How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore? I don't think Dems are doing a bang up job, but this is something developed and deployed, 100% working, that only helps the American people navigate a complicated tax system. The only reason to get rid of it is to hurt the American people.
Because for probably the vast majority of Republican voters, this is effectively a religion (identity politics). It doesn't matter what the Republican party chooses to do, voting Republican is a part of who people are and to do anything else is simply unbelievable.
To expand on this a little, even before this hyper-tribalism consumed politics, conservatism has always had an in-group / out-group mentality
It has been remarkably effective to find a niche wedge issue and drive it to the forefront.
Abortion, guns, big city crime, religion…the practical impact these issues have on most people’s daily lives is dwarfed by economic policy but it hits the emotional nerve centers and has a crisp message.
And that’s how you get people voting against their best interests time and time again
I sort of fear tribalism will typically win more and more in the future. There’s a large enough population in the conservative end that’s fine with tribalism. And while there’s certainly a fair share of it on the democratic side, the democratic side tends to lure in educated and anti-authoritarian folks who question things, formulate opinions outside the pack, and will have more difficult electing a cohesive candidate. Meanwhile the Conservative Party targeting religious folks already have a group of people who tend to be OK with just me following whatever it’s told to them without question or with little question.
There's a good read that was put out by OK Cupid (the dating site) 15 years ago outlining exactly this. They had a lot of personality questions that they'd use to match people, so they had a lot of this data correlated with a lot of demographics.
One of the interesting takeaways was about dating compatibility (they are a dating site after all). They found that republicans tended to pair well with other republicans, more than any other group paired with itself, and far better than democrats paired with other democrats.
I think this analysis ignores that the Republican party is winning because they expanded their coalition outside of their base of religious and upper-income voters. Trump pulled in lots of either non-voters or formerly Democrat voters. That's hurting the Dems it has made them more uniformly the party of the educated and upper-middle class and losing broader appeal The flip side is that the GOP now needs to manage a more diverse (racial, religious, cultural, income) coalition along with that. Trump is unifying to across the coalition to a large degree but its hardly assured that his successor will be able to continue that.
The GoP does not need to make things work. One of its pillars has been to ensure a hamstrung government, and take a position that government is ineffective.
Any time the other party comes to power, they are unable to make significant change or headway - and the Republicans are proven right.
The Dems are by default the party of Governance so unless they too get on board with gutting institutions, and removing safety nets, they will always be stuck with this weak hand.
The Republican strategies (all of which are publicly discussed in various news articles over the years) do not need to manage a big tent, because even when out of power, they simply need to ensure governance is ineffective.
And given their near mind control via Fox and their content economy - they can even blame the opposition for problems when they are in power.
This is why I think Liberalism is on the outs. Its whole premise is that we can rationally manage society, but there's no romance in this. The Old Left had romance, as did Fascism. Trumpism has a certain amount of it. Abundance and the traditional neoliberal platform of the Democrats simply don't. Only a very small percentage of the population can get their blood up about means-tested social programs.
A Democratic party that was serious about winning elections would turn sharply left, get new candidates, and start the long process of selling voters on things that they can feel some romance in: ending suffering, universal childcare, universal healthcare, good union jobs, a struggle to take back our country from the money interests. Imagining a future where we aren't all climate refugees in Northern Canada.
Unfortunately, the Democratic party is not serious about winning elections. They keep their fossilized leadership in place while their mental capacity deteriorates until it's simply no longer tenable to pretend that they are capable of governing. Younger candidates are considered a success if they can successfully fundraise, even it they can't actually win the elections that they're fundraising for. In every instance, party operators are out for themselves rather than trying to win and deliver material benefits to voters. Republicans at least win (barely, and usually with some extreme gerrymandering), even if they can't deliver materially.
The only alternative I can see right now is a return to the Old Left playbook: a confrontational labor movement. Maybe there are other alternatives that will emerge but I've yet to see one as promising as just organizing your workplace.
Progressives needed to show up at the polls as a bloc. Unfortunately, there is a pervasive belief that this is a symmetric game between Dems and Republicans.
This belief gives people a reason to expect that their protest is recognized, without doing significant harm to electoral outcomes.
This isn’t the ONLY problem here, theres reasons progressives feel disillusioned by the party, but the rule of power is that its must be grasped.
The Tea Party movement ate the Republican Party from the inside - they primaried politicians and used their Fox/Media economy well.
I hear you but I think there are much deeper problems. The material basis for the post-war order (high employment in high-margin industry in the developed countries, globally marketized resource extraction everywhere else) is collapsing. "Progressives" are just as lost as the rest of the broadly left coalition, but they're Liberals too, and their world is over.
I think the old "har har those dopes are voting against their best interest" is over simplified. It seems to assume that the only best interest is immediate simple financial self interest. But people are complicated and have many interests beyond immediate simple financial interests.
> I think the old "har har those dopes are voting against their best interest" is over simplified. It seems to assume that the only best interest is immediate simple financial self interest.
You can't mischaracterise a phrase and then say it's wrong. That isn't what it means.
The thing that any "voting against their best interests" critique misses is that most people are willing to vote "against their best interest" if they feel like it's the morally correct thing to do.
Like, I'm an adult who never intends to have children, but I still support robust public education. I could make some arguments about how paying taxes for schools is somehow in my best interest. But the reality is I support public education because I think it's the right thing to do, not because I think it will personally benefit me.
The thing is, conservatives and Republican voters don't lean that way because they're just too stupid to vote for Democrats. It's because they have a different moral framework. And that's something that can be hard to reconcile and address. Changing someone's political views requires changing their entire worldview, which is incredibly difficult.
I do believe that supporting public education will benefit me. (And I, too, have no children nor any intent to have any.)
Robust public education would have gone a long way toward preventing the disaster currently unfolding. The very fact that Trump is aggressively gutting every part of the government that once supported education and science is (indirect) evidence of this.
An educated populace makes better decisions, and requires me to spend less time standing out there with a sign stating the painfully obvious.
You can't solve Trumpism with education. What kind of "education" would have changed the mind of someone who voted to re-elect Trump?
Keep in mind that education doesn't shift the IQ bell curve appreciably. There are a hundred million or more American voters with two-digit IQs, and they are easier to herd to the polls than the rest. It turns out that if you give stupid people someone to look up to and someone else to look down on, you'll win their vote every time.
That's Trumpism in a nutshell. There probably is no fix.
I was thinking about the "against their best interest" argument recently and connecting it to the democrats.org "who we serve" page made it even worse than it seemed. Rational people not on the list should avoid them?
Saying that people are voting against their best interests assumes that you know what those interests are. Maybe what they really want is not what you think they want, or what you think they ought to want. This is an attitude common among liberals. They know best, and if you disagree with them, you are simply wrong.
Electing Trump was a big FU to that attitude. The astonishing thing is that liberals are so cocksure of themselves that they have not yet figured out this simple truth and are still carrying on as if Trump were simply an anomaly rather than a predictable response to their own actions. The magnitude of the tone-deafness in the Democratic party is simply staggering. And I'm a Democrat, or at least I was until I realized how utterly incompetent they are.
[UPDATE] Ironically, the fact that this comment is being downvoted into oblivion actually demonstrates the very point I am making.
[UPDATE2] With regards to my saying that Democrats are incompetent, this is manifestly true at least with regards to 1) winning elections and 2) controlling Donald Trump. Maybe they are competent at other things, but that seems like a bit of a moot point to me under the present circumstances.
I disagree. When it comes to "voting against their best interests," these best interests are not determined at an individual level, but rather through what is in the best interests of that group of individuals.
It is provable that, for example, having a strong emergency response infrastructure is in the best interests of the people of the United States, and especially in the best interests of, e.g., Floridians. Natural disasters happen, and having a strong, coordinated response to assist the victims of natural disasters is in society's best interests, even if individuals (generally wrongly) think that they are self-sufficient enough to handle that situation.
So what I'm saying is that while folks that are "voting against their best interests" may on an individual level have decided that their best interests are different from the best interests of their neighborhood/region/state/country, it doesn't make them <i>right</i>.
A rural voter voting for candidates who will enact policies that will close the only hospital within 100+ miles of where they live is, by definition, voting against their own best interests, as it is in their best interests to have access to that hospital when it becomes necessary, as it could literally be a matter of life or death. Those voters opinions of what might be in their own best interests don't actually matter in terms of determining their best interests, but it matters a lot in terms of getting them to vote against their own best interests.
What Democrats are incompetent at is coming up with messaging that stands a chance of being more convincing than the blatant lies and propaganda of the modern Conservative media machine.
No. There is nothing patrician about it. Stating "it's in your own best interests that the only hospital within 100 miles of your house stays open" is not a "patrician attitude" at all.
Again, it is stating a fact. It is not in those voters best interests to vote for politicians whose stated goal is policy that will cause that hospital to close.
There is nothing derogatory or "patrician" in that. It is a cold, hard fact. Politics are politics, and facts are facts. That people choose to go with feelings and reject facts is beside the point. Their feelings do not determine their best interests.
But we also have a long history of using regulations and other inducements to get people to act in their own best interests. The current regime has just decided that it will act in the best interests of monied interests, to the detriment of a large swath of the people who voted for them.
Now, if you want a liberal, "patrician" attitude, here's one: Fuck 'em. They voted for politicians who openly told them they were going to do things that would be absolutely horrifically bad for them. Let them deal with the consequences and feel morally superior because they've "owned the libs," or whatever other BS helps them sleep at night as their poor, mostly rural communities fall apart around them. Do I think it will get them to vote for politicians who have their best interests in mind? Absolutely not, at least not at a scale necessary to change elections results.
I spend a fair amount of my time in rural America. It's not pretty, and it really doesn't matter if it's a red state or a blue state, rural America is hell bent on its own destruction. It's a shame, but apparently, it's what they want. So let 'em have it.
If you're not free to make (what someone else believes to be) the wrong decision you're not free. Dems assume that they can tell voters what's in their best interest because Dems assume that they can tell voters what those voters value and what those voters think is the best way to achieve it. That's the patrician attitude, the idea that the vast majority of the population is too stupid to make decisions for themselves with the ipso facto evidence being that they don't want the same things that the patrician does. Whether it works out in what is judged to be their "best interests" or not, that attitude is why people are abandoning liberalism and it's a very good reason to do exactly that. Is it cutting off your nose to spite your face? Probably, but after years of someone looking down that nose at me I might be tempted to cut it off as well and damn the consequences. Between that and the way Dems run on "no kids in cages" then rule on "expanded open-air detention facilities for underage migrants", they run on "student loan forgiveness" then rule on "partial forgiveness for people who were already legally qualified", they run on "healthcare for everyone" then rule on "access to insurance marketplaces for everyone with a small subsidy to help pay for insurance that's mostly useless". They run on "women have a right to choose" and when given the chance to make that a law they say it's "not a legislative priority" (Obama, 09). Even if I do concede that Democrats have "my best interest" at heart I don't trust them to actually do any of it.
> Saying that people are voting against their best interests assumes that you know what those interests are. Maybe what they really want is not what you think they want, or what you think they ought to want. This is an attitude common among liberals. They know best, and if you disagree with them, you are simply wrong.
This is such a tired refrain. As a libertarian who was telling my aghast friends in 2016 that Trump was really speaking to people's frustrations and likely to win (thus you know, demonstrating that I at least understand many of those concerns, if not outright share them), this still doesn't explain it. For the most part Trump's policies do nothing to effect his (non-financier) supporters' professed interests, yet they keep lapping it up and coming back for more.
Perhaps with my libertarian biases, I could still be putting too much emphasis on the economic and liberty-based complaints rather than the contingent that wants to criminalize healthcare, put a handful of unlucky brown people in concentration camps, and other negative-sum social policies. But it still really doesn't feel that is where the broad support is coming from in the first place.
Ultimately from where I'm sitting, the responsibility for the communications breakdown mainly rests on Trump supporters for seemingly making "owning the libs" into their primary KPI. The Democratic party certainly has a similar "rabid" dynamic with regards to social justice / diversity, but that's a much narrower contingent (vocal, but still only a slice of policy) whereas for the Republicans it has broadly taken over the entire party platform.
As a fellow recovering Democrat I couldn't agree more. When the party shifted to neoliberalism in the 90s an incredible arrogance came with it. The attitude went from "How do we represent working people and get government to do what they want" to "We know how to govern better than the plebs, how do we get them to want what we're willing to do?" And their reaction to Trump has been to dismiss him as a flash in the pan and try to wait him out like bad weather, but they completely fail to reckon with the idea that whatever else he may be he's currently the guy batting .667 against them and in 2024 managed to maintain the support of open racists while gaining ground with every minority except women.
Trump isn't a disease, he's a symptom. He's an emergent property of a system that has been hilariously blatant about the fact that it doesn't value the people it needs to to continue functioning. Trump fits in a hole the government left in the hearts of the American people when it decided that its primary operating principle is "give the voters just enough to get them to put us in power give everything else to the donors and then buy stock in their companies". Doubly so because the lesson the Dems learned from Obama was that they can exploit identity politics to give the populace a symbolic victory and then govern in a way that directly transfers wealth from their voters to the donor class. Since 2008 the Democratic primary has been a game of "Who will you accept neoliberal market worship from?" An african american man (08, 12), a woman (16), your choice of an old white man, a mixed race woman or a gay man (20), the same mixed race woman from 20 who flat out told us when asked if there was anything she would do differently than the historically-unpopular old white man said "Not a thing that comes to mind" (24). They're the Pizza Party, the manager at work who has been given the impossible task of trying to buck up a completely demoralized staff while not being permitted to offer them anything of substance. The neoliberal wing of the Democratic party has been feasting on the seed corn since 1992 and can't figure out why the fields are empty and their serfs are angry.
Their response to Trump has been internally contradictory to a delightful degree as well. In 2015 HRC specifically instructed Dem-aligned media to elevate Trump's campaign with the theory that he would frighten people so badly that they'd vote for her without her having to offer anything substantial to voters. You'll remember the focus of the campaign was threefold: she's a woman and it would be neat to have a woman president, she's qualified, it's her turn. More of the same policies that pissed everyone off, very little in the way of material support that actually makes the average person's day to day life better, a lot of scolding people for not already being on the Dem side rather than figuring out what it would take to get them on the Dem side ("basket of deplorables") and generally treating voters as a resource that needs to be managed and then exploited for maximum value rather than as the people that you as an elected official serve.
To me, the defining feature of the modern Democratic party is their self-assurance that Trump is an idiot combined with a complete unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that that idiot just keeps kicking their asses. If your opponent is weak but consistently puts you on your back what does that make you?
From the perspective of an independent, I’m not sure why you’re singling out Republicans here. It reads just as true if you’re to swap in the word Democrat.
If it turns out that Obama is in the Epstein files, my friends won't have to get rid of their Obama hat, or their Obama sneakers, or their Obama cologne, or their Obama watch, or their Obama bible, or take down their Obama flag, or delete their Obama NFT trading cards.
Both parties are alien and hostile to me, but for very different reasons.
This is why arguing politics with these guys is pointless. I once naively thought I could bring around one of my MAGA friends to the light side by focusing on policy but it just doesn't work. He admitted that everything Team R is doing is not really helping him but in the end it's always something like: "Look, I was born a Republican, my family is Republican, I will never vote Democrat, no matter what any of them do. We have to trust Trump to do the right thing." It's truly a religion. There is no getting to these people.
Seriously I wish we could split the country. Let the deplorables live by themselves un-vaxxed, with guns, religion and all of their other non-sense. And let us normal people live by ourselves with science and compassion.
(Unfortunately this will not happen. Because two things will have to be split: national debt and the nuclear arsenal. Heavy Sigh…)
Given the complete destruction of norms and institutions over the last year, the country is already lost for at least a decade, if not several. "Winning" is now a fantasy for our kids to maybe enjoy one day. I'm not sure that spite is a particularly bad option in this scenario.
Don't you think it cuts both ways though? I saw a video where a guy was asking (presumably liberal) NYU students about quotes relating to immigration policy. He initially said they were from (republican person T), and they stated that they thought the comments were racist. Then the interviewer said, oh wait, sorry, they were actually from (democrat person O), and the students immediately shifted their opinions and said the comments were reasonable.
Tribalism coming to the Dems is taking FAR too long. People recognize that tribalism is working for the Republicans, so it’s natural that they are going to eventually imitated the winning strategy.
Seriously, I can’t believe it took this many decades for it to happen, and only after Trump made its efficacy blindingly obvious.
PS: Tribalism is not good for the overall health of a polity. Its just that people imitate whatever strategies appear to work.
I'm sure there's a little tribalism on the (D) side, too, but I don't know anyone who decorates their house, yard, and truck with Democrat merchandise and flags, wears Democrat political shirts and hats, has a shrine at home with a life-size figure of a Democrat politician, or brings up Democrat politics in social settings that are not even remotely political like a kid's birthday party. I've seen real life examples of all of these from the (R) side.
You've never seen evidence of cultural/tribal signaling on the left? Never seen an "in this house" sign, somebody wearing a mask outside and alone/spread out, NPR tote bag, "Anti-Racist Baby" book on the shelf, brought up Robin Deangelo or random Trump jokes at a bbq... Fish don't know their wet.
I don't doubt they exist--I just haven't seen any, and I have seen many dozens of examples from the other side. I'm talking about an order of magnitude difference in degree of tribalism, not claiming total absence of tribalism from one side.
My observation is that “both sides” (EDIT: of the electorate) are locked in this dynamic. In the ideal world people are able to evaluate specific ideas, but instead people judge ideas based on who it comes from.
id love to know some of the good ideas from republicans, because for the past like 50 years or so, nearly every one has been a disaster or discriminatory
Your observation is yours, but it isn't mine and many others.
I grew up in a Dem household but I don't vote dem because my parents did or because I'm a party member (I'm not), it's because the lesser of the two evils is almost always the blue side.
And this was before the GOP literally became a cult. Now it's not even a choice.
I concur that ultimately you have to decide which party to vote for (and I happen to vote similarly to you).
What I am asserting is that it would be better if we were able to judge ideas based on the merit of the idea rather than who it comes from. That is, in my experience, not happening and the electorate for both dem and rep are guilty of this behavior.
I absolutely agree with that. But as a vote for a candidate due to an agreeable policy position is also a vote that's likely to vote as a block for everything else, it's not entirely invalid to vote that way (historically).
But as today's GOP is the Party of Trump™, and they now vote in lockstep, it's a simple "nopes".
I abhor partisan politics -- Washington warned us against them at the beginning and he was right.
The false equivalence you reference, and that I agree exists, is about the politicians actions.
But I’m talking about the electorate who, in both cases, largely do not seem to evaluate the strength of ideas or policies, but, in many examples I can cite, judge ideas based on who it comes from.
There simply is no alternative. Normal people must be completely blackpilled like me. The Democrats have an approval rating the lowest in Decades. None of these people are "working for [us]". Everyone is captured and this country is over. I really mean this. As part of the working class, we all feel this way.
This can be fixed with sane campaign finance laws. Every elected Democrat I know is willing to enact those if Citizens United is overruled. And every Democratic-appointed Justice on the Supreme Court would vote to overturn Citizens United. I know it sounds trite, but voting for Democrats again and again, flawed as they are, for generations, is the only way we're going to get out of this mess.
> Every elected Democrat I know is willing to enact those if Citizens United is overruled.
I don't want to be rude, but I don't believe you. I also have seen the polling and the country does not believe it as a whole. Democratic voters also don't believe it either. If you personally have an income >150K you are likely completely insulated from real Americans. The perception is that the Democrats care more about Israel and their donors than the country. Only 8 percent of Democrats are supportive of Israel but almost 90% of Dem senators are (I made this number up, the rest are real).
edit: the Republicans are publicly grifting, lest you think I like the Republicans. My overarching point is that ~60% of American's don't own homes and are completely uninvested in this country. They have completely given up, or are in a state of giving up. The Republicans and Democrats are extremely vile reptilian grifters who sold out this country.
I get it, your perspective is totally fair. Part of the reason Democrats care only about donors (the Israel lobby is one of those donors) is because of the influence of money in politics, which is a direct result of Citizens United. If they don't care about their donors, they lose. The incentives are pretty straightforward.
There were great campaign finance laws on the books, but Republican-appointed judges have steadily eroded those over the years, culminating in Citizens United. We have to overrule that awful case if we are to ever have working campaign finance laws in this country again. There's only one way to overrule that case, and that's with Democrat-appointed judges. Those judges typically do not answer to donors and so don't have the same incentives you've identified.
It does seem that people are fed up enough to ignore campaign spending, however. Examples are the Wisconsin supreme court race and Mamdani vs. Cuomo.
I really don't think that the Democratic establishment as we know it has much time to live. Democratic voters are not interested in the center-right. They want to go left. Candidates that move things to the left do well without expensive campaigns.
No. The alternative is to have some courage. It's easier to destroy than it is to create. There is a responsibility bias against the Democratic party because they're the only ones that know how to govern. Everyone is responsible is some way for the outcome. Our political rivals have attacked us so hard we're starting to believe the characterization they've made of us. I don't buy into the 'Everyone is captured and this country is over' message. It's a false equivocacy and just an excuse to be super critical of our own people.
Due to first-past-the-post voting in the US, I have at most two realistic options for my vote.
For the majority of the problems I see that I believe the government should be addressing, one side says "that's not a real problem" and the other side offers a really bad solution that they also won't realistically be able to make law.
Because Obamacare was such a fuckup? Where is Trumpcare? Where is Trumphousing? Bushfinancing? Bushtransport? How about even as a promise, and not as a delivered reality?
Anytime big news like this, news report on it, but the specific news channels do not mention, at all or minimize it position it in a way of for instance.. got rid of a terrible tool that didnt work well and was inefficient etc. So instead of focusing on removing free tax service so people have to pay again, people think it's a good thing because x y z, or even if they you ask any they don't know why its a good thing, they say someone they trust says its a good thing and people they don't like says a bad thing, and that's enough.
1. People have demonstrated they aren't really willing to pay enough for independent media, aside from one or two person shops.
2. The current media is incentivized to collect ad revenue. Currently, the best known scheme is to outrage or scare readers so they keep refreshing the page. So, in that respect, the current media is doing great business.
Or they'll cover it and say how this is a win for the American public because they no longer need to use a socialist government website to file their taxes.
But there was already a free way you could file taxes with Turbotax, FreeTaxUSA, and H&RBlock if you had a simple return. Direct File was a government built alternative to that.
Because those other companies actively violated agreements they made with the government in the 2000 to offer those services for free. They regularly tricked people into paying and lost a class action lawsuit over it.
It's also weird that we have to file taxes at all. Other developed countries have their revenue agencies automatically calculate the taxes for you and send a return. The only reason we don't is because of Intuit and H&R Block lobbying like crazy to prevent this. It's rent seeking at it's worse
Direct File was only built in the first place because Turbo Tax and H&R Block dropped out of agreements with the IRS to keep free tax filing options free and unencumbered of upsells and dark patterns.
The number of people their "free" products actually serve dropped drastically a couple years ago. They will upsell or dark pattern you to paying for it as best and as deeply as they can.
Some people are of the opinion that ANY way to lessen the burden of taxation, especially automatic taxation, will lead to silent and continual increases of taxes.
I wonder if people actually know how much of their income is taxed away?
federal tax, state tax, local tax, property tax, sales tax, gas tax...
I wonder how much we actually get to keep, and I wonder how many people are aware of it both now and historically?
the book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This helped me realize that asking questions like this isn't really about contradiction, it's about revealed preference. In this case, it's about a revealed preference for social stability and personal comfort/familiarity in a system that's already been pushed over the inflection point and is now self-sustaining.
It helps to stop assuming people want what they say they want and start assuming that they want the predictable effects of their actions, then try to figure out what benefits those actions have or desires those effects may fulfill. When the group does something that's against your principles or best interests, there's an implicit question: do you value being part of the group more than you value this thing that we're transgressing against? When you look at it in this lens all sorts of behaviors start to make sense.
Also the reason to get rid of free tax filing is to exploit the American people, not just to hurt them for its own sake. Tell them they have to do something, make it as convoluted as possible, then sell a service that does it for them. It absolutely does hurt them, but that's not the driving force behind the effort.
The people who need to see it needs to see it in the entertainment hour of Fox News. I don't think Fox News would be disseminating this information at that hour
Populism has a zero sum view of the world. Absolute prosperity is less important than relative prosperity. In addition, for some there is a very strong expectation that they should be more prosperous than “out” groups (in the US, racial minorities).
Liberal policy in the US since Clinton has failed to deal with this, focusing instead on absolute prosperity (GDP per-capita). And progressive policy has been ineffective since they promise equality, including with minorities.
It drives me absolutely mad when I see (largely liberal people) complain about how both parties are the same and just as bad.
And its like... how do you really believe that? Like yeah both parties have the same corruption but welcome to politics.
So at this point I am convinced it is willful ignorance on both sides (or ulterior motives when I see certain left leaning people STILL bring up Biden or Harris in relation to trump as if either of them matter anymore in the slightest given our current situation, at this point I don't care what Biden did or did not do). Seeing something that goes against their views of "this side is bad" and just trying to talk it away as some "abuse of government power" or something to justify why it should not have been a thing in the first place while ignoring its real benefits.
The history of the last ~100 years of the study of democracy by basically pro-broad-franchise-democracy academics has been a journey from:
"Well, the masses must not be stupid, as restricted-franchise and anti-democratic folks have suggested, because this seems to kinda work. Let's study voter behavior to learn more about this."
to
"Uh. OK so we checked a hundred different ways, several times each to be sure, and they're in-fact incredibly poorly informed and have awful reasoning skills and their behavior, in aggregate, isn't driven by what we might hope it is at all. But, uh... I really want there to be a good outcome here, so, um, let's make some fuzzy guesses at how some kind of Wisdom of Crowds thingy and some sort of system-equilibria-seeking effects might save us? And let's keep double-checking those studies that kept proving voters are really dumb, because maybe... maybe we got something wrong?"
to
"Yeah all that was bullshit cope on our parts, it's all wrong. It's amazing this works at all. Voters are amazingly stupid, to a degree that's so hard to believe we spent decades and decades making sure—like it's proven about as surely as is the law of universal gravitation; cannot practically be educated out of that, maybe at all, and especially not if we first have to get them to vote to make that happen; and everything's basically held together by noise and circumstance and social norms, until it isn't. Go ahead and make that whisky a double. And line up another."
Intellectuals and academics coming to these conclusions and talking down to the populace is a big part of what has fueled anti-intellectualism and paved the way for demagogues to take over. If your response to today's ugly political landscape is that people are stupid, then you're not helping.
Sorry, I was contributing the painfully-well-backed scientific perspective. If we're doing public-politics kayfabe here, too, then yes that was a faux pas. I'm not trying to campaign though, I'm trying to inform.
If one mistakes the kayfabe for genuine, an awful lot of observed behavior and outcomes remain confusing... the science is there if anyone wants it (reading lists for relevant courses are widely available, journals are not that hard to come by, or just grab Democracy for Realists and follow up with reading criticism of it and checking its sources) and at least the basic fact that very few voters think or behave remotely like anyone hoping for a well-informed, rational, and empathetic electorate might hope, is depressingly solid.
This is understood by everybody operating at a level of importance in media and politics, so a bunch of what they do (and its efficacy) will also be confusing if one disregards it. Even when they talk about how they believe in the voters, and blah blah—that's part of the kayfabe, that's a marketing message, they 100% don't believe that because not only is it definitely not true, you also lose elections (or viewership, or whatever) more often if you act like (not say—act like) it's true. It's not a lie they can afford to hold on to past the lowest levels of their professions, as they'll be concretely punished for the gap between their belief and reality and replaced by others who get it.
Positioning this as a program from the previous admin (therefore bad).
Positioning this as a win for privatization (therefore good).
And people not willing to look at politics as something beyond a sport.
Quite frankly, I believe both parties are pretty foul, and people should be looking outside of them for policy positions that actually help people, but I suppose that makes me naive or whatever.
> How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore?
anymore?
Are you implying that the GOP would have been for a free Direct File in years prior?
They wouldn't have.
This is not a new stance. I'm not sure why anyone in the Republican party would be shocked by this news, or why it would change their opinions.
This is similar to the Republican party doing something anti-abortion, and then Liberals being shocked, and saying, "You guys are really still going to vote for these people?"
If you had even a minimal US history education or you wouldn't make such claims. Nixon was to the left of Obama on many issues. That you don't know this is symptomatic of the problem today. The right has moved so far to the right that what was once considered right is now lefter than anyone on the left is willing to be. This wasn't an accident. It was planned, and began around the time of Reagan. Almost half a century later, the country is radically changed and kids today think it's always been this way. Well, it hasn't.
"Anymore?" At what point has the GOP worked for "the people" at all?
I'm 55. At no point in my life has the GOP pushed any policy initiative that would help regular humans. Instead, they've been the party of fearmongering -- about women, about drugs, about immigrants, about African Americans, about gay people, and the devil, about trans people, etc.
The Dems have been the party that advanced actual helpful policies, but holy crap do they ever have a messaging problem IN ADDITION to an effectiveness issue. But at least their marching orders are actually helpful.
Nixon created the EPA, he expanded the Clean Air Act, he signed the Endangered Species Act. He did a lot of good for the environment in the early 70's.
> I'm 55. At no point in my life has the GOP pushed any policy initiative that would help regular humans.
You're overstating the case a bit. Nixon and Ford were not bad for most people. Nixon's motives might have been extremely self-serving on domestic issues - but he was re-elected in '72, amid the Vietnam War and many other troubles, with 60.7% of the popular vote. Take a peek at his domestic policies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Domestic_policy He didn't need Watergate, nor any other dirtywork to easily win the election - he just couldn't keep himself from scratching his Paranoid Creepy Idiot itch.
Yes, after Ford, the GOP was taken over by a team-up of "Conquer, Loot, and Pillage" fiscal conservatives, and "Dump Jesus and Jimmy, 'Cause Our Rightful Kingdom is of This World" religious conservatives.
Flip-side, I don't see the Dems nearly so favorably. In the Carter-ish years they phased out most of their historic concern for ordinary Americans. In favor of hanging out with rich & slimy, and performative concern for ever-smaller minorities.
That's right: most Republicans are actually evil aliens whose motivations are quite different from human motivations. Also, it is impossible to understand their motivations, so we shouldn't waste our time trying.
So you believe it was done just to hurt the American people?
No, that’s not plausible.
The article suggests Trump wanted to help tax software companies, but that overlooks the fact that Trumps previous increase to the standard deduction greatly simplified taxes for many filers. So that’s probably not it, either.
Trump is hell bent on raising taxes via tariffs, so it doesn’t seem likely that personal income taxes are a big part of whatever he’s planning.
Personally, I wish the government would start sending a bill, not putting the onus on the filer to make the calculation. That seems most sensible to me.
Oh they do, but the democrats are so hated but a significant percentage of the population for their recent actions, people had to make a choice, and they did.
I’ve heard it described as “I know I’m being robbed, but I was already being robbed. I know this is a poor environmental choice, but the dems acted like we’re all children, thinking we have no choice but to support them. When they try to force through new social norms like they’ve been doing, it doesn’t even feel like my country anymore.”
I have to agree, they definitely encouraged the attitude of “either you agree with this new thing or you’re a Nazi”. Well, they certainly found out.
Of course this backlash is so bad it’s going to trigger another.
Meanwhile, Dems pissed away billions trying and failing to build things like high speed rail, rural broadband, and EV charging network. Somebody needs to figure out a way to make this stuff work.
HSR is getting built; the USD successfully connected rural areas, though I agree that was pointless; EV charger build out is accelerating despite funds being illegally yanked back.
They're usually better for the deficit (yes, really, if you just looked at the data and not rhetoric Republicans are who you'd vote for if you wanted to make the deficit worse) and sometimes do stuff like effective consumer protection enforcement, do a lot less of things like trying to sell off public land to extractive industries, haven't tried to use the civil service as a captured partisan tool & loyalist-reward program since like the 19th century, and occasionally get us at least baby-steps in the right direction like this now-removed direct filing program and the ACA (god knows what they might accomplish if those baby steps didn't keep getting completely wiped out every few years, perhaps they'd move beyond that! But I guess we'll never know because we keep electing Republicans)
>> You could elect Democrats and it would be just as crappy.
Crappy for different reasons though. This tax filing thing was implemented on their watch, so they would not be the ones to dismantle it. Somehow we seem to get the worst ideas from both parties rather than the best.
Is it not in the governments interest to implement the cheapest, best system to enable all citizens to easily pay taxes? The IRS knows basic taxes better than anyone so certainly they are the most equipped to handle this program instead of the private sector?
Unfortunately, private sector has a say in this as well UA lobbying. Intuit and H&R Block spend millions a year [1] in lobbying to protect their business, at the expense of the American people.
And ironically, those same interests don't usually lower either middle-class tax rates nor the required complexity of the returns themselves! They just farm annoyance by making "IRS" a dirty word, and harvest it by some combination of imposing austerity on the IRS to make tax cheating by rich people less risky, and policy changes that just happen to benefit a class of people that excludes the bottom 80%.
There is a giant and still ever-widening gap between what is in the best interest of the government* and what is in the best interest of elected officials and the wealthy special interests that fund them.
(* which should theoretically be indistinguishable from what is in the best interest of the people)
I, a Dane, have literally never filed a tax return in my life. It's completely automatic. I get a letter every year (electronically) and unless I have corrections to the pre-filled numbers, I do nothing. Manually filing tax returns is something people did in the 80's.
I thought you guys were supposed to be tech pioneers or something.
When I was self-employed for a shortish period, I went for an assessment interview. The HMRC bod spent most of the 20 minutes trying to find expenses I could claim tax relief on. There wasn't much (working at home, using my own laptop, writing teaching materials based on existing knowledge &c).
We have automatic deductions on paychecks too, the problem is the complicated system of deductions and the way capital gains are handled that we have to apply after that.
Trump and Republicans actually simplified it a lot with their temporary tax changes that boosted up the "standard deduction" that everyone can take at the cost of nerfing a bunch of "itemized deductions" that are more likely to apply to people in blue states (state tax deductions, property tax deductions) with the sneaky provision that the boost to the standard deduction would expire when he was no longer in office in order to make the bill "tax neutral" and let them pass it through budget reconciliation.
Which is nuts, but has actually made filing taxes much simpler and closer to what it should be for some time.
I set up an electric utility account online. Later, I get a bill from them, that has my name misspelled. I use as hell did not misspell my name like that. In the back office somewhere they are employing people who read text from one application and type it in another.
The US is stuck in time somewhere along the 70-90s.
You still need to do some kind of yearly accounts for your business.
And you will most likely need an accountant for that.
But the actual tax filing is fairly simply.
I'm convinced a bunch of things like this, which create expense and nickel-and-diming and wasted time for tons and tons of ordinary people, are why the US feels a lot poorer than it is on paper.
Like, Intuit and Turbotax contribute to GDP but their existence, at least at the size they are and in some of their roles, is purely a drag on QOL.
(of course, the biggest part of this is the healthcare system, which is great at making sick people and their families, not to mention HR folks and such, waste tens to hundreds of hours on things that aren't about healthcare itself at all, while also costing far more than it ought to—but there are lots of other things like this, see also the tipping-culture thread today, it's all part of that, little bits of bullshit that make life worse)
Yes, in a world where the government is run by a benevolent public servant. But we now have a fascist Republican government run by a rapist fraudster intent on pillaging whatever is left of America.
GOP congresspeople have argued it's good to make it harder to pay taxes, that will make people pay less taxes, which is "starving the beast", which is good.
It's incredible how little interest these ghouls have in the concept of "public good." Things like the conserving the environment or public health or even something as simple as free tax filing, are just seen as aisles for scoring ideological points or maximizing the interests of profit seeking entities.
No it's not. Why are they bragging about tariff income then? There is no coherent ideology guiding the American right wing except centralizing power onto the monarch.
It contains multitudes. The "tear down government" are the Curtis Yarvin - like faction who believes "the State" (including federal government) must be destroyed and replaced by private entities. They use Trump as a tool to reach their goal. Then you have the true Trump believers. Then there are the turncoats (probably the majority). All of them seek power for the monarch.
Right, so the only coherent ideology is their desire for dictatorship, as I said. This makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to interact with and collaborate with "the right" in a democratic system.
The unifying feature is they do not care for the established mechanisms by which we decide what to do, ergo there is no way for us to decide together what to do.
FYI, there are/were two systems. "Direct File" is probably the more complex and integrates directly with 25 participating states. The other is "Free File" and only covers some payers.
Although these systems are similar in goals, they are pretty different in terms of how they're structured:
- Direct File: Was built by the US government to make tax filing easier
- Free File: Is a subsidy from the US government to tax software to make it cheaper for people to file taxes
Direct file had the promise of making things easier and cheaper overall while Free File is more of a cost shifting approach.
Features like importing tax data from other federal government systems were included in Direct File to make it easier to file taxes. These types of features would be hard for those outside the government to do. At a values level, Free File provides funding to the tax preparation software companies. These companies benefit from difficulty in filing taxes because it creates a market for their products.
Yep, and "Free File" is the one that you are required to go through TurboTax or their 1-2 'competitors' to do, who are free to do their best to essentially bury and shadowban it from search engines. They're required by law to offer it, but are allowed to try to hide it from you and to promote alternative programs that will likely result in upsells for most taxpayers.
Uh no, "Free File" is split into two versions and the second option on there, "Free File Fillable Forms", is available to everyone for free without using a third party. I've been using it for years.
CPB, Direct File, BLS head all in one day. Lots to sweep under the rug this Friday afternoon. We're spending more for this service incineration. Literally. Tr*mp has increased spending despite all these cuts.
The only silver lining to this is that since the direct file code is open source, forks have already sprung up.
What I would love to see is one of these forks gain prominence and become the “Debian” of tax filing while TurboTax and HR block are the “Windows” and “MacOS” of the tax filing world
Granted I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that this is a tall tall order and finding consistent maintainers will be a huge challenge. But who knows maybe this will piss off just the right billionaire to make them dump a few dollars into a dev team that can build FreeFile
Just Print + Mail. Sure it's an extra hassle but if it means saving $80 on your tax filing then lots of people will jump through the additional hoops. And TBH having printed and mailed my tax returns before it's not that onerous.
That's what I've always done. I used TurboTax a few times back when it first came out. At that time it was a standalone program that you bought on a CD. It ran on your computer and it generated forms that you printed and mailed in. No internet required, your data never left your computer.
Once it became a "cloud" platform I didn't trust Intuit to keep my data private or not to use it for their own purposes. Ever since then I've done my taxes on paper. It's not difficult for someone with W2 and even self-employment income. For a more complicated situation it could be, but at that point you probably have an accountant anyway.
The workaround is for everyone to coordinate , print and mail physical returns. Let IRS have fun with scanning and processing :) enough people do this, IRS would open up digital filing again
I don't think the second half of your comment is accurate.
Works created by the federal government have always been in the public domain, i.e. ineligible for copyright protection. The SHARE IT Act has nothing to do with that. (Of course, government works may be protected or restricted in other ways, such as classification.)
The SHARE IT Act doesn't say anything about releasing software publicly, nor does it say anything about open source licensing. It applies to software that is created by the federal government itself or by contractors It requires the source code to be made available to the government and stored in an appropriate source code repository, such that it can potentially be shared between agencies.
Most Americans don’t know of Grover Norquist, but he’s probably the most influential conservative activist on tax policy. He had a pledge that, at some point, almost all Republican congresspeople signed.
The way taxes work in the U.S. is bass ackwards. They have all the info. I should be the I.R.S. where they submit a completed form to me for me to audit. I decide to sign it or not and go on with my life for another year. The state taxes are even worse (albeit, that may just be ny's problem).
How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore? I don't think Dems are doing a bang up job, but this is something developed and deployed, 100% working, that only helps the American people navigate a complicated tax system. The only reason to get rid of it is to hurt the American people.
Because for probably the vast majority of Republican voters, this is effectively a religion (identity politics). It doesn't matter what the Republican party chooses to do, voting Republican is a part of who people are and to do anything else is simply unbelievable.
To expand on this a little, even before this hyper-tribalism consumed politics, conservatism has always had an in-group / out-group mentality
It has been remarkably effective to find a niche wedge issue and drive it to the forefront.
Abortion, guns, big city crime, religion…the practical impact these issues have on most people’s daily lives is dwarfed by economic policy but it hits the emotional nerve centers and has a crisp message.
And that’s how you get people voting against their best interests time and time again
I sort of fear tribalism will typically win more and more in the future. There’s a large enough population in the conservative end that’s fine with tribalism. And while there’s certainly a fair share of it on the democratic side, the democratic side tends to lure in educated and anti-authoritarian folks who question things, formulate opinions outside the pack, and will have more difficult electing a cohesive candidate. Meanwhile the Conservative Party targeting religious folks already have a group of people who tend to be OK with just me following whatever it’s told to them without question or with little question.
There's a good read that was put out by OK Cupid (the dating site) 15 years ago outlining exactly this. They had a lot of personality questions that they'd use to match people, so they had a lot of this data correlated with a lot of demographics.
One of the interesting takeaways was about dating compatibility (they are a dating site after all). They found that republicans tended to pair well with other republicans, more than any other group paired with itself, and far better than democrats paired with other democrats.
https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-democrats-are-doomed-or-how-...
I think this analysis ignores that the Republican party is winning because they expanded their coalition outside of their base of religious and upper-income voters. Trump pulled in lots of either non-voters or formerly Democrat voters. That's hurting the Dems it has made them more uniformly the party of the educated and upper-middle class and losing broader appeal The flip side is that the GOP now needs to manage a more diverse (racial, religious, cultural, income) coalition along with that. Trump is unifying to across the coalition to a large degree but its hardly assured that his successor will be able to continue that.
The GoP does not need to make things work. One of its pillars has been to ensure a hamstrung government, and take a position that government is ineffective.
Any time the other party comes to power, they are unable to make significant change or headway - and the Republicans are proven right.
The Dems are by default the party of Governance so unless they too get on board with gutting institutions, and removing safety nets, they will always be stuck with this weak hand.
The Republican strategies (all of which are publicly discussed in various news articles over the years) do not need to manage a big tent, because even when out of power, they simply need to ensure governance is ineffective.
And given their near mind control via Fox and their content economy - they can even blame the opposition for problems when they are in power.
This is why I think Liberalism is on the outs. Its whole premise is that we can rationally manage society, but there's no romance in this. The Old Left had romance, as did Fascism. Trumpism has a certain amount of it. Abundance and the traditional neoliberal platform of the Democrats simply don't. Only a very small percentage of the population can get their blood up about means-tested social programs.
A Democratic party that was serious about winning elections would turn sharply left, get new candidates, and start the long process of selling voters on things that they can feel some romance in: ending suffering, universal childcare, universal healthcare, good union jobs, a struggle to take back our country from the money interests. Imagining a future where we aren't all climate refugees in Northern Canada.
Unfortunately, the Democratic party is not serious about winning elections. They keep their fossilized leadership in place while their mental capacity deteriorates until it's simply no longer tenable to pretend that they are capable of governing. Younger candidates are considered a success if they can successfully fundraise, even it they can't actually win the elections that they're fundraising for. In every instance, party operators are out for themselves rather than trying to win and deliver material benefits to voters. Republicans at least win (barely, and usually with some extreme gerrymandering), even if they can't deliver materially.
The only alternative I can see right now is a return to the Old Left playbook: a confrontational labor movement. Maybe there are other alternatives that will emerge but I've yet to see one as promising as just organizing your workplace.
Progressives needed to show up at the polls as a bloc. Unfortunately, there is a pervasive belief that this is a symmetric game between Dems and Republicans.
This belief gives people a reason to expect that their protest is recognized, without doing significant harm to electoral outcomes.
This isn’t the ONLY problem here, theres reasons progressives feel disillusioned by the party, but the rule of power is that its must be grasped.
The Tea Party movement ate the Republican Party from the inside - they primaried politicians and used their Fox/Media economy well.
I hear you but I think there are much deeper problems. The material basis for the post-war order (high employment in high-margin industry in the developed countries, globally marketized resource extraction everywhere else) is collapsing. "Progressives" are just as lost as the rest of the broadly left coalition, but they're Liberals too, and their world is over.
"Good union jobs" for the good union workers who voted for Trump. Got it. Clearly moving left is the answer.
Sigh...
I think the old "har har those dopes are voting against their best interest" is over simplified. It seems to assume that the only best interest is immediate simple financial self interest. But people are complicated and have many interests beyond immediate simple financial interests.
> I think the old "har har those dopes are voting against their best interest" is over simplified. It seems to assume that the only best interest is immediate simple financial self interest.
You can't mischaracterise a phrase and then say it's wrong. That isn't what it means.
The thing that any "voting against their best interests" critique misses is that most people are willing to vote "against their best interest" if they feel like it's the morally correct thing to do.
Like, I'm an adult who never intends to have children, but I still support robust public education. I could make some arguments about how paying taxes for schools is somehow in my best interest. But the reality is I support public education because I think it's the right thing to do, not because I think it will personally benefit me.
The thing is, conservatives and Republican voters don't lean that way because they're just too stupid to vote for Democrats. It's because they have a different moral framework. And that's something that can be hard to reconcile and address. Changing someone's political views requires changing their entire worldview, which is incredibly difficult.
I do believe that supporting public education will benefit me. (And I, too, have no children nor any intent to have any.)
Robust public education would have gone a long way toward preventing the disaster currently unfolding. The very fact that Trump is aggressively gutting every part of the government that once supported education and science is (indirect) evidence of this.
An educated populace makes better decisions, and requires me to spend less time standing out there with a sign stating the painfully obvious.
You can't solve Trumpism with education. What kind of "education" would have changed the mind of someone who voted to re-elect Trump?
Keep in mind that education doesn't shift the IQ bell curve appreciably. There are a hundred million or more American voters with two-digit IQs, and they are easier to herd to the polls than the rest. It turns out that if you give stupid people someone to look up to and someone else to look down on, you'll win their vote every time.
That's Trumpism in a nutshell. There probably is no fix.
The only explanations that makes sense are immediate financial reward, standard christian "bring about armageddon/death cult"-ism, or proud ignorance.
Spite / revenge/ "owning the libs". Some people don't care if their lives get worse as long as someone else is suffering even more.
> It seems to assume that the only best interest is immediate simple financial self interest
I blame Clinton and his “it’s the economy stupid” nonsense people believed.
I mean, they're voting against their long term financial interests as well.
I was thinking about the "against their best interest" argument recently and connecting it to the democrats.org "who we serve" page made it even worse than it seemed. Rational people not on the list should avoid them?
It appears that they have (finally!) removed that stupid page but it's still linked-to (https://democrats.org/who-we-are/) on their website. Here's a copy from June https://web.archive.org/web/20250615042752/https://democrats...
What's wrong with that page?
if you aren't on the list why would you vote against your interests?
It seems like a broad list. Who's missing that is underrepresented in government and representation?
Saying that people are voting against their best interests assumes that you know what those interests are. Maybe what they really want is not what you think they want, or what you think they ought to want. This is an attitude common among liberals. They know best, and if you disagree with them, you are simply wrong.
Electing Trump was a big FU to that attitude. The astonishing thing is that liberals are so cocksure of themselves that they have not yet figured out this simple truth and are still carrying on as if Trump were simply an anomaly rather than a predictable response to their own actions. The magnitude of the tone-deafness in the Democratic party is simply staggering. And I'm a Democrat, or at least I was until I realized how utterly incompetent they are.
[UPDATE] Ironically, the fact that this comment is being downvoted into oblivion actually demonstrates the very point I am making.
[UPDATE2] With regards to my saying that Democrats are incompetent, this is manifestly true at least with regards to 1) winning elections and 2) controlling Donald Trump. Maybe they are competent at other things, but that seems like a bit of a moot point to me under the present circumstances.
I disagree. When it comes to "voting against their best interests," these best interests are not determined at an individual level, but rather through what is in the best interests of that group of individuals.
It is provable that, for example, having a strong emergency response infrastructure is in the best interests of the people of the United States, and especially in the best interests of, e.g., Floridians. Natural disasters happen, and having a strong, coordinated response to assist the victims of natural disasters is in society's best interests, even if individuals (generally wrongly) think that they are self-sufficient enough to handle that situation.
So what I'm saying is that while folks that are "voting against their best interests" may on an individual level have decided that their best interests are different from the best interests of their neighborhood/region/state/country, it doesn't make them <i>right</i>.
A rural voter voting for candidates who will enact policies that will close the only hospital within 100+ miles of where they live is, by definition, voting against their own best interests, as it is in their best interests to have access to that hospital when it becomes necessary, as it could literally be a matter of life or death. Those voters opinions of what might be in their own best interests don't actually matter in terms of determining their best interests, but it matters a lot in terms of getting them to vote against their own best interests.
What Democrats are incompetent at is coming up with messaging that stands a chance of being more convincing than the blatant lies and propaganda of the modern Conservative media machine.
>Those voters opinions of what might be in their own best interests don't actually matter
This is the fundamentally patrician attitude that is killing the democratic party, and it should
No. There is nothing patrician about it. Stating "it's in your own best interests that the only hospital within 100 miles of your house stays open" is not a "patrician attitude" at all.
Again, it is stating a fact. It is not in those voters best interests to vote for politicians whose stated goal is policy that will cause that hospital to close.
There is nothing derogatory or "patrician" in that. It is a cold, hard fact. Politics are politics, and facts are facts. That people choose to go with feelings and reject facts is beside the point. Their feelings do not determine their best interests.
But we also have a long history of using regulations and other inducements to get people to act in their own best interests. The current regime has just decided that it will act in the best interests of monied interests, to the detriment of a large swath of the people who voted for them.
Now, if you want a liberal, "patrician" attitude, here's one: Fuck 'em. They voted for politicians who openly told them they were going to do things that would be absolutely horrifically bad for them. Let them deal with the consequences and feel morally superior because they've "owned the libs," or whatever other BS helps them sleep at night as their poor, mostly rural communities fall apart around them. Do I think it will get them to vote for politicians who have their best interests in mind? Absolutely not, at least not at a scale necessary to change elections results.
I spend a fair amount of my time in rural America. It's not pretty, and it really doesn't matter if it's a red state or a blue state, rural America is hell bent on its own destruction. It's a shame, but apparently, it's what they want. So let 'em have it.
If you're not free to make (what someone else believes to be) the wrong decision you're not free. Dems assume that they can tell voters what's in their best interest because Dems assume that they can tell voters what those voters value and what those voters think is the best way to achieve it. That's the patrician attitude, the idea that the vast majority of the population is too stupid to make decisions for themselves with the ipso facto evidence being that they don't want the same things that the patrician does. Whether it works out in what is judged to be their "best interests" or not, that attitude is why people are abandoning liberalism and it's a very good reason to do exactly that. Is it cutting off your nose to spite your face? Probably, but after years of someone looking down that nose at me I might be tempted to cut it off as well and damn the consequences. Between that and the way Dems run on "no kids in cages" then rule on "expanded open-air detention facilities for underage migrants", they run on "student loan forgiveness" then rule on "partial forgiveness for people who were already legally qualified", they run on "healthcare for everyone" then rule on "access to insurance marketplaces for everyone with a small subsidy to help pay for insurance that's mostly useless". They run on "women have a right to choose" and when given the chance to make that a law they say it's "not a legislative priority" (Obama, 09). Even if I do concede that Democrats have "my best interest" at heart I don't trust them to actually do any of it.
> Saying that people are voting against their best interests assumes that you know what those interests are. Maybe what they really want is not what you think they want, or what you think they ought to want. This is an attitude common among liberals. They know best, and if you disagree with them, you are simply wrong.
This is such a tired refrain. As a libertarian who was telling my aghast friends in 2016 that Trump was really speaking to people's frustrations and likely to win (thus you know, demonstrating that I at least understand many of those concerns, if not outright share them), this still doesn't explain it. For the most part Trump's policies do nothing to effect his (non-financier) supporters' professed interests, yet they keep lapping it up and coming back for more.
Perhaps with my libertarian biases, I could still be putting too much emphasis on the economic and liberty-based complaints rather than the contingent that wants to criminalize healthcare, put a handful of unlucky brown people in concentration camps, and other negative-sum social policies. But it still really doesn't feel that is where the broad support is coming from in the first place.
Ultimately from where I'm sitting, the responsibility for the communications breakdown mainly rests on Trump supporters for seemingly making "owning the libs" into their primary KPI. The Democratic party certainly has a similar "rabid" dynamic with regards to social justice / diversity, but that's a much narrower contingent (vocal, but still only a slice of policy) whereas for the Republicans it has broadly taken over the entire party platform.
As a fellow recovering Democrat I couldn't agree more. When the party shifted to neoliberalism in the 90s an incredible arrogance came with it. The attitude went from "How do we represent working people and get government to do what they want" to "We know how to govern better than the plebs, how do we get them to want what we're willing to do?" And their reaction to Trump has been to dismiss him as a flash in the pan and try to wait him out like bad weather, but they completely fail to reckon with the idea that whatever else he may be he's currently the guy batting .667 against them and in 2024 managed to maintain the support of open racists while gaining ground with every minority except women.
Trump isn't a disease, he's a symptom. He's an emergent property of a system that has been hilariously blatant about the fact that it doesn't value the people it needs to to continue functioning. Trump fits in a hole the government left in the hearts of the American people when it decided that its primary operating principle is "give the voters just enough to get them to put us in power give everything else to the donors and then buy stock in their companies". Doubly so because the lesson the Dems learned from Obama was that they can exploit identity politics to give the populace a symbolic victory and then govern in a way that directly transfers wealth from their voters to the donor class. Since 2008 the Democratic primary has been a game of "Who will you accept neoliberal market worship from?" An african american man (08, 12), a woman (16), your choice of an old white man, a mixed race woman or a gay man (20), the same mixed race woman from 20 who flat out told us when asked if there was anything she would do differently than the historically-unpopular old white man said "Not a thing that comes to mind" (24). They're the Pizza Party, the manager at work who has been given the impossible task of trying to buck up a completely demoralized staff while not being permitted to offer them anything of substance. The neoliberal wing of the Democratic party has been feasting on the seed corn since 1992 and can't figure out why the fields are empty and their serfs are angry.
Their response to Trump has been internally contradictory to a delightful degree as well. In 2015 HRC specifically instructed Dem-aligned media to elevate Trump's campaign with the theory that he would frighten people so badly that they'd vote for her without her having to offer anything substantial to voters. You'll remember the focus of the campaign was threefold: she's a woman and it would be neat to have a woman president, she's qualified, it's her turn. More of the same policies that pissed everyone off, very little in the way of material support that actually makes the average person's day to day life better, a lot of scolding people for not already being on the Dem side rather than figuring out what it would take to get them on the Dem side ("basket of deplorables") and generally treating voters as a resource that needs to be managed and then exploited for maximum value rather than as the people that you as an elected official serve.
To me, the defining feature of the modern Democratic party is their self-assurance that Trump is an idiot combined with a complete unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that that idiot just keeps kicking their asses. If your opponent is weak but consistently puts you on your back what does that make you?
tl;dr -- make 'em angry and point them at others to hate.
From the perspective of an independent, I’m not sure why you’re singling out Republicans here. It reads just as true if you’re to swap in the word Democrat.
- from California
As a fellow California independent, does it?
If it turns out that Obama is in the Epstein files, my friends won't have to get rid of their Obama hat, or their Obama sneakers, or their Obama cologne, or their Obama watch, or their Obama bible, or take down their Obama flag, or delete their Obama NFT trading cards.
Both parties are alien and hostile to me, but for very different reasons.
Now do Clinton!
do you suspect that this person was using Obama as an example because they secretly had a bunch of Clinton flags on their truck?
I mean, in all fairness I stole that bit from somewhere about Clinton, so it's been done.
This is why arguing politics with these guys is pointless. I once naively thought I could bring around one of my MAGA friends to the light side by focusing on policy but it just doesn't work. He admitted that everything Team R is doing is not really helping him but in the end it's always something like: "Look, I was born a Republican, my family is Republican, I will never vote Democrat, no matter what any of them do. We have to trust Trump to do the right thing." It's truly a religion. There is no getting to these people.
We could offer them an alternate social structure that they're welcome in. It beats calling them deplorables and trying to browbeat them.
No, this will not work.
The people who have the most success in terms of engagement against Anti-Vaxxers are not the pro-vax or normal people. Its the Anti-anti-vaxxers
The vibe of being able to fight for a moderate position, extremely - is what is currently working in debates.
Being treated like a worthy adversary, or being beaten by someone they can respect is one of the avenues is likely going to succeed more.
Why should I offer charity to people who keep referring to *all* Dems as scum of the earth and similar?
Depends on what you want. Do you want to win, or do you want to spite the people who hurt your feelings?
Seriously I wish we could split the country. Let the deplorables live by themselves un-vaxxed, with guns, religion and all of their other non-sense. And let us normal people live by ourselves with science and compassion.
(Unfortunately this will not happen. Because two things will have to be split: national debt and the nuclear arsenal. Heavy Sigh…)
Given the complete destruction of norms and institutions over the last year, the country is already lost for at least a decade, if not several. "Winning" is now a fantasy for our kids to maybe enjoy one day. I'm not sure that spite is a particularly bad option in this scenario.
Don't you think it cuts both ways though? I saw a video where a guy was asking (presumably liberal) NYU students about quotes relating to immigration policy. He initially said they were from (republican person T), and they stated that they thought the comments were racist. Then the interviewer said, oh wait, sorry, they were actually from (democrat person O), and the students immediately shifted their opinions and said the comments were reasonable.
I would love to see this video if you can find a link
Yes, second the desire for the video.
Tribalism coming to the Dems is taking FAR too long. People recognize that tribalism is working for the Republicans, so it’s natural that they are going to eventually imitated the winning strategy.
Seriously, I can’t believe it took this many decades for it to happen, and only after Trump made its efficacy blindingly obvious.
PS: Tribalism is not good for the overall health of a polity. Its just that people imitate whatever strategies appear to work.
I'm sure there's a little tribalism on the (D) side, too, but I don't know anyone who decorates their house, yard, and truck with Democrat merchandise and flags, wears Democrat political shirts and hats, has a shrine at home with a life-size figure of a Democrat politician, or brings up Democrat politics in social settings that are not even remotely political like a kid's birthday party. I've seen real life examples of all of these from the (R) side.
I live in Seattle and they exist on the (D) side too, it just depends on the neighborhood. And don’t get me started on Portland :)
Speaking to you as a progressive here I wish we had more viable parties.
You've never seen evidence of cultural/tribal signaling on the left? Never seen an "in this house" sign, somebody wearing a mask outside and alone/spread out, NPR tote bag, "Anti-Racist Baby" book on the shelf, brought up Robin Deangelo or random Trump jokes at a bbq... Fish don't know their wet.
I don't doubt they exist--I just haven't seen any, and I have seen many dozens of examples from the other side. I'm talking about an order of magnitude difference in degree of tribalism, not claiming total absence of tribalism from one side.
Really? You’ve never seen a life sized Barack Obama cutout?
You’ve not seen an “in the house we believe” yard sign?
It goes both ways.
My observation is that “both sides” (EDIT: of the electorate) are locked in this dynamic. In the ideal world people are able to evaluate specific ideas, but instead people judge ideas based on who it comes from.
The difference is that the actual output of good policy versus bad policy from the two sides are wildly uneven.
I don’t disagree. My point is that there are good ideas from both sides and there are poor ideas from both sides.
We’d be much better off if we can judge those ideas and sort the bad from good, rather than who they come from.
id love to know some of the good ideas from republicans, because for the past like 50 years or so, nearly every one has been a disaster or discriminatory
Your observation is yours, but it isn't mine and many others.
I grew up in a Dem household but I don't vote dem because my parents did or because I'm a party member (I'm not), it's because the lesser of the two evils is almost always the blue side.
And this was before the GOP literally became a cult. Now it's not even a choice.
I concur that ultimately you have to decide which party to vote for (and I happen to vote similarly to you).
What I am asserting is that it would be better if we were able to judge ideas based on the merit of the idea rather than who it comes from. That is, in my experience, not happening and the electorate for both dem and rep are guilty of this behavior.
I absolutely agree with that. But as a vote for a candidate due to an agreeable policy position is also a vote that's likely to vote as a block for everything else, it's not entirely invalid to vote that way (historically).
But as today's GOP is the Party of Trump™, and they now vote in lockstep, it's a simple "nopes".
I abhor partisan politics -- Washington warned us against them at the beginning and he was right.
> both sides
There it is... everytime, like clockwork, the false equivalence.
The false equivalence you reference, and that I agree exists, is about the politicians actions.
But I’m talking about the electorate who, in both cases, largely do not seem to evaluate the strength of ideas or policies, but, in many examples I can cite, judge ideas based on who it comes from.
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Word salad.
Even LLMs outperform your ability to comprehend English.
There simply is no alternative. Normal people must be completely blackpilled like me. The Democrats have an approval rating the lowest in Decades. None of these people are "working for [us]". Everyone is captured and this country is over. I really mean this. As part of the working class, we all feel this way.
This can be fixed with sane campaign finance laws. Every elected Democrat I know is willing to enact those if Citizens United is overruled. And every Democratic-appointed Justice on the Supreme Court would vote to overturn Citizens United. I know it sounds trite, but voting for Democrats again and again, flawed as they are, for generations, is the only way we're going to get out of this mess.
> Every elected Democrat I know is willing to enact those if Citizens United is overruled.
I don't want to be rude, but I don't believe you. I also have seen the polling and the country does not believe it as a whole. Democratic voters also don't believe it either. If you personally have an income >150K you are likely completely insulated from real Americans. The perception is that the Democrats care more about Israel and their donors than the country. Only 8 percent of Democrats are supportive of Israel but almost 90% of Dem senators are (I made this number up, the rest are real).
edit: the Republicans are publicly grifting, lest you think I like the Republicans. My overarching point is that ~60% of American's don't own homes and are completely uninvested in this country. They have completely given up, or are in a state of giving up. The Republicans and Democrats are extremely vile reptilian grifters who sold out this country.
I get it, your perspective is totally fair. Part of the reason Democrats care only about donors (the Israel lobby is one of those donors) is because of the influence of money in politics, which is a direct result of Citizens United. If they don't care about their donors, they lose. The incentives are pretty straightforward.
There were great campaign finance laws on the books, but Republican-appointed judges have steadily eroded those over the years, culminating in Citizens United. We have to overrule that awful case if we are to ever have working campaign finance laws in this country again. There's only one way to overrule that case, and that's with Democrat-appointed judges. Those judges typically do not answer to donors and so don't have the same incentives you've identified.
It does seem that people are fed up enough to ignore campaign spending, however. Examples are the Wisconsin supreme court race and Mamdani vs. Cuomo.
I really don't think that the Democratic establishment as we know it has much time to live. Democratic voters are not interested in the center-right. They want to go left. Candidates that move things to the left do well without expensive campaigns.
No. The alternative is to have some courage. It's easier to destroy than it is to create. There is a responsibility bias against the Democratic party because they're the only ones that know how to govern. Everyone is responsible is some way for the outcome. Our political rivals have attacked us so hard we're starting to believe the characterization they've made of us. I don't buy into the 'Everyone is captured and this country is over' message. It's a false equivocacy and just an excuse to be super critical of our own people.
Due to first-past-the-post voting in the US, I have at most two realistic options for my vote.
For the majority of the problems I see that I believe the government should be addressing, one side says "that's not a real problem" and the other side offers a really bad solution that they also won't realistically be able to make law.
Because Obamacare was such a fuckup? Where is Trumpcare? Where is Trumphousing? Bushfinancing? Bushtransport? How about even as a promise, and not as a delivered reality?
Anytime big news like this, news report on it, but the specific news channels do not mention, at all or minimize it position it in a way of for instance.. got rid of a terrible tool that didnt work well and was inefficient etc. So instead of focusing on removing free tax service so people have to pay again, people think it's a good thing because x y z, or even if they you ask any they don't know why its a good thing, they say someone they trust says its a good thing and people they don't like says a bad thing, and that's enough.
People can only get mad at the things they know about. My guess is the Murdoch Network of news organizations will not cover this heavily, if at all.
I looked, but couldn’t see this story covered by the NYT or NPR either…. Can you see it?
Could it be that there’s simply bigger news?
and if they do cover it, they will blame the other party for mismanaging it.
Sinclair too. US needs more independent media. Or the current media should get good.
1. People have demonstrated they aren't really willing to pay enough for independent media, aside from one or two person shops.
2. The current media is incentivized to collect ad revenue. Currently, the best known scheme is to outrage or scare readers so they keep refreshing the page. So, in that respect, the current media is doing great business.
Or they'll cover it and say how this is a win for the American public because they no longer need to use a socialist government website to file their taxes.
Which is also why they took down all the payment and audit/penalty management webpages too! Right? Right!?
… Oh wait. They didn’t? Huh, I wonder where the disconnect is. I guess no lobbyist wrote a check to remove that from the Government.
But there was already a free way you could file taxes with Turbotax, FreeTaxUSA, and H&RBlock if you had a simple return. Direct File was a government built alternative to that.
Eg: https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi...
If there was also a free flow available, why would the government need to build an alternative?
And TurboTax got in a bunch of trouble because of the amount of dark patterns they were using to guide you away from the free filing.
[0]: https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/01/ftc-finds-t...
Because those other companies actively violated agreements they made with the government in the 2000 to offer those services for free. They regularly tricked people into paying and lost a class action lawsuit over it.
It's also weird that we have to file taxes at all. Other developed countries have their revenue agencies automatically calculate the taxes for you and send a return. The only reason we don't is because of Intuit and H&R Block lobbying like crazy to prevent this. It's rent seeking at it's worse
Direct File was only built in the first place because Turbo Tax and H&R Block dropped out of agreements with the IRS to keep free tax filing options free and unencumbered of upsells and dark patterns.
The number of people their "free" products actually serve dropped drastically a couple years ago. They will upsell or dark pattern you to paying for it as best and as deeply as they can.
This was an interesting read on the subject: https://chrisgiven.com/2025/07/the-things-that-cannot-be-cha...
> How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore?
It is working "for" the people who have (perceived?) grievances against others, and are enacting pain on those Others.
People are happy to screw themselves if they screw Others (even more):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness
The cruelty towards Others is the point (regardless what you, yourself, get hit with):
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
Some people are of the opinion that ANY way to lessen the burden of taxation, especially automatic taxation, will lead to silent and continual increases of taxes.
I wonder if people actually know how much of their income is taxed away?
federal tax, state tax, local tax, property tax, sales tax, gas tax...
I wonder how much we actually get to keep, and I wonder how many people are aware of it both now and historically?
> How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore?
It's all about "owning the libs" by any means necessary. Nothing more, nothing less.
the book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This helped me realize that asking questions like this isn't really about contradiction, it's about revealed preference. In this case, it's about a revealed preference for social stability and personal comfort/familiarity in a system that's already been pushed over the inflection point and is now self-sustaining.
It helps to stop assuming people want what they say they want and start assuming that they want the predictable effects of their actions, then try to figure out what benefits those actions have or desires those effects may fulfill. When the group does something that's against your principles or best interests, there's an implicit question: do you value being part of the group more than you value this thing that we're transgressing against? When you look at it in this lens all sorts of behaviors start to make sense.
Also the reason to get rid of free tax filing is to exploit the American people, not just to hurt them for its own sake. Tell them they have to do something, make it as convoluted as possible, then sell a service that does it for them. It absolutely does hurt them, but that's not the driving force behind the effort.
The people who need to see it needs to see it in the entertainment hour of Fox News. I don't think Fox News would be disseminating this information at that hour
Doesn't matter. They will gladly take it on the chin if they believe the other guy gets it worse.
Populism has a zero sum view of the world. Absolute prosperity is less important than relative prosperity. In addition, for some there is a very strong expectation that they should be more prosperous than “out” groups (in the US, racial minorities).
Liberal policy in the US since Clinton has failed to deal with this, focusing instead on absolute prosperity (GDP per-capita). And progressive policy has been ineffective since they promise equality, including with minorities.
It drives me absolutely mad when I see (largely liberal people) complain about how both parties are the same and just as bad.
And its like... how do you really believe that? Like yeah both parties have the same corruption but welcome to politics.
So at this point I am convinced it is willful ignorance on both sides (or ulterior motives when I see certain left leaning people STILL bring up Biden or Harris in relation to trump as if either of them matter anymore in the slightest given our current situation, at this point I don't care what Biden did or did not do). Seeing something that goes against their views of "this side is bad" and just trying to talk it away as some "abuse of government power" or something to justify why it should not have been a thing in the first place while ignoring its real benefits.
You're assuming there is rationality in Republican party voters. They are generally not educated people.
The history of the last ~100 years of the study of democracy by basically pro-broad-franchise-democracy academics has been a journey from:
"Well, the masses must not be stupid, as restricted-franchise and anti-democratic folks have suggested, because this seems to kinda work. Let's study voter behavior to learn more about this."
to
"Uh. OK so we checked a hundred different ways, several times each to be sure, and they're in-fact incredibly poorly informed and have awful reasoning skills and their behavior, in aggregate, isn't driven by what we might hope it is at all. But, uh... I really want there to be a good outcome here, so, um, let's make some fuzzy guesses at how some kind of Wisdom of Crowds thingy and some sort of system-equilibria-seeking effects might save us? And let's keep double-checking those studies that kept proving voters are really dumb, because maybe... maybe we got something wrong?"
to
"Yeah all that was bullshit cope on our parts, it's all wrong. It's amazing this works at all. Voters are amazingly stupid, to a degree that's so hard to believe we spent decades and decades making sure—like it's proven about as surely as is the law of universal gravitation; cannot practically be educated out of that, maybe at all, and especially not if we first have to get them to vote to make that happen; and everything's basically held together by noise and circumstance and social norms, until it isn't. Go ahead and make that whisky a double. And line up another."
Intellectuals and academics coming to these conclusions and talking down to the populace is a big part of what has fueled anti-intellectualism and paved the way for demagogues to take over. If your response to today's ugly political landscape is that people are stupid, then you're not helping.
Sorry, I was contributing the painfully-well-backed scientific perspective. If we're doing public-politics kayfabe here, too, then yes that was a faux pas. I'm not trying to campaign though, I'm trying to inform.
If one mistakes the kayfabe for genuine, an awful lot of observed behavior and outcomes remain confusing... the science is there if anyone wants it (reading lists for relevant courses are widely available, journals are not that hard to come by, or just grab Democracy for Realists and follow up with reading criticism of it and checking its sources) and at least the basic fact that very few voters think or behave remotely like anyone hoping for a well-informed, rational, and empathetic electorate might hope, is depressingly solid.
This is understood by everybody operating at a level of importance in media and politics, so a bunch of what they do (and its efficacy) will also be confusing if one disregards it. Even when they talk about how they believe in the voters, and blah blah—that's part of the kayfabe, that's a marketing message, they 100% don't believe that because not only is it definitely not true, you also lose elections (or viewership, or whatever) more often if you act like (not say—act like) it's true. It's not a lie they can afford to hold on to past the lowest levels of their professions, as they'll be concretely punished for the gap between their belief and reality and replaced by others who get it.
Poor information diet.
Positioning this as a program from the previous admin (therefore bad).
Positioning this as a win for privatization (therefore good).
And people not willing to look at politics as something beyond a sport.
Quite frankly, I believe both parties are pretty foul, and people should be looking outside of them for policy positions that actually help people, but I suppose that makes me naive or whatever.
> How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore?
anymore?
Are you implying that the GOP would have been for a free Direct File in years prior?
They wouldn't have.
This is not a new stance. I'm not sure why anyone in the Republican party would be shocked by this news, or why it would change their opinions.
This is similar to the Republican party doing something anti-abortion, and then Liberals being shocked, and saying, "You guys are really still going to vote for these people?"
Yeah, it's what they expected.
>Are you implying that the GOP would have been for a free Direct File in years prior?
Look at the Eisenhower campaign planks. A pro-union, pro-minimum wage Republican party isn't just possible, they did it and they won on it.
If you had even a minimal US history education or you wouldn't make such claims. Nixon was to the left of Obama on many issues. That you don't know this is symptomatic of the problem today. The right has moved so far to the right that what was once considered right is now lefter than anyone on the left is willing to be. This wasn't an accident. It was planned, and began around the time of Reagan. Almost half a century later, the country is radically changed and kids today think it's always been this way. Well, it hasn't.
> That you don't know this is symptomatic of the problem today.
Is today the last 20+ years?
If you go back far enough, the democrats and republicans are completely unrecognizable, and anybody who would recognize them is long dead...
The cruelty is the point.
Also, don't expect them to do anything that benefits anyone other than their billionaire cronies.
It's a "complicated tax system" when the president can't even complete his tax return for showing to the American public.
Very complicated.
"Anymore?" At what point has the GOP worked for "the people" at all?
I'm 55. At no point in my life has the GOP pushed any policy initiative that would help regular humans. Instead, they've been the party of fearmongering -- about women, about drugs, about immigrants, about African Americans, about gay people, and the devil, about trans people, etc.
The Dems have been the party that advanced actual helpful policies, but holy crap do they ever have a messaging problem IN ADDITION to an effectiveness issue. But at least their marching orders are actually helpful.
Nixon created the EPA, he expanded the Clean Air Act, he signed the Endangered Species Act. He did a lot of good for the environment in the early 70's.
> in the early 70's
Calling back to a time before the middle-aged GP could even tie his own shoes is not really much of an argument.
"at no point in my life"
You probably have to go back to before the civil rights movement.
> I'm 55. At no point in my life has the GOP pushed any policy initiative that would help regular humans.
You're overstating the case a bit. Nixon and Ford were not bad for most people. Nixon's motives might have been extremely self-serving on domestic issues - but he was re-elected in '72, amid the Vietnam War and many other troubles, with 60.7% of the popular vote. Take a peek at his domestic policies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Domestic_policy He didn't need Watergate, nor any other dirtywork to easily win the election - he just couldn't keep himself from scratching his Paranoid Creepy Idiot itch.
Yes, after Ford, the GOP was taken over by a team-up of "Conquer, Loot, and Pillage" fiscal conservatives, and "Dump Jesus and Jimmy, 'Cause Our Rightful Kingdom is of This World" religious conservatives.
Flip-side, I don't see the Dems nearly so favorably. In the Carter-ish years they phased out most of their historic concern for ordinary Americans. In favor of hanging out with rich & slimy, and performative concern for ever-smaller minorities.
>I don't see the Dems nearly so favorably.
I supposed my opinion may be colored by the fact that I have friends who can afford to be alive today because of the ACA, so...
That's right: most Republicans are actually evil aliens whose motivations are quite different from human motivations. Also, it is impossible to understand their motivations, so we shouldn't waste our time trying.
So you believe it was done just to hurt the American people?
No, that’s not plausible.
The article suggests Trump wanted to help tax software companies, but that overlooks the fact that Trumps previous increase to the standard deduction greatly simplified taxes for many filers. So that’s probably not it, either.
Trump is hell bent on raising taxes via tariffs, so it doesn’t seem likely that personal income taxes are a big part of whatever he’s planning.
Personally, I wish the government would start sending a bill, not putting the onus on the filer to make the calculation. That seems most sensible to me.
Oh they do, but the democrats are so hated but a significant percentage of the population for their recent actions, people had to make a choice, and they did.
I’ve heard it described as “I know I’m being robbed, but I was already being robbed. I know this is a poor environmental choice, but the dems acted like we’re all children, thinking we have no choice but to support them. When they try to force through new social norms like they’ve been doing, it doesn’t even feel like my country anymore.”
I have to agree, they definitely encouraged the attitude of “either you agree with this new thing or you’re a Nazi”. Well, they certainly found out.
Of course this backlash is so bad it’s going to trigger another.
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This is the republican endgame: destroy anything of public value, privately capture all organs of a functioning state and divide them up for profit.
And stamp some newspeak hypocritical label on it. That last part is important for the Fox ticker.
Meanwhile, Dems pissed away billions trying and failing to build things like high speed rail, rural broadband, and EV charging network. Somebody needs to figure out a way to make this stuff work.
HSR is getting built; the USD successfully connected rural areas, though I agree that was pointless; EV charger build out is accelerating despite funds being illegally yanked back.
They did. It was called DirectFile, and it was working great with overwhelmingly positive reviews.
Every example you have was blocked or disrupted by Republicans. And yet you're blaming Democrats for failing? What, exactly, are they supposed to do?
You could elect Democrats and it would be just as crappy. They'd just talk nicer to you.
They're usually better for the deficit (yes, really, if you just looked at the data and not rhetoric Republicans are who you'd vote for if you wanted to make the deficit worse) and sometimes do stuff like effective consumer protection enforcement, do a lot less of things like trying to sell off public land to extractive industries, haven't tried to use the civil service as a captured partisan tool & loyalist-reward program since like the 19th century, and occasionally get us at least baby-steps in the right direction like this now-removed direct filing program and the ACA (god knows what they might accomplish if those baby steps didn't keep getting completely wiped out every few years, perhaps they'd move beyond that! But I guess we'll never know because we keep electing Republicans)
Except when we DID elect Democrats we got the free Direct File tax service. so no, it's not "just as crappy"
>> You could elect Democrats and it would be just as crappy.
Crappy for different reasons though. This tax filing thing was implemented on their watch, so they would not be the ones to dismantle it. Somehow we seem to get the worst ideas from both parties rather than the best.
No one wanted to dismantle it; it was a very positive change in terms of government and citizen efficiency.
If no one wanted to dismantle it, why is it being dismantled?
Because Intuit wants to dismantle it.
.. so still better
Is it not in the governments interest to implement the cheapest, best system to enable all citizens to easily pay taxes? The IRS knows basic taxes better than anyone so certainly they are the most equipped to handle this program instead of the private sector?
Unfortunately, private sector has a say in this as well UA lobbying. Intuit and H&R Block spend millions a year [1] in lobbying to protect their business, at the expense of the American people.
[1] https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/turbotaxs-intuit-spent-re...
It is in the interest of turbotax et al. shareholders and politicians who receive funding from their lobbyists.
It is, but it is in individual politician's interest to take lobbying dollars from Intuit, who wants to keep gouging us
Many private interests want taxes to be inefficient and painful so they can lobby for lower taxes
And ironically, those same interests don't usually lower either middle-class tax rates nor the required complexity of the returns themselves! They just farm annoyance by making "IRS" a dirty word, and harvest it by some combination of imposing austerity on the IRS to make tax cheating by rich people less risky, and policy changes that just happen to benefit a class of people that excludes the bottom 80%.
You presume that the people in charge have the best interests of the government in mind when they make their decisions.
There is a giant and still ever-widening gap between what is in the best interest of the government* and what is in the best interest of elected officials and the wealthy special interests that fund them.
(* which should theoretically be indistinguishable from what is in the best interest of the people)
I, a Dane, have literally never filed a tax return in my life. It's completely automatic. I get a letter every year (electronically) and unless I have corrections to the pre-filled numbers, I do nothing. Manually filing tax returns is something people did in the 80's.
I thought you guys were supposed to be tech pioneers or something.
Brit here, we have tax taken from gross pay automatically (Pay As You Earn, PAYE) for most people unless they are self-employed.
https://www.gov.uk/income-tax/how-you-pay-income-tax
When I was self-employed for a shortish period, I went for an assessment interview. The HMRC bod spent most of the 20 minutes trying to find expenses I could claim tax relief on. There wasn't much (working at home, using my own laptop, writing teaching materials based on existing knowledge &c).
We have automatic deductions on paychecks too, the problem is the complicated system of deductions and the way capital gains are handled that we have to apply after that.
Trump and Republicans actually simplified it a lot with their temporary tax changes that boosted up the "standard deduction" that everyone can take at the cost of nerfing a bunch of "itemized deductions" that are more likely to apply to people in blue states (state tax deductions, property tax deductions) with the sneaky provision that the boost to the standard deduction would expire when he was no longer in office in order to make the bill "tax neutral" and let them pass it through budget reconciliation.
Which is nuts, but has actually made filing taxes much simpler and closer to what it should be for some time.
I set up an electric utility account online. Later, I get a bill from them, that has my name misspelled. I use as hell did not misspell my name like that. In the back office somewhere they are employing people who read text from one application and type it in another.
The US is stuck in time somewhere along the 70-90s.
>The US is stuck in time somewhere along the 70-90s.
Don't be too sad. The 90's were a great time. I wish I could go back.
Is it that easy for small business owners too?
In the USA if you have a small business, with a few shareholders, it's an absolute nightmare.
You still need to do some kind of yearly accounts for your business. And you will most likely need an accountant for that. But the actual tax filing is fairly simply.
Couldn't tell you, since I'm a wage slave. But I hear Denmark is quite small business friendly, despite us being taxed up the arse.
I'm convinced a bunch of things like this, which create expense and nickel-and-diming and wasted time for tons and tons of ordinary people, are why the US feels a lot poorer than it is on paper.
Like, Intuit and Turbotax contribute to GDP but their existence, at least at the size they are and in some of their roles, is purely a drag on QOL.
(of course, the biggest part of this is the healthcare system, which is great at making sick people and their families, not to mention HR folks and such, waste tens to hundreds of hours on things that aren't about healthcare itself at all, while also costing far more than it ought to—but there are lots of other things like this, see also the tipping-culture thread today, it's all part of that, little bits of bullshit that make life worse)
Many countries have been working for decades on improving their societies, systems and quality of life.
The US has been boosting its GDP to the benefit of the rich while not improving a damn thing for regular people.
> I thought you guys were supposed to be tech pioneers or something.
Lol thank you for the laugh
What browser do you, as a Dane, use to electronically file? I assume something very advanced Danish-built?
Any browser, its just a web app.
Yes indeed! Chrome (through Vivaldi). The technical lead and chief architect of the V8 JavaScript engine was a dane (Lars Bak).
Yes, in a world where the government is run by a benevolent public servant. But we now have a fascist Republican government run by a rapist fraudster intent on pillaging whatever is left of America.
Ah, high quality HN discussion
Ah, good comment
GOP congresspeople have argued it's good to make it harder to pay taxes, that will make people pay less taxes, which is "starving the beast", which is good.
well, also it means that you can arbitrarily prosecute people, and it means Intuit etc will just give you, as a congressperson, bribes.
It's incredible how little interest these ghouls have in the concept of "public good." Things like the conserving the environment or public health or even something as simple as free tax filing, are just seen as aisles for scoring ideological points or maximizing the interests of profit seeking entities.
It's even worse. The ideology is that the government needs to be starved of income.
They seem pretty ok with starving actual people too.
No it's not. Why are they bragging about tariff income then? There is no coherent ideology guiding the American right wing except centralizing power onto the monarch.
It contains multitudes. The "tear down government" are the Curtis Yarvin - like faction who believes "the State" (including federal government) must be destroyed and replaced by private entities. They use Trump as a tool to reach their goal. Then you have the true Trump believers. Then there are the turncoats (probably the majority). All of them seek power for the monarch.
Right, so the only coherent ideology is their desire for dictatorship, as I said. This makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to interact with and collaborate with "the right" in a democratic system.
The unifying feature is they do not care for the established mechanisms by which we decide what to do, ergo there is no way for us to decide together what to do.
FYI, there are/were two systems. "Direct File" is probably the more complex and integrates directly with 25 participating states. The other is "Free File" and only covers some payers.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/irs-direct-file-for-free
https://www.irs.gov/filing/irs-free-file-do-your-taxes-for-f...
Although these systems are similar in goals, they are pretty different in terms of how they're structured:
- Direct File: Was built by the US government to make tax filing easier - Free File: Is a subsidy from the US government to tax software to make it cheaper for people to file taxes
Direct file had the promise of making things easier and cheaper overall while Free File is more of a cost shifting approach.
Features like importing tax data from other federal government systems were included in Direct File to make it easier to file taxes. These types of features would be hard for those outside the government to do. At a values level, Free File provides funding to the tax preparation software companies. These companies benefit from difficulty in filing taxes because it creates a market for their products.
Some of the DirectFile code was published on GitHub.
https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file
Yep, and "Free File" is the one that you are required to go through TurboTax or their 1-2 'competitors' to do, who are free to do their best to essentially bury and shadowban it from search engines. They're required by law to offer it, but are allowed to try to hide it from you and to promote alternative programs that will likely result in upsells for most taxpayers.
Uh no, "Free File" is split into two versions and the second option on there, "Free File Fillable Forms", is available to everyone for free without using a third party. I've been using it for years.
Awesome! I love having great public services be fucking gutted for no goddamn reason.
CPB, Direct File, BLS head all in one day. Lots to sweep under the rug this Friday afternoon. We're spending more for this service incineration. Literally. Tr*mp has increased spending despite all these cuts.
The only silver lining to this is that since the direct file code is open source, forks have already sprung up.
What I would love to see is one of these forks gain prominence and become the “Debian” of tax filing while TurboTax and HR block are the “Windows” and “MacOS” of the tax filing world
Granted I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that this is a tall tall order and finding consistent maintainers will be a huge challenge. But who knows maybe this will piss off just the right billionaire to make them dump a few dollars into a dev team that can build FreeFile
What does it mean to open source this? Genuinely. Won't the irs just say, "we only accept digital filing from known providers"?
Just Print + Mail. Sure it's an extra hassle but if it means saving $80 on your tax filing then lots of people will jump through the additional hoops. And TBH having printed and mailed my tax returns before it's not that onerous.
That's what I've always done. I used TurboTax a few times back when it first came out. At that time it was a standalone program that you bought on a CD. It ran on your computer and it generated forms that you printed and mailed in. No internet required, your data never left your computer.
Once it became a "cloud" platform I didn't trust Intuit to keep my data private or not to use it for their own purposes. Ever since then I've done my taxes on paper. It's not difficult for someone with W2 and even self-employment income. For a more complicated situation it could be, but at that point you probably have an accountant anyway.
Ah, that makes sense. Appreciate it.
The workaround is for everyone to coordinate , print and mail physical returns. Let IRS have fun with scanning and processing :) enough people do this, IRS would open up digital filing again
It’ll become a paid offering lol. What’s the license?
Its a custom license apparently, but its public domain for the US.
https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/LICENSE
Was required to be open-sourced from the SHARE IT act. One of the most common-sense bills in a long time.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9566
I don't think the second half of your comment is accurate.
Works created by the federal government have always been in the public domain, i.e. ineligible for copyright protection. The SHARE IT Act has nothing to do with that. (Of course, government works may be protected or restricted in other ways, such as classification.)
The SHARE IT Act doesn't say anything about releasing software publicly, nor does it say anything about open source licensing. It applies to software that is created by the federal government itself or by contractors It requires the source code to be made available to the government and stored in an appropriate source code repository, such that it can potentially be shared between agencies.
Most Americans don’t know of Grover Norquist, but he’s probably the most influential conservative activist on tax policy. He had a pledge that, at some point, almost all Republican congresspeople signed.
And despite that Republicans are now cheering one of the largest tax increases on US consumers (tariffs)
The way taxes work in the U.S. is bass ackwards. They have all the info. I should be the I.R.S. where they submit a completed form to me for me to audit. I decide to sign it or not and go on with my life for another year. The state taxes are even worse (albeit, that may just be ny's problem).
This does sound a lot like Washington Monument Syndrome but I’m happy to be corrected
Is there any impact on Free Fillable Forms?
Earlier on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44730256
I can't even ping irs.gov right now.
HTTPS request to www.irs.gov times out.
Great government we got here :(
Dropping ICMP traffic isn't super uncommon to try to mitigate low-complexity DoS attacks, I also cannot ping irs.gov.
I can get to www.irs.gov in my browser though.
It's also a great way to introduce hard to debug network issues since PMTUD also relies on ICMP, and is basically mandatory for ipv6.
works fine for me... i really doubt the irs website is down
You can't ping irs.gov. It blocks ICMP.
ICMP (ping) is often blocked and is an unreliable way to tell if a website is up.
HTTPS requests timing out might as easily be something on your end, or your provider.
Do you have a VPN on? A lot of government services block those.