Yet many other countries do in fact calculate taxes for their citizens. You just need to check it and sign.
Not exactly, since the IRS provides tons of credits and deductions for things that aren’t inherently trackable, like credits for upgrading your home to be more “green,” asset depreciation, or any other of the thousand random things they incentivize
But it’s honestly stupid to do it that way at the individual taxpayer level. Do you think the EU doesn’t subsidize anything? They subsidize hella things.
They just do it the real way, through spending. In the US, Republicans in Congress can never agree to spend money, just tax cuts. Tax cuts are spending.
We have those kinds of deductions in Sweden too. The company that upgrades your home files for the money of your deduction with the IRS and then reduces your bill by the corresponding amount.
If you do the renovations yourself you have to file for the deduction yourself, so there are certainly many situations where you can’t just have every single part of the tax forms automatically calculated. But typically it’s just a matter of logging in to the IRS website and providing the facts as you know them (“I bought stock for X and sold it for Y”) then the system calculates the rest for you.
If you need to check it, then maybe they are not calculating your taxes for you, so much they are taking their best guess and asking you to sign off on it. If their best guess is as good (or better) than yours, there is no difference in practice. But there is still a difference in principle: whether a citizen is permitted to declare their own income or whether the government is obliged to determine it for them.
Not exactly a guess, more like “this is what we know about your income. Would you like to add anything?”
But how do they know what they know about your income? Didn’t you (or your employer on your behalf) already volunteer this information to the government in the first place? Or is your government monitoring your private financial transactions without your express consent?
