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I had an earlier-than-I-like meeting today, so here& #39;s my hot take: we& #39;re in this mess about poor people not getting the Economic Impact Payments they& #39;re entitled to because the GOV doesn& #39;t autofill taxes for everyone and that& #39;s because of Intuit and Grover Norquist.
Here& #39;s the Planet Money piece on this issue: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episode-760-tax-hero">https://www.npr.org/sections/...
Here& #39;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">https://www.propublica.org/article/i...
Let& #39;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/">https://www.politico.com/agenda/st...
There are plenty of other reasons why this is hard (a top one is that certain Republicans didn& #39;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& #39;t have the relevant data on all people in the United States because they& #39;ve never been asked to interact or help people living in poverty outside of VITA or TCE.
And that& #39;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.
