Comment by mulletbum
5 days ago
How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore? I don't think Dems are doing a bang up job, but this is something developed and deployed, 100% working, that only helps the American people navigate a complicated tax system. The only reason to get rid of it is to hurt the American people.
Because for probably the vast majority of Republican voters, this is effectively a religion (identity politics). It doesn't matter what the Republican party chooses to do, voting Republican is a part of who people are and to do anything else is simply unbelievable.
To expand on this a little, even before this hyper-tribalism consumed politics, conservatism has always had an in-group / out-group mentality
It has been remarkably effective to find a niche wedge issue and drive it to the forefront.
Abortion, guns, big city crime, religion…the practical impact these issues have on most people’s daily lives is dwarfed by economic policy but it hits the emotional nerve centers and has a crisp message.
And that’s how you get people voting against their best interests time and time again
I sort of fear tribalism will typically win more and more in the future. There’s a large enough population in the conservative end that’s fine with tribalism. And while there’s certainly a fair share of it on the democratic side, the democratic side tends to lure in educated and anti-authoritarian folks who question things, formulate opinions outside the pack, and will have more difficult electing a cohesive candidate. Meanwhile the Conservative Party targeting religious folks already have a group of people who tend to be OK with just me following whatever it’s told to them without question or with little question.
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I think the old "har har those dopes are voting against their best interest" is over simplified. It seems to assume that the only best interest is immediate simple financial self interest. But people are complicated and have many interests beyond immediate simple financial interests.
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I was thinking about the "against their best interest" argument recently and connecting it to the democrats.org "who we serve" page made it even worse than it seemed. Rational people not on the list should avoid them?
It appears that they have (finally!) removed that stupid page but it's still linked-to (https://democrats.org/who-we-are/) on their website. Here's a copy from June https://web.archive.org/web/20250615042752/https://democrats...
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Saying that people are voting against their best interests assumes that you know what those interests are. Maybe what they really want is not what you think they want, or what you think they ought to want. This is an attitude common among liberals. They know best, and if you disagree with them, you are simply wrong.
Electing Trump was a big FU to that attitude. The astonishing thing is that liberals are so cocksure of themselves that they have not yet figured out this simple truth and are still carrying on as if Trump were simply an anomaly rather than a predictable response to their own actions. The magnitude of the tone-deafness in the Democratic party is simply staggering. And I'm a Democrat, or at least I was until I realized how utterly incompetent they are.
[UPDATE] Ironically, the fact that this comment is being downvoted into oblivion actually demonstrates the very point I am making.
[UPDATE2] With regards to my saying that Democrats are incompetent, this is manifestly true at least with regards to 1) winning elections and 2) controlling Donald Trump. Maybe they are competent at other things, but that seems like a bit of a moot point to me under the present circumstances.
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tl;dr -- make 'em angry and point them at others to hate.
From the perspective of an independent, I’m not sure why you’re singling out Republicans here. It reads just as true if you’re to swap in the word Democrat.
- from California
As a fellow California independent, does it?
If it turns out that Obama is in the Epstein files, my friends won't have to get rid of their Obama hat, or their Obama sneakers, or their Obama cologne, or their Obama watch, or their Obama bible, or take down their Obama flag, or delete their Obama NFT trading cards.
Both parties are alien and hostile to me, but for very different reasons.
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This is why arguing politics with these guys is pointless. I once naively thought I could bring around one of my MAGA friends to the light side by focusing on policy but it just doesn't work. He admitted that everything Team R is doing is not really helping him but in the end it's always something like: "Look, I was born a Republican, my family is Republican, I will never vote Democrat, no matter what any of them do. We have to trust Trump to do the right thing." It's truly a religion. There is no getting to these people.
We could offer them an alternate social structure that they're welcome in. It beats calling them deplorables and trying to browbeat them.
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Don't you think it cuts both ways though? I saw a video where a guy was asking (presumably liberal) NYU students about quotes relating to immigration policy. He initially said they were from (republican person T), and they stated that they thought the comments were racist. Then the interviewer said, oh wait, sorry, they were actually from (democrat person O), and the students immediately shifted their opinions and said the comments were reasonable.
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My observation is that “both sides” (EDIT: of the electorate) are locked in this dynamic. In the ideal world people are able to evaluate specific ideas, but instead people judge ideas based on who it comes from.
The difference is that the actual output of good policy versus bad policy from the two sides are wildly uneven.
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Your observation is yours, but it isn't mine and many others.
I grew up in a Dem household but I don't vote dem because my parents did or because I'm a party member (I'm not), it's because the lesser of the two evils is almost always the blue side.
And this was before the GOP literally became a cult. Now it's not even a choice.
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> both sides
There it is... everytime, like clockwork, the false equivalence.
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Word salad.
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There simply is no alternative. Normal people must be completely blackpilled like me. The Democrats have an approval rating the lowest in Decades. None of these people are "working for [us]". Everyone is captured and this country is over. I really mean this. As part of the working class, we all feel this way.
This can be fixed with sane campaign finance laws. Every elected Democrat I know is willing to enact those if Citizens United is overruled. And every Democratic-appointed Justice on the Supreme Court would vote to overturn Citizens United. I know it sounds trite, but voting for Democrats again and again, flawed as they are, for generations, is the only way we're going to get out of this mess.
> Every elected Democrat I know is willing to enact those if Citizens United is overruled.
I don't want to be rude, but I don't believe you. I also have seen the polling and the country does not believe it as a whole. Democratic voters also don't believe it either. If you personally have an income >150K you are likely completely insulated from real Americans. The perception is that the Democrats care more about Israel and their donors than the country. Only 8 percent of Democrats are supportive of Israel but almost 90% of Dem senators are (I made this number up, the rest are real).
edit: the Republicans are publicly grifting, lest you think I like the Republicans. My overarching point is that ~60% of American's don't own homes and are completely uninvested in this country. They have completely given up, or are in a state of giving up. The Republicans and Democrats are extremely vile reptilian grifters who sold out this country.
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No. The alternative is to have some courage. It's easier to destroy than it is to create. There is a responsibility bias against the Democratic party because they're the only ones that know how to govern. Everyone is responsible is some way for the outcome. Our political rivals have attacked us so hard we're starting to believe the characterization they've made of us. I don't buy into the 'Everyone is captured and this country is over' message. It's a false equivocacy and just an excuse to be super critical of our own people.
Due to first-past-the-post voting in the US, I have at most two realistic options for my vote.
For the majority of the problems I see that I believe the government should be addressing, one side says "that's not a real problem" and the other side offers a really bad solution that they also won't realistically be able to make law.
Because Obamacare was such a fuckup? Where is Trumpcare? Where is Trumphousing? Bushfinancing? Bushtransport? How about even as a promise, and not as a delivered reality?
Anytime big news like this, news report on it, but the specific news channels do not mention, at all or minimize it position it in a way of for instance.. got rid of a terrible tool that didnt work well and was inefficient etc. So instead of focusing on removing free tax service so people have to pay again, people think it's a good thing because x y z, or even if they you ask any they don't know why its a good thing, they say someone they trust says its a good thing and people they don't like says a bad thing, and that's enough.
People can only get mad at the things they know about. My guess is the Murdoch Network of news organizations will not cover this heavily, if at all.
I looked, but couldn’t see this story covered by the NYT or NPR either…. Can you see it?
Could it be that there’s simply bigger news?
and if they do cover it, they will blame the other party for mismanaging it.
Or they'll cover it and say how this is a win for the American public because they no longer need to use a socialist government website to file their taxes.
Which is also why they took down all the payment and audit/penalty management webpages too! Right? Right!?
… Oh wait. They didn’t? Huh, I wonder where the disconnect is. I guess no lobbyist wrote a check to remove that from the Government.
Sinclair too. US needs more independent media. Or the current media should get good.
1. People have demonstrated they aren't really willing to pay enough for independent media, aside from one or two person shops.
2. The current media is incentivized to collect ad revenue. Currently, the best known scheme is to outrage or scare readers so they keep refreshing the page. So, in that respect, the current media is doing great business.
Doesn't matter. They will gladly take it on the chin if they believe the other guy gets it worse.
Populism has a zero sum view of the world. Absolute prosperity is less important than relative prosperity. In addition, for some there is a very strong expectation that they should be more prosperous than “out” groups (in the US, racial minorities).
Liberal policy in the US since Clinton has failed to deal with this, focusing instead on absolute prosperity (GDP per-capita). And progressive policy has been ineffective since they promise equality, including with minorities.
But there was already a free way you could file taxes with Turbotax, FreeTaxUSA, and H&RBlock if you had a simple return. Direct File was a government built alternative to that.
Eg: https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi...
If there was also a free flow available, why would the government need to build an alternative?
And TurboTax got in a bunch of trouble because of the amount of dark patterns they were using to guide you away from the free filing.
[0]: https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/01/ftc-finds-t...
Because those other companies actively violated agreements they made with the government in the 2000 to offer those services for free. They regularly tricked people into paying and lost a class action lawsuit over it.
It's also weird that we have to file taxes at all. Other developed countries have their revenue agencies automatically calculate the taxes for you and send a return. The only reason we don't is because of Intuit and H&R Block lobbying like crazy to prevent this. It's rent seeking at it's worse
Direct File was only built in the first place because Turbo Tax and H&R Block dropped out of agreements with the IRS to keep free tax filing options free and unencumbered of upsells and dark patterns.
The number of people their "free" products actually serve dropped drastically a couple years ago. They will upsell or dark pattern you to paying for it as best and as deeply as they can.
This was an interesting read on the subject: https://chrisgiven.com/2025/07/the-things-that-cannot-be-cha...
> How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore?
It is working "for" the people who have (perceived?) grievances against others, and are enacting pain on those Others.
People are happy to screw themselves if they screw Others (even more):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness
The cruelty towards Others is the point (regardless what you, yourself, get hit with):
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
"Anymore?" At what point has the GOP worked for "the people" at all?
I'm 55. At no point in my life has the GOP pushed any policy initiative that would help regular humans. Instead, they've been the party of fearmongering -- about women, about drugs, about immigrants, about African Americans, about gay people, and the devil, about trans people, etc.
The Dems have been the party that advanced actual helpful policies, but holy crap do they ever have a messaging problem IN ADDITION to an effectiveness issue. But at least their marching orders are actually helpful.
Nixon created the EPA, he expanded the Clean Air Act, he signed the Endangered Species Act. He did a lot of good for the environment in the early 70's.
> in the early 70's
Calling back to a time before the middle-aged GP could even tie his own shoes is not really much of an argument.
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You probably have to go back to before the civil rights movement.
> I'm 55. At no point in my life has the GOP pushed any policy initiative that would help regular humans.
You're overstating the case a bit. Nixon and Ford were not bad for most people. Nixon's motives might have been extremely self-serving on domestic issues - but he was re-elected in '72, amid the Vietnam War and many other troubles, with 60.7% of the popular vote. Take a peek at his domestic policies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Domestic_policy He didn't need Watergate, nor any other dirtywork to easily win the election - he just couldn't keep himself from scratching his Paranoid Creepy Idiot itch.
Yes, after Ford, the GOP was taken over by a team-up of "Conquer, Loot, and Pillage" fiscal conservatives, and "Dump Jesus and Jimmy, 'Cause Our Rightful Kingdom is of This World" religious conservatives.
Flip-side, I don't see the Dems nearly so favorably. In the Carter-ish years they phased out most of their historic concern for ordinary Americans. In favor of hanging out with rich & slimy, and performative concern for ever-smaller minorities.
>I don't see the Dems nearly so favorably.
I supposed my opinion may be colored by the fact that I have friends who can afford to be alive today because of the ACA, so...
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the book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This helped me realize that asking questions like this isn't really about contradiction, it's about revealed preference. In this case, it's about a revealed preference for social stability and personal comfort/familiarity in a system that's already been pushed over the inflection point and is now self-sustaining.
It helps to stop assuming people want what they say they want and start assuming that they want the predictable effects of their actions, then try to figure out what benefits those actions have or desires those effects may fulfill. When the group does something that's against your principles or best interests, there's an implicit question: do you value being part of the group more than you value this thing that we're transgressing against? When you look at it in this lens all sorts of behaviors start to make sense.
Also the reason to get rid of free tax filing is to exploit the American people, not just to hurt them for its own sake. Tell them they have to do something, make it as convoluted as possible, then sell a service that does it for them. It absolutely does hurt them, but that's not the driving force behind the effort.
Some people are of the opinion that ANY way to lessen the burden of taxation, especially automatic taxation, will lead to silent and continual increases of taxes.
I wonder if people actually know how much of their income is taxed away?
federal tax, state tax, local tax, property tax, sales tax, gas tax...
I wonder how much we actually get to keep, and I wonder how many people are aware of it both now and historically?
> How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore?
It's all about "owning the libs" by any means necessary. Nothing more, nothing less.
The history of the last ~100 years of the study of democracy by basically pro-broad-franchise-democracy academics has been a journey from:
"Well, the masses must not be stupid, as restricted-franchise and anti-democratic folks have suggested, because this seems to kinda work. Let's study voter behavior to learn more about this."
to
"Uh. OK so we checked a hundred different ways, several times each to be sure, and they're in-fact incredibly poorly informed and have awful reasoning skills and their behavior, in aggregate, isn't driven by what we might hope it is at all. But, uh... I really want there to be a good outcome here, so, um, let's make some fuzzy guesses at how some kind of Wisdom of Crowds thingy and some sort of system-equilibria-seeking effects might save us? And let's keep double-checking those studies that kept proving voters are really dumb, because maybe... maybe we got something wrong?"
to
"Yeah all that was bullshit cope on our parts, it's all wrong. It's amazing this works at all. Voters are amazingly stupid, to a degree that's so hard to believe we spent decades and decades making sure—like it's proven about as surely as is the law of universal gravitation; cannot practically be educated out of that, maybe at all, and especially not if we first have to get them to vote to make that happen; and everything's basically held together by noise and circumstance and social norms, until it isn't. Go ahead and make that whisky a double. And line up another."
Intellectuals and academics coming to these conclusions and talking down to the populace is a big part of what has fueled anti-intellectualism and paved the way for demagogues to take over. If your response to today's ugly political landscape is that people are stupid, then you're not helping.
Sorry, I was contributing the painfully-well-backed scientific perspective. If we're doing public-politics kayfabe here, too, then yes that was a faux pas. I'm not trying to campaign though, I'm trying to inform.
If one mistakes the kayfabe for genuine, an awful lot of observed behavior and outcomes remain confusing... the science is there if anyone wants it (reading lists for relevant courses are widely available, journals are not that hard to come by, or just grab Democracy for Realists and follow up with reading criticism of it and checking its sources) and at least the basic fact that very few voters think or behave remotely like anyone hoping for a well-informed, rational, and empathetic electorate might hope, is depressingly solid.
This is understood by everybody operating at a level of importance in media and politics, so a bunch of what they do (and its efficacy) will also be confusing if one disregards it. Even when they talk about how they believe in the voters, and blah blah—that's part of the kayfabe, that's a marketing message, they 100% don't believe that because not only is it definitely not true, you also lose elections (or viewership, or whatever) more often if you act like (not say—act like) it's true. It's not a lie they can afford to hold on to past the lowest levels of their professions, as they'll be concretely punished for the gap between their belief and reality and replaced by others who get it.
The people who need to see it needs to see it in the entertainment hour of Fox News. I don't think Fox News would be disseminating this information at that hour
It drives me absolutely mad when I see (largely liberal people) complain about how both parties are the same and just as bad.
And its like... how do you really believe that? Like yeah both parties have the same corruption but welcome to politics.
So at this point I am convinced it is willful ignorance on both sides (or ulterior motives when I see certain left leaning people STILL bring up Biden or Harris in relation to trump as if either of them matter anymore in the slightest given our current situation, at this point I don't care what Biden did or did not do). Seeing something that goes against their views of "this side is bad" and just trying to talk it away as some "abuse of government power" or something to justify why it should not have been a thing in the first place while ignoring its real benefits.
It's a "complicated tax system" when the president can't even complete his tax return for showing to the American public.
Very complicated.
You're assuming there is rationality in Republican party voters. They are generally not educated people.
Oh they do, but the democrats are so hated but a significant percentage of the population for their recent actions, people had to make a choice, and they did.
I’ve heard it described as “I know I’m being robbed, but I was already being robbed. I know this is a poor environmental choice, but the dems acted like we’re all children, thinking we have no choice but to support them. When they try to force through new social norms like they’ve been doing, it doesn’t even feel like my country anymore.”
I have to agree, they definitely encouraged the attitude of “either you agree with this new thing or you’re a Nazi”. Well, they certainly found out.
Of course this backlash is so bad it’s going to trigger another.
Poor information diet.
Positioning this as a program from the previous admin (therefore bad).
Positioning this as a win for privatization (therefore good).
And people not willing to look at politics as something beyond a sport.
Quite frankly, I believe both parties are pretty foul, and people should be looking outside of them for policy positions that actually help people, but I suppose that makes me naive or whatever.
So you believe it was done just to hurt the American people?
No, that’s not plausible.
The article suggests Trump wanted to help tax software companies, but that overlooks the fact that Trumps previous increase to the standard deduction greatly simplified taxes for many filers. So that’s probably not it, either.
Trump is hell bent on raising taxes via tariffs, so it doesn’t seem likely that personal income taxes are a big part of whatever he’s planning.
Personally, I wish the government would start sending a bill, not putting the onus on the filer to make the calculation. That seems most sensible to me.
> How does something like this happening not make people immediately realize that the Republican party is not working for the people anymore?
anymore?
Are you implying that the GOP would have been for a free Direct File in years prior?
They wouldn't have.
This is not a new stance. I'm not sure why anyone in the Republican party would be shocked by this news, or why it would change their opinions.
This is similar to the Republican party doing something anti-abortion, and then Liberals being shocked, and saying, "You guys are really still going to vote for these people?"
Yeah, it's what they expected.
>Are you implying that the GOP would have been for a free Direct File in years prior?
Look at the Eisenhower campaign planks. A pro-union, pro-minimum wage Republican party isn't just possible, they did it and they won on it.
If you had even a minimal US history education or you wouldn't make such claims. Nixon was to the left of Obama on many issues. That you don't know this is symptomatic of the problem today. The right has moved so far to the right that what was once considered right is now lefter than anyone on the left is willing to be. This wasn't an accident. It was planned, and began around the time of Reagan. Almost half a century later, the country is radically changed and kids today think it's always been this way. Well, it hasn't.
> That you don't know this is symptomatic of the problem today.
Is today the last 20+ years?
If you go back far enough, the democrats and republicans are completely unrecognizable, and anybody who would recognize them is long dead...
The cruelty is the point.
Also, don't expect them to do anything that benefits anyone other than their billionaire cronies.
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