Taxes Today

Finished our 2017 taxes today, using TurboTax.  Seems to me they were more complicated than previous years, especially the boilerplate at the end.  Although with Mr. Zuckerberg's testimony still fresh, I still clicked on "agree" without reading and understanding them. I'm sure there's reasons for them, but it doesn't make me happy.

What really makes me unhappy is this sentence: "In Sweden, you can see your tax forms already filled in and approve them on your cellphone." That's from a piece at Monkey Cage on the complexities of our tax system (John Sides interviewing a couple experts).  One point made there--our system would be simpler if we taxed individuals rather than households.   Kevin Drum has in the past pushed the idea of IRS preparing our returns from their available data, with the individual taxpayer responsible for confirming the correctness of the information and adding to it.  It's a great idea, which Intuit will lobby against to their dying breath, so I guess today I contributed to the continuance of our system.

Banks With No Cash?

In Sweden, according to Steve Kelman here at FCW: ". In what might sound like a joke if it weren’t true, many banks carry no cash on their premises." Kelman is writing about Sweden and China, which he finds to be ahead of the U.S. in some areas of adopting IT:

"First, other countries’ edge over us is sometimes due to technology developed first outside the U.S., sometimes to quicker user adoption (something that would probably surprise most Americans), and sometimes to a greater ability to make non-tech organizational adjustments, such as eliminating minimum transaction values on credit cars, to get the tech to work better. Second, there are clearly efficiency benefits to the new technologies -- think only of the decline in hold ups in stores and bank robberies thanks to the disappearance of cash. But there are also benefits in terms of the general social climate for innovation."