yeah This Guy is actually probably a plant and a shill, but you guys throw that at so many people who don’t worship the ground Biden walks on that it is hard to trust you
    Doesn’t look like a plant or a shill. Looks like a tankie.

    The truth is, I have no idea and I don't think it's all that productive in most cases to try to sort it out or talk about it. I didn't actually say anything at all about what the person was; I simply highlighted flaws in their argument and linked to one of their other comments and let the reader draw their own conclusions. In this case I think they were so self explanatory that I didn't really need to indicate any of what my conclusions were.

    But... to deal explicitly with my conclusions, I'll say that in almost every case where there's some kind of weird nonsense-logic, and then poking through the person's history instantly yields some "let's not vote for Biden" advocacy, I do personally tend to draw the conclusion that they're a political shill. If I saw a bunch of geopolitical stuff or extended arguments about Marxism then that would tilt the scales in favor of tankie (although like I say, this is only my private logic about it, not like anything I would present as conclusive, because it's basically impossible to tell.) Going into mainstream political forums and getting real vocal about how people involved with mainstream US politics are supposed to engage with it doesn't strike me as real common tankie behavior.

    Going into mainstream political forums and getting real vocal about how people involved with mainstream US politics are supposed to engage with it doesn’t strike me as real common tankie behavior.

    Really? Hm. Maybe I’m using it wrong, it seems like that’s a big thing they do. Like we don’t support third parties because we’re terrible liberals who love war, and not because third parties have zero chance and almost always hurt the chance for progressive reforms. (Also ‘liberals love war’ is just Qanon level batshittery, I just can’t)

    I classify most of those people as shills. The people who want to talk about communism or anarchism or pro-China/Russia-ism, and lack of any interest or hope for US electoral politics as kind of an outgrowth of that but US electoral politics is not the main thing they are interested in focusing on, I classify as probably authentic tankies.

    Like I say, of course, I have no idea. That's just how I write it down in my head.

    Fair enough. I just think of “shill” in a context of paid advertiser or, well, useful idiot. Yeah, ok I could see that.