[nemo44x]

It also means you aren’t thinking about what you’re paying so often. Of course they do the magic work of taking your money from you, for you. People probably don’t even notice it, how nice.

Taxes, although necessary, should be painful to pay. Every last bit should be accounted for and legit.

If anything governments should send you a receipt detailing where all your tax money was spent.

[kiba]

Trust me, nobody's thinking about what they're paying for. More often, they're just stressed.

If you want to educate the taxpayer to be more well informed, there's way better mechanism than inflicting pointless bureaucratic misery and anxiety.

[kelnos]

That's nonsense. It's amazing that Intuit and the others have been so effective at their propaganda that they can not only convince people that they are too stupid and lazy to notice when the government tries to add new taxes, but that it's their patriotic duty to make their lives harder in order to counter that stupidity and laziness.

I also suspect most people don't really realize how much tax they pay under the current system, since W-2 employees have the bulk of their taxes automatically deducted from their paychecks and paid throughout the year. Sure, the total number ends up on the tax return, but the number of focus is always either the amount due or amount to be refunded. People doing their taxes by hand, either on paper or by filling out the PDFs directly, may be more likely to realize these numbers, but anyone who uses TurboTax or goes to a mass-market accountant like H&R Block might not even notice.

Regardless, I would much prefer a system where the IRS sends me an email telling me my tax return is ready, and then I can read it over, edit it if there are things I don't agree with or deductions the IRS didn't know about, and then sign it and be on my way. If that sort of system causes people to ignore it and just approve it without reading it, that's on them, and I'm sick of the idea that I have to suffer (and spend money on a CPA[0]) because others might -- might! -- treat their tax returns like a click-through software license agreement.

[0] I use a CPA because I have enough income sources and line-items that doing it myself would be annoying, time-consuming, and error-prone. But everything that ends up on my tax return is still data the IRS already has, and I expect that if they were legally allowed to prepare my return for me, it would be accurate, and I wouldn't have to do much (if anything) in order to approve it.

[RhysU]

This. Everyone should pay quarterlies and employers should not withhold. People should feel the visceral pain of having their money taken away and be inconvenienced by the complexity of the tax code. Then we can have real discussions about what is worth funding with taxes and how to structure them.