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I had an earlier-than-I-like meeting today, so here's my hot take: we're in this mess about poor people not getting the Economic Impact Payments they're entitled to because the GOV doesn't autofill taxes for everyone and that's because of Intuit and Grover Norquist.
Here's the Planet Money piece on this issue: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episode-760-tax-hero
Here's the Pro Public piece on this issue: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free
Let's throw in this Politico piece on the political alliance with this quote: "Both want to make it as painful as possible for you to do your taxes yourself": https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2018/07/18/tax-filing-congress-irs-000683/
There are plenty of other reasons why this is hard (a top one is that certain Republicans didn't want to use other systems like SSA or SNAP to pay people the stimulus for ideological reasons).
But a huge part of this is that the IRS doesn't have the relevant data on all people in the United States because they've never been asked to interact or help people living in poverty outside of VITA or TCE.
And that's because tax preparation companies and anti-tax advocates are happy to sacrifice the interests of people living in poverty in exchange for more profits and their ideological goals. Which makes me so mad.
