[pfisch]

It doesn't make any sense to compare the Netherlands to the US on any metric. The Netherlands doesn't have the population or gdp of just Texas or California by themselves.

The sheer magnitude of the difference between the US and the Netherlands is crazy, and it is like comparing a house to a town.

Communism works on a small scale, the bigger the scale, the less you can just trust everyone is doing the right thing. The bureaucracy of the IRS has every incentive to maximize tax revenue, and that is what they will eventually do.

[kwhitefoot]

I see this sort of sentiment repeated over and over in different contexts both here and on Quora; but the poster never explains why scale is relevant.

Most people in both the US and the Netherlands work for one employer, own or rent one house, have a few credit cards, and a car. In most cases they have no complicated investments or debts. So how does the simple fact that one population is larger than the other have any effect?

In a larger community you simply need proportionally more computer power to process proportionally more data, but the data types and business rules are the same for all the individuals.

[pfisch]

It isn't about the person. It is about the scale of government.

Running a small business is not the same as a large business.

Ok, have you ever played civilization? In civilization corruption goes up as you build more cities and the farther those cities are from the capital. That is to reflect the reality of managing larger and larger groups of people.

Solutions that can work on the state level don't necessarily work on the federal level. The Netherlands are basically the size of a state with an extremely homogeneous population, and a far less cut throat culture than the US.

In small groups of 10-20 people communism works very well. It doesn't work in bigger groups though. The bigger the group the more perverse incentives are acted upon.

Even beyond that though the US is a cut throat competitive culture. Eventually the person in charge of treasury will want to show that the democrats/republicans before them did a bad job of collecting tax revenue. They will realize by not offering deductions a lot of people will just pay and this will end up with them looking like they did a really good job. Or maybe it will be someone lower on the totem pole that wants to move up and can show that they did a better job at collecting tax revenue.

Also, solutions that work in the US probably won't work in China or India because the population is so much larger that US solutions won't scale properly.

[anticensor]

Indian tax system largely resembles British and Brazilian systems. Chinese tax system is simpler, but they compensate by tighter population control (which is unfavorable in the US).

[kingosticks]

True, the size difference would mean the time/effort saved would be tremendous. I detest the hours and hours of my life I've given to the IRS simply because they are stuck in a time warp. My UK tax return took me under 2 hours last night (and only because they keep getting the student loan wrong - but it's simple to correct). But yes, it does require investing in a suitable computer system. I seem to be giving them the benefit of the doubt and attributing it to an infrastructure issue but that's probably not the real problem, is it.

[moorhosj]

Bizarre to see this type of comment on a technology-focused site. Turbo Tax can figure it out, but the government can’t?

[pfisch]

Turbo Tax is incentivized to maximize your savings. The government is incentivized to do the opposite.

It's not that they can't. It's that eventually someone will be in charge that will decide they shouldn't.

[moorhosj]

This might be true if you view the government as adversarial. If you view the government as a service provider for citizens I don’t think it holds water.

Your statement could easily be flipped. Turbo Tax is incentivized to keep the tax code as complex as possible, the government is incentivized to do the opposite.