Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site(washingtonpost.com) |
Claiming high user satisfaction, IRS will decide on renewing free tax site(washingtonpost.com) |
Eventually, privacy was eroded away year after year to the point where the government now knows an extreme amount about each citizen.
I guess I'd refrain the question - instead of asking why do we need to do taxes when the government knows everything about us that they could do it for us, should we really have that little privacy? Maybe instead of changing the way we file taxes, we change the way the government is intimately entangled with our lives?
Of course, those ideas, liberty and privacy, small government, etc., isn't really fashionable with the latest generations and most people would gladly give up their freedom and privacy to save having to fill out some paperwork.
They cannot do everyone's taxes since what they know about many individuals is incomplete.
> should we really have that little privacy?
Put that way, the answer is no. On the other hand, virtually everyone demands services from their government and very few people want those services to be transactional (e.g. most people demand roads, few people want to pay based upon their usage of those roads). That means the government needs some form of revenue. For various reasons, it has been decided that a person's income should be a portion of those revenues. In order to ensure that people are paying their dues, the government needs to collect some information. Are there other ways the government could get revenues? Sure, but all of them are going to be problematic in some form or other.
> Of course, those ideas, liberty and privacy, small government, etc., isn't really fashionable with the latest generations and most people would gladly give up their freedom and privacy to save having to fill out some paperwork.
One has to be careful about generalizations. Even though a desire for liberty and privacy may be universally appealing, we would find that people's views on what those terms mean varies from generation to generation and from individual to individual. Note that I said the meaning changes, not a person's desire for it. As for the desire for small government, well, some people want small government and other people don't. It is a far less universal ideal.
But that’s really beside the point. If you are like millions of other Americans filing W2s, the fact that you work for your employer isn’t a secret. Your salary isn’t a secret. Most people will take the standard deduction. There’s no reason why that can’t be the default. It’s not a privacy violation for the IRS to use that info to make peoples lives easier.
I've lived in Sweden where taxes are not just automatically filed but every citizen can trivially look up anyone's tax returns and nobody ever saw it as the government being intimately entangled with anyone's life.
Privacy violation would be to look into how and on what you spend your money, not that everyone pays their share of taxes. That tells you nothing about what people spend their money on. Merely that they aren't avoiding paying their part. I don't see the problem with the government automatically doing my taxes or anyone being able to see that.
You still had to file taxes, though, so they would know about your income, if only a year behind. I read somewhere that tax withholding only started during WWII (and it was supposed to be temporary). It's really the withholding that would give the IRS the information needed to file your taxes in advance, so it's only a fairly recent possibility.
Your job is it then to correct things, fix wrong ones and submit what they couldn’t get automatically
The ATO website is also veeeery nice! I was surprised how simple of a task doing taxes was
Your negative freedom and ownership of property is recognized and enforced by the tax-funded awesome power of the state. If you like small government there is no lack of countries that you can emigrate too where the internationally-recognized government is too weak to enforce its protection over much of its society. These are usually places that are too unstable to be palatable to someone from a developed nation.
> should we really have that little privacy?
As someone else mentioned, the government already has to know that to know that you are paying the right amount of tax given your means. Alternatively, consider simplifying tax laws so that it needs to know less. Also, look at regulation that limits what the government can do based on the information that it has on you; for that matter, businesses too, for privacy's sake.
Might as well say "Maybe instead of changing the way we file taxes, we solve world hunger"
(I say this while voting for small government & making efforts to preserve my privacy)
I understand why it’s important to do it properly (for the employee’s benefit) but when I tried to look into what we had to do, as technically her employer, and it was nearly impossible for me to figure out what we had to do and then how to even do it (federal and state). I understand why many people just want to pay cash under the table. It really made me feel like a complete moron.
If we ever do it again we’ll have to just hire a payroll service and factor that cost into what wages we can offer, or structure it so that total payments remain under the threshold required for filing.
I did it manually the first time around and it was a pain in the ass.
Not knowing what was required for sure? Figuring out how to fill out the 1099-MISC? Knowing how to file it with the IRS/state?
I remember it being a bit tricky at first but once I knew the right form it only took a few minutes. The hard part for me is keeping track of rule changes.
Payroll service works though =)
Maybe Congress can work on this next.
https://www.npr.org/2013/03/26/175332655/what-would-the-u-s-...
AFAICT this is a mis-interpretation. IIUC the actual study says "54% of adults in the United States have a literacy IN ENGLISH below 6th grade level". They might be highly literate in some other language but that wasn't tested.
The functional literacy statistics are bad no matter how you dice them.
There is no reason every legitimate employer can't send tax information to the IRS and the self employed can't simply self-report our taxable incomes. No more deductions, for anything, just simple graduated tax brackets. Easy for the IRS to calculate quickly and either send a bill or a refund by April. They would need a fraction of the staff they currently employ and we could apply the savings to the national debt.
Stop there! Really? "6th grade" is age eleven?
That is mind blowing!
This year things got complicated enough that after spending an entire Saturday staring at forms, instructions, and spreadsheets trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, I finally gave up and hired a CPA that specializes in tax returns do my 1040.
The whole thing ended up being 27 pages long. I guess I needed forms 1040-ES, 2210, 8949, 8995-A, 8960; Schedules 2, B, D, and 8812; and several worksheets. I consider myself fairly capable and experienced in filing my own taxes having done it 20-something times, but I don't think I would have ever figured out that I'd need all those forms and schedules this time around.
It's particularly frustrating that they are somehow able to tell me that it's wrong after the fact and harass me to correct it. If they can do that, why not just tell me what they think it's supposed to be in the first place, and then give me the option of correcting what they send me if I spot something that doesn't make sense to me?
*intuit has left the chat
I wonder if this issue is due to the overall spread of academic abilities, or if it's because progressive education systems focus more on caring for students' feelings rather than setting higher standards
Like many things in America, the government is lobbied to create an unnecessary problem by private companies who aim to profit off of solving that problem.
https://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-many-words-are-tax-code/
A typical federal tax filing for our household is over 100 pages long, and that’s just the stuff that we need to mail. The accompanying directions and worksheets are probably close to 1000 pages.
Also, lots of the directions are incredibly obfuscated once you start getting into those 1000 pages.
> If you do A and not B then you can do C.
> Example calculation of C (usually over a page long):
> Bob wants to do C but encountered corner case exceptions E and F in the absence of event G. That implies B, so here’s the arithmetic for doing D (which is covered elsewhere in this book, and is probably irrelevant to your situation).
This is just standard stuff TurboTax handles. God help people with filings too complicated for that!
(And, yes, I used to do taxes by hand.)
One year, I had to spend a good deal of time working around a cycle in my taxes--VA wanted me to do my CA taxes first and CA wanted me to do my VA taxes first, and the instructions that explained how to handle this situation were only one on the one form that needed to be used to solve it, with nothing telling you maybe you should look for that form instead.
Furthermore, there's quite a few cases where the instructions basically tell you "fill in the number that belongs here" without giving a good idea of what numbers actually belong there. Here is an example of such an instruction in its entirety:
> Enter in line 5 the amount of pension, annuities, IRA/Keogh distributions not taxed on your Massachusetts Form 1.
The hard part of taxes isn't knowing whether or not to add or subtract two lines. It's knowing which lines shouldn't be 0!
I don't care how many times this is repeated it's utterly preposterous. Imagine being so naive or less charitably to possess the motivated reasoning to actually believe this shit.
If you can make a market out of it, someone will.
Yes you can. It’s capitalism. The owners of the current system lobby and advertise and “manufacture consent” in keeping the current system because it is wildly profitable.
That’s really all there is to it.
I assume most people have too much money taken out of their paycheck for taxes, so the net result is that the government takes in extra money.
Fixing the withholding system to account for the real world would go a long way toward simplifying reporting and would improve compliance.
Even the people I work with as team mates often call me and do a screen share for a problem and most of the time the answer is “dude, you’re just machine gunning the buttons before I can even read them. Lets just slow down for a second here”.
You can help choose the brand of oligarchy that runs the United States but you can't vote against it.
I welcome the Americans to the delightful convenience of hassle-free taxes!
did you ever try to use any USA federal service? (veteran benefits, free tax filing, ssn, etc). you're required an id.me account.
what's that? well some anonymous group saw login.gov, realized the value of the data, and lobbied that it should be open to free capital markets to explore, not the government!
so now if you want to even talk to the irs or veteran service, you need to go to that privately owned id.me site, do a video call, scan all the documents they ask for (even ones without visible anti counterfeit mechanics like your typewritter filled ssn card).
and the best part? right after you create your account, you land on a coupon clipping page that is a facsimile of the garbage pamphlet the usps is forced to shove daily in yout physical mailbox! and among the links on that page are links to Whitepapers about how advertisers can benefit from buying user data from them because it includes gov affiliation like vetetan, taxpayer, etc and bank information!
i bet Stalin also had good approval after the purge
Getting taxes automated is a solved problem. There is only one reason this status quo persisted for so many years. it's just to bad that we must bend the knee before the real americans, Intuit's lobbyists.
I'm glad the IRS is showing signs of wriggling free of such influence, but it is unfortunately to late a fix for yet another unforgiveable position for me.
The US government has shown me its priorities again and again throughout my life, and it's not the people. There is no rehabilitating this image in my eyes.
Hopefully I can be proven wrong, and the next generation can grow up far less cynical of our elected representatives.
I support free file for most people. I also support radically simplifying the tax code, which would make the Byzantines blush.
I do not want to be forced to mail in paper forms just so I can do my taxes for real.
This year it took me five minutes and cost whatever I pay for my bank account, which I used for identification. $30 maybe? I could have waited a bit for papers through the mail and approved with a SMS.
Might be an OK goal for US:ian lawmakers.
But of course the direct answer is that throwing the full faith and credit of the US (that is, in showing earnest and steady effort to pay off its debts, something that worldwide investors count on) straight out the window would immediately tank the value of the dollar, which wouldn't be good for anyone paid in dollars.
If the implication is that we should not bother to run our finances honestly and responsibly because of some idea that the checks written by lawmakers aren't for things we all agree on, then it seems like a bit of a non sequitur. The time to decide on that is when we decide who writes those checks, but we have every incentive to commit and honor our debts after that.
In the rest of the world in many places we have been filling taxes directly online for many years. Sorry Americans, you did not invent free electronic tax filing. You are at least twenty years late to the party.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090418011703/http://www.irs.go...
I've used it for years. It's just the paper forms with some auto-calculation built in. I've never had a company do my taxes for me so it's a little hard for me to even imagine the value-add for simple taxes. Presumably they ask for the same information that's on the form.
I imagine Intuit is still ripping us off behind the scenes even if it's free at point of use, but maybe they don't get a good deal and are happy to do it free/cheap as long as they can make it have a scary enough UX to get you to pay them instead.
He the President of America you know?
id.meThe rest of the world call this a bribe.
Should people who are receiving welfare benefits be allowed to vote?
With voting on passing legislation, the point is to choose what best represents the interests of your constituents, conflicts of interest matter because they may cause you to not properly represent the interests of your constituents. Self interest is not supposed to be the point.
> hassle-free taxes
That's still a crazy demand on the time of someone paying for everything. My bank, my employer and my brokerage all report on me, the IRS should be able to just mail a check or a bill most of the time.
Settling with the US government as an expat, on the other hand... I pay handomely for somebody to handle that.
My wife’s (uncomplicated) taxes basically took 15 minutes. You do always want to check to make sure that you’ve hit every tax deduction you can - for example, work-from-home deductions, donation deductions, even things like paying for news subscriptions gets a tax credit. That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t get reported to the CRA, but which you can claim tax deductions on.
It really puzzles me what is so complicated about filing taxes as someone who only has employment income.
For years the big hassle was that housing loans only got put on one of us, but since we're both paying on the loan, the loan and deductions should be split as well. So that had to be manually calculated and corrected on each of our declarations.
However last year they fixed that. Now they get the split from the property ownership registry and distribute the loan and deductions according to that. For most people they pay similar to their ownership, typically 50/50, so no need to change that anymore.
Our IRS' has a quite good internal development team[1], rather than relying on contractors for everything. Their digital solutions has been several steps ahead most other agencies.
[1]: https://www.skatteetaten.no/nn/itjobb/ledige-stillinger/
UFile downloaded everything for me, autofilled my return, submitted it online back to the CRA and charged me $30 for the privilege. LMAO
That out if the way, I agree with the earlier comment: why does the government automatically know all your financial details? Where is the privacy? Where is the requirement for a warrant, to access your private information?
If you ever work with poor families to help them navigate the government resources available to them, you develop a strong appreciation for the EITC as opposed to, say, SNAP (food stamps)
To relieve the regressive payroll tax (FICA) on low-income families.
One can argue whether this is desirable, but there's basically no way to enforce income taxes if the government is not aware of how much people earn.
How is this possible? Where I live, you can expect to pay around 30% of your income as tax almost regardless of how much money you actually make (as long as it's above something like $600 a year).
Then $1.6k/kid gets subtracted due to the Child Tax Credit, for a net -$700 in taxes paid.
Keep in mind the cost of living in the USA is higher than many other countries. 60k for a family of four is doable in most places, but it is not a life of luxury.
edit: the family will also end up paying 7.65%/$4.6k in a separate tax for a mandatory retirement scheme (FICA)
I qualified for using the IRS free option this year and I'm so happy and I hope I never go back.
You only need to withhold 90% of the taxes you owe to avoid an underpayment penalty, so you don't need to withhold too much.
Those tax prep companies like TurboTax spent a lot of marketing dollars on making it seem they are finding you secret deductions and other crap. There isn't. It's all pretty straight forward.
Some of it comes from the pre-online era where tax accountants did and still do commit fraud by falsely claiming deductions for individuals. And you eventually hear of a hundred million dollar IRS fraud arrest.
For reference, here's what I paid for tax preparation over the years:
2010: $9.99
...
2017: $48.00
2018: $66.95
2019: $97.90
2020: $67.91
2021: $93.67
2022: $124.90
2023: $133.95 (at this point I said "Fuck this")
So from $48 to $134 (or +280%) over the course of 6 years and +1344%(!!!) over the course of 13 years. All to simply pre-fill some standard IRS forms and submit them for me. It doesn't make sense to pay for this.
So should that be allowed or not?
I think people using roads, or schools, or getting welfare should be able to vote, I believe politicians getting monetary benefits from tax filing services should be allowed to speak.
I mean that's a pretty harsh decision, deciding that the government determines who is allowed to speak. That's what I was responding to.
"we want to make your life worse so that you align with our political goals" is generally a terrible thing to admit to out loud
I think many of them would also like to see a ban on auto tax deduction. Their POV is if everyone has to send a check to the government they'll vote for less taxes where as with auto-deduction, most people just look at their after tax income and ignore the rest (and see their "refund" as a bonus which it isn't)
I think I'm mostly on the "simpler is better" where simpler should be "get the tax code to fit on 2 pages of 10pt single spaced letter sized paper. Something simple like "+0.25% for every 1k over 10k up to 50%" the end. I'd be curious to know which country has the simplest taxes
Whether or not you do your taxes by hand, you should probably have a good idea of your income sources.
The solution to this of course is to simplify the tax code so that you don't have so many colors to your money. I very much would love to see this happen, but it will produce howls of protests from every special interest group who benefits from special tax advantage to their interests.
The standard that government organizations run off of is "use up all the budget, or else your budget gets cut the next year". Are you going to lie and say that is not the case?
Be honest.
I have worked at multiple large and successful tech companies, and groups in those companies operated under the same principles.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p926#en_US_2024_publink1000...
I eventually got everything sorted with the help of an accountant and they confirmed this.
I see often people claim that the US tax code sucks (nobody is going to defend it with the rising inequality), but there isn't any proposal about how exactly to enact the changes while still keeping the benefits of the tax code that apply to the disadvantaged.
Also, I'd like to point out that the tax code has every type of federal tax, administrative elements, and isn't just about income tax, and I'd argue that most of the federal tax code has nothing to do with "loopholes for the rich".
What about rental income?
What about expenses related to rental properties?
Lots of things the government doesn’t know…
Nobody is saying filing taxes should never be necessary. Only that it shouldn’t be necessary for most people.
The flow should be… Employer and financial institutions send info to IRS (they mostly do already). Then, in January, IRS sends a “Is this correct?” notice to residents. If correct, no action is needed. If not correct, then make adjustments.
- IRS pre-fills all it knows about you
- you log into to IRS web site to check if everything is correct, and provide additional data or correct invalid data
- submit
Oh look. By implementing this you may join Sweden and a bunch of other countries in the 21st century.
free-file is estimated to cover 47% of Americans. we fund public schools even though a significantly smaller proportion of Americans are children. you would have a hard time finding any government service that applies to 100% of people
With the hindsight I have now it would have been much cheaper for us than it turned out to be, but that’s still extra money I’m paying simply because complying with the law is as complex as it is, and I’m not running a business, just hiring a part-time caretaker.
No, for most individuals it is complete. Most people don’t own stocks directly (only an estimated 21% do)[1], and the ones who don’t are not probable to deal with complexly taxable transactions as the norm.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2023/10/18/percentage-americans-own-st...
For the vast majority of people they have all the info needed. Hardly anyone can take any deductions other than the standard deduction anymore, so that's covered. For income, most people have W-2 jobs so that's covered and all financial institutions send 1099s to the IRS with all your interest, dividend and stock transactions so that's covered too.
No, just a singular reason: Prohibition.
Enter the shiny new income tax, passed just a few years before (1916). This had been sold to the public using Bernie Sanders-style "millionaires and billionaires" rhetoric, but, as is the inevitable way with such things, it was soon being applied to thousandaires and hundredaires. :-)
Which still highlights the absurdity of making me re-enter the stuff they already know.
It might be stuff they’ll eventually know, but it’s not necessarily stuff they already know at the relevant time.
The shock value of the original statement derives from the idea that sixth-graders are basically illiterates who can barely function in society, but what if that's not the case and six years in school are actually enough to learn reading and writing? It's a pretty long time already. What further improvements are to be expected from another six years?
The US has exceptional universities and colleges, but its K12 education system leaves much to be desired.
Many on the US/Mexico border fall into this category where they were born here but speak Spanish better than English.
According to the U.S. Census Data, only 18 million, or 5% of Americans even live along the U.S./Mexico border. Of that 18 million, 9 million or 2.5% identify as Hispanic. Of that 2.5%, about 70% identify Spanish as their native language.
I can't find how many among the 2.5% who identify as Hispanic were born in the U.S., but even if we assume they all are, this is basically a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
In Canada the adults with low literacy (below high school) is 49%.
It's likely 90% of the population don't follow this tax law.
Please do not post misinformation.
It's a little weird to lump it all together as FICA taxes, too. Social security is more of a mandatory pension program that caps both contributions and benefits for high earners (in addition to progressively lower benefits for higher earners on the back end). Medicare taxes are straight up progressive -- there is an extra 0.9% tax bracket on higher W-2 income and the 3.8% NIIT investment income tax on stocks.
So I agree.
I would prefer if it was. It's even worse than that, the government has entitled itself to be a party to every transaction over $600, so even the self employed have to shoulder this unseemly burden.
> Your salary isn’t a secret
It is. It's a shared secret. Again, I would prefer if I didn't have to do this. My salary is not at all the same as my "taxable income." It puts me in a position to have to justify my filings after the fact to an entity that only has access to half my relevant information.
Even the constitutionality of an income tax was in question until 1913 and the 16th Amendment.
People today assume the past was a lot more surveilled than it was. The government (at any level) often didn't even have a record of people's births until they needed to interact with the government for some reason, even in the early 20th century. That was largely changed by Social Security, and people at the time and since complained that its foothold would begin a slippery slope of government intrusion into every aspect of their lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...
Before all of this unconstitutional collection of Americans information the government had to have a target and go out and collect and tabulate the information.
Now it’s a select where citizen does thing x over y threshold. How is this not changing the game?
I believe the IRS is even informed of things like 401k disbursement and stock sales. Meaning most people wouldn't have to submit for those either.
The gains of simplify the tax code are gargantuan, but unfortunately, the wealthy and powerful organizations benefit from the current system, and would be hurt financially by simplifying it. So, it will never be simplified.
A babysitter one of the examples specifically called out as a household employee in the IRS guidance[1], so if you’re doing it right you should be running payroll. That’s pretty tricky to DIY properly.
Which tells you volumes about the practicality of said law.
What made it difficult was: finding out we needed to do anything at all, finding out what that “anything” even was, finding instructions for doing it, parsing the instructions and figuring out if we were reading the correct instructions, figuring out if the various exceptions and other special clauses applied, researching those, then figuring out how to actually do any of this, and so on, and then again a second time for state taxes.
Nevermind going down the rabbit whole of trying to figure out if we need an EIN and then repeating the same discovery and learning process for just that small part of the whole entire thing.
Honestly it would have been a full time job for me to successfully navigate it all. I don’t see how it’s possible to do without already being a CPA or accountant of some sort. It’s an entire domain of knowledge and I had almost none of that knowledge. There’s too much else going on in my life to begin to delve into all that.
All this for a baby sitter 16 hours a week.
this is such a privileged position and you think you should’ve just been able to pay cash and potentially screw someone over?
I went through all the trouble because I thought it was the right thing to do and I wanted to do right by the babysitter. It’s why I ended up paying an accountant a larger lump of money than I would have liked to in order to get it all sorted out.
Im complaining how difficult it is to do the right thing.
You're only benefitting the babysitter by paying them cash, big win for them. And benefitting yourself to avoid all that payroll hassle that nobody understands. Win-win.
Unfortunately, Your simplification isn't really a simplification.
Simplified tax code means less tax money is spent on administration overhead of the IRS itself and more money that can go to programs like WIC, SNAP, TANF, and other targeted programs that are more effective aid to the economically disadvantaged.
And then to find out one political party would prefer that I suffer so I’ll vote the way they want? Yeah, fuck those guys, I’m voting for the other ones.
Then campaign and vote for people who will handle the money how you prefer. You don’t get to argue with the bill after the money is already spent. Tax collection time is the wrong time to be having this fight.
The only thing anti-taxers need for their project is awareness of taxes paid, which can be done without needless pain.
I guess the difference is that my mind immediately goes to "Who are those people who think government not doing its job properly is a Good Thing(TM), and why do Americans keep electing them?"
It's as if a wannabe entrepreneur claiming "Capitalism does not work! Make me your CEO and I'll prove it to you!" - and then the board keeps falling for those guys.
More like “They can’t even solve poverty? What are they doing with 2/3rd of my income?” France here. Cities have to build 40% of poverty housing, by law, because, well, we’ve determined that 40% people are poor.
The benefit of not declaring income is not only taxes, but lower-rent housing as well.
it is pretty cynical to say "i don't want to make people's lives easier so they better align with my political goals"
I did not read anything in your post that suggested you resented the babysitter or having to pay money to do it properly.
I read the exact opposite, that more people would if the process were not so burdensom of people who obviously have a child and so presumably not a ton of time for paperwork.
After all, you did it properly... what's to get angry about other than the topic of the original article, that tax paperwork is overboard?
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44825/8 (PDF)
For all intents and purposes, a babysitter is looked at just like a nanny in that if they must adhere to the schedule you set and come to your home to take care of your kids based on the rules you set, the IRS will most likely view this as an employment relationship. And taxes can sneak up on you quickly. If the babysitter earns just $15 per hour and works even 10 hours per week, you’ll cross the $2,700 tax withholding threshold in a little over four months.
[1] https://www.care.com/hp/do-you-need-to-pay-taxes-for-your-pa...
And at some point you just pay cash.
Are income levels not deserving of privacy?
Even your sense that you should hide it is in service of this and the effort to get people tearing each other down is also just a good way to depress salaries.
... No? I don't think so, anyway. Maybe if people understood how obscenely unequal our society is, it would go part of the way toward fixing that.
Rich people in the Nordics hold their wealth in foreign companies as retained earnings, and thus that wealth accrues gains/dividends tax free and remains invisible until they sell off a small portion for the purpose of buying something.
It's "transparency" only for the plebs. Americans cannot do this, as they are subject to global tax and extra punitive taxation on foreign withheld earnings.
Also, Swedes don't have the same level of real estate transparency that there is in America (property tax assessments put a public value on everyone's holdings in the US). Wealthy folks holding real estate between different countries in Europe makes the whole situation more shadowy than you might think.
Is that true? There's no one, not one person in Sweden, who sees that as government overreach?
Scary if true.
Sweden also doesn’t have secret ballot
In Sweden, anyone can look up your address, phone number, social security number, your car registration etc etc
This is not cool or desirable
It takes very little to deanonymize things like healthcare records with this information as was demonstrated going back to the 1990s.
Swedes have a highly developed superiority complex and ability to perform mental gymnastics about the flaws of their country and ways of doing things. No sane person from any other country in the world would consider a system where voters must, in public and under the active scrutiny of other voters and local election officials (who are themselves politicians and party members) pick ballots for the party you intend to vote for and then bring it into the “secret” booth. Any child or idiot can see that’s not secret other than in the most distorted and disingenuous sense of the word.
I also don’t know what’s wrong with hearing the opinion of a jet-setting cosmopolitan anyhow.
"Of course" makes it sound like it is obviously / objectively true, but it is a sentiment that is not necessarily true, either in the past, or even in the present everywhere on the planet.
> your address, phone number, income, etc should all be private just because the phone companies shared this didn't mean it's a good idea
This information was public in the past before the phone companies existed. May I introduce you to the concept of city directories:
> A city directory is a listing of residents, streets, businesses, organizations or institutions, giving their location in a city. It may be arranged alphabetically or geographically or in other ways.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_directory
> City Directories were created for salesmen, merchants, and other interested in contacting residents of an area. They are arranged alphabetically giving lists of names and addresses. These often list the adult residents of a city or area.
* https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/City_Directories
They can date back to (at least) the 1800s and continued into the twentieth century:
> City directories were published yearly. The Archives has them from 1834 to 2001 (except for a few years in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and in 1987, when they were not published).
* https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/accountability-operat...
It will probably have a negative effect on the ability for smaller parties to get started.
> blank ones if you want to write down the party of your choice
this can and does risk resulting in the vote not being counted (due to alleged illegibility, a tiny spelling error or whatever)
> You could bring your own ballot if you so choose
same thing, your own ballot could be considered illegitimate + even in the best case that you obtain a real lawful ballot, only a tiny fraction of people are willing and able to go through the trouble of doing so + again, by requesting a ballot, secrecy is out the window
> or vote pretty much anywhere else than were you live during a ~ three week long period
the suggestions just keep getting more and more ridiculous - no one should have to do any of this! everyone should be able to just rock up and vote with secrecy preserved, without having to prepare or use all these hacks
As per my prior comment directed at you, you have been reminded that the improvement you asked for had been implemented into law.
As per the same comment, the situation for new parties have thereby become worse. You are sure to have experienced the same problems we experienced when getting the Pirate party into parliament when you got the Sweden Democrats through the system.
France works exactly the way you have described Sweden so far.