[vonmoltke]

Their actual goal is to make people resent taxes by forcing them to calculate themselves just how much money they are giving the government. It's less painful if you get something akin to a credit card statement from the IRS.

[antidesitter]

Ok, but why does making the process more painful make people lobby for lower taxes? The connection isn’t obvious to me.

To make this more explicit, presumably the chain of reasoning is as follows:

1. Make tax filing more painful.

2. As a general rule, people will set out to do that which reduces their pain.

3. Therefore, people will set out to do that which makes tax filing less painful.

4. People determine that lobbying for lower taxes will make tax filing less painful.

5. Therefore, people will set out to lobby for lower taxes.

Step 4 doesn't make sense to me because reducing total tax rate and reducing tax code complexity are orthogonal issues, and advocating for lower taxes will not in and of itself lead to a simpler tax code.

[kelnos]

I disagree with the premise, but I don't think the idea is that making the process more painful will make people want lower taxes.

It's just an in-your-face reminder of how much you're paying in taxes, supposedly sending a stronger message to you than if the IRS were to send you a pre-filled return.

So the idea is, if you're more obviously reminded of how/why your tax money is leaving your wallet, you'll hate taxes more and lobby for lower taxes. You understand that doing so won't make filing taxes any less complicated (and in fact it might be more complicated if taxes are lowered through new deductions and credits that you need to prove eligibility for), but you'll expect to be paying less.

It's still stupid, but at least the chain of logic could potentially hold if you squint close enough and agree with the premises.

[antidesitter]

> It's just an in-your-face reminder of how much you're paying in taxes

But that’s just going back to my comment 4 levels up this thread. If it’s an issue of tax amount visibility and not tax filing pain, the latter is not needed for the former.