Taxes
More Taxpayers Will Owe The IRS In April Due To Under-Withholding, Report Says
The GOP tax postcard requires 6 extra forms – Vox
Pre filled in tax forms are a good idea. Although for a simple worker who has no investment income and just the standard deduction this simpler form is a modest step forward.
Planet Money : NPR
"The mortgage interest deduction is popular, but it has numerous distorting effects on the economy β and economists also say that it does exactly the opposite of what people think."
Republicans Are Growing the Deficit to Cut Welfare Programs – The Atlantic
"Republicans are planning to use the deficits created by their own tax cuts to slash the social safety netβbut they may end up setting the stage for tax hikes instead."
The IRS Computer System Is the Oldest in the Government
"Though the IRS has periodically upgraded its computing system, todayβs system is still running the same code, which was written nearly 60 years ago. Most of it is in the Assembly programming language, which the IRS itself has described as βantiquatedβ and βinflexible.β Worse, the number of programmers who can understand and maintain the code behind the Individual Master File (IMF) dwindles with every passing year. According to the Government Accountability Office, the IMF and its business counterpart (the BMF) are the oldest computing systems used by the federal government. (The runner-up in this dubious contest is the software used to coordinate the nationβs nuclear weapons.)"
"Plans to replace the IMF with a twenty-first-century equivalent known as CADE (Customer Account Data Engine) have faltered. The transition is now well behind schedule. As a consequence, the likelihood of a catastrophic computer failure during tax season increases with every passing year. That may not pose quite the same danger as an errant missile, but the prospect of lost refund checks, unnecessary audits, and other errors suggests that the time has come to bring the IRS into the 21st century."