It does not go far enough. If the government won't allow the IRS to autoprepare the 90%+ returns that they already have the data for than paid tax preparers should be licensed, whether it is as an Enrolled Agent, CPA, or some newly created tax preparer that cannot represent you before the IRS license. The fact that a company like HR Block or Turbotax can hire someone with no experience, sign them up for a PTIN, teach them how to use turbotax, and then call them an "expert" is insane.
>mis-filed my taxes a couple years ago, which cost me about $20K
What do you mean by "cost you $20K"? That your tax liability was calculated by the accountant to be higher than it actually should have been? Or that the accountant calculated your liability too low, which was caught and billed by the IRS?
In the first case, you can still file for a refund within 3 years (I'm omitting some technical details), but in the latter case, as mentioned by others, you still owe the tax whether it was correctly reported on your original return or not.
Years ago I had a similar issue. Accountant did something incorrect, increasing my liability by around $50k. Tax date came so I paid it, but moved accountants. New person fixed the issues, refiled, but it took a long time to get the refund back. IIRC, the IRS did include some nominal interest for the time they had the money.
The first time I learned of these was from the movie "The Naked Prey" where the according to google search,
• He [protagonist] finds a giant African land snail (Lissachatina fulica) crawling on a rock.
• Starving and exhausted, he uses his knife to carve the large mollusk out of its shell and eats the snail meat raw.
• After swallowing it, he comically picks a sharp thorn off a nearby bush to clean his teeth.
Do you think that every president since Clinton save one was born in the 1940s because of some reason besides that baby boomers are the prevailing political force in the country?
Yes obviously they are not all alive still, but the point remains that the 60+ set have more voting power and influence/wealth now than they ever had in the past.
Way more boomers were born in the 1950s and 1960s than the 1940s. Clinton, Bush II, and Trump barely qualify as boomers, and Biden is definitely not one, so yes, I think it is because of some reason(s) besides affliation with the boomer birthdate range.
>the point remains that the 60+ set have more voting power and influence/wealth now than they ever had in the past.
That says nothing about how their "voting power" compares to the rest of the population, especially since the size of the cohort is rapidly declining, which is the point that remains.
>> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.
>My local government put exactly this on the ballot: a small percentage transfer tax on the sale price of the home,
First comment suggests taxing the gain (income tax), while second comment suggests a tax on sale price (gross receipts tax). Two very different things.
While I grant you that they are two different things, two-thirds of the average sale price in my area is from gains in value accrued over the time the home was occupied prior to sale, almost all of which is currently untaxed.
In late 1970s, I spent two months hitching and riding trains around Europe, just an external frame backpack and a sleeping bag. A few years ago, I spent 2.5 weeks in U.K. and Ireland, with an 18-liter backpack and a waist bag (a.k.a. fanny pack ), which made getting around a breeze especially at airports and on trains. It even allowed me to carry a notebook computer. As mentioned in TFA, merino wool and no cotton garments helps. The rain was a minor inconvenience, but I did have lodging where I could get things rinsed and dried out in my room. I did buy an umbrella but should have splurged on better quality, even if I would end up abandoning it.
Best packing advice I ever received: take half as many clothes, and twice as much money, as you think you'll need.
>My dad talks of regular Nuclear War drills in elementary school.
The boomer generation covers 18 years. While such drills may have been common for those in school during the 1950s, I suspect it was much less by the 1960s.
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