1054
Useful Life Skills [extra fabulous]
(thelemmy.club)
Transcript
[An angry kid sits at his desk in school complaining]
Kid: Ugh why don’t you teach us about things we’ll actually need to know as adults?!
[An unamused teacher]
Teacher: Ok, I’m going to teach you how to do your taxes while also dealing the death of a loved one
[The teacher, wearing the same expression, holds a knife in one hand, and a hamster in the other]
Teacher: Please itemize your deductions while I deal with Mister Hamps, the class pet
[A class of shocked and crying kids look on in horror while trying to simultaneously do their taxes. The cries of the hamster off screen are cut off abruptly]
Hamster: SQWEEE- -
As funny as this is, I really think an entire year if not a core course on taxes, tax law, rights, law, etc. would have really fucking helped life.
A whole year? The vast majority of people do not need to do much more than take the standard deduction and input their work income. The IRS offers free fillable forms with clear instructions.
Anyone who believes this either has a very complex tax situation or has just never actually tried to do more than let TurboTax scam them.
Filling your returns by hand is obnoxious by design. Importing your data digitally saves a ton of time and wrist strain.
It sucks that TurboTax has a functional monopoly on the IRS API, but you're really trading time (and annoyance) for money. Most people justifiably bite the bullet and file electronically.
Freetaxusa is free federal and cheaper state. They still try to upsell you (but not as aggressively), but the most I ever paid for standard deductions and nothing crazy is $15 for the state.
And the experience is the same as the other ones. Pretty simple
Haven't tried it in a minute, but I've got a Schedule B and D to file. It wasn't helpful for that.
I had to learn all these things in school. They were actually covered in both junior high and then again when I was in high school. Also how to do job applications and interviews, budgeting, bank accounts, loans, interest, stocks, all that stuff. We even spent weeks doing a fake stock market where we "invested" and tracked the stocks we picked to see how we did.
Damn, which school did you attend?
Regular old public school.
Which state & city? Because I guarantee you most regular old public schools do not provide education to the extent you described. In which state & city did you attend a regular old public school?
I'll say it was a small town in the midwest. Not getting more specific than that.
Most people don't need an education on how to do their taxes. They simply need maths and reading comprehension. It's not that hard.
If we get to wish for a public policy to change, then I'd rather we get 100% of our taxes from the rich, calculated by the government. Henry George was right.
I'll say it as much as I can. Tax business, on profit not individuals on their salary. Salary comes from a business paying you, they have accountants, they can pay taxes.
And when you tax profits, they have the incentive to reinvest in the company, either by hiring more people, or building things, or spending money on research. Instead of giving record profits to shareholders.
Of course you can have small businesses below certain employee numbers exempt or something like that to help new businesses.
This of course means you can't hand out "government help" by just taking less taxes from people already making money, and have to install give real help to people in need irrespective of their salary.
And of course there might be some details that should be added to make it good.
If you did that, every single person would be a contractor, with their company paying them everything, with no "profits" at all.
Making functional tax systems is really hard!
Wouldn't that mean the worker is getting paid the full value of their labor?
A lot of schools do teach laws, rights and the like to students now.
Taxes, not so useful when filing laws regularly change.
The only way tax law has meaningfully changed in the last 30 years for most Americans is the brackets.
us is no the whole world
I am confused many people feel filing tax is a useful skill, I have never once used itemized deduction.
Lucky them, honestly.
in HS I took a class for small business. we learned things like how to use spreadsheets(the paper kind) as well as balancing accounts. we had a whole section based on pricing with supply and demand.
I think we even covered things like different investment options for money.
out of all my friends in my youth, I was the only one who knew how to create a budget and balance my accounts.
wealth intelligence is important to ensure you can not only grow your savings, but protect it as well.
most people don't even know what a fiduciary is and why it's important, let alone why a CD might be better than a savings account.
These are precisely the things our government does not want you to know.
Incorrect. TurboTax and H&R Block don't want you to know these things. And they lobby to keep the IRS crippled.