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from the something-something-death-and-taxes dept.
C|net reports:
If you were waiting until the last minute to pay your taxes and were depending on IRS.gov to make a payment from your checking account, there's some bad news.
For most of Tuesday, the last day to file taxes, the Direct Pay section of the Internal Revenue Service's website wasn't working. Instead, people planning to pay electronically saw a message reading, "This service is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Now there's good news -- of sorts. The site is working once again. And Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told reporters Tuesday that Americans who couldn't pay their taxes because of the outage will receive an extension. The IRS later said that individuals and businesses with a filing or payment due date of April 17 will now have until midnight on Wednesday, April 18. Taxpayers need do nothing to qualify for the extra time.
[...] Direct Pay is a service that lets taxpayers pay their estimated taxes directly via a bank account, free of charge. Paying with a credit card through the IRS site costs around 2 percent of the payment amount, starting at $2.50.
[...] While the problem persisted, both vendors had continued to accept electronic returns. At the time, an H&R Block spokesperson said, "We are encouraging taxpayers to continue to use our retail services or our do-it-yourself products as they normally would."
It was a similar story at TurboTax. "For those that prepared and filed their taxes with TurboTax earlier today, TurboTax is now submitting those returns to the IRS and is currently processing newly filed returns as normal," an Intuit spokesperson said after the government restored functionality to the IRS site.
From The Washington Post:
A computer glitch at the IRS knocked offline the agency's ability to process many tax returns filed electronically, a stunning breakdown that left agency officials flummoxed and millions of Americans bewildered. Senior government officials were at a loss to explain what happened, even as close to 5 million Americans were expected to try to file their taxes before the midnight deadline.
IRS officials did not specify what went wrong, saying only that they would undertake a "hard reboot" of their systems. By late Tuesday, the IRS said that its systems were back online and that taxpayers could proceed to file returns through the end of Wednesday. Taxes had been due on Tuesday. (That was two days later than the usual due date, April 15, which fell on a Sunday. Monday was Emancipation Day, a holiday in the District.)
[...] An IRS spokeswoman said that "all indications point to this being hardware-related. We're aware of no other external issues."
[...] It wasn't immediately clear how many people were affected or could take advantage of the one-day delay in the filing deadline, but IRS officials said taxpayers wouldn't have to do anything special to take advantage of the postponement. Many filers who use online tax preparation software, such as TurboTax or H&R Block, or pay their taxes directly to the IRS online were affected. The vast majority of tax preparers, such as accountants, are required to file taxes electronically.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday April 18 2018, @04:33PM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Thursday April 19 2018, @04:13AM (5 children)
There are several reasons why that is a non-issue.
Let's say you give a $10,000 "First Home Buyer's Grant" - yes, the first thing that happens is the price of homes will rise by $10,000. Providing a Universal Basic Income won't have the same effect. Look at your weekly shopping - there's a vast variety of different products, sourced and supplied from various places. If the price of a good goes up, people will buy it elsewhere or buy a different product. That's the market-place in action. The prices won't rise because people are buying a basket of goods and the market isn't a monopoly.
So let's say the prices do rise. (Which I believe they will, just not commensurate with the additional money injected.) Having prices rise is not necessarily bad - providing the money returns to the ecosystem.
The market already deals with distorting effects. In theory, people that need money might get welfare today. With UBI, they would stop getting welfare. So the amount of money in the marketplace remains more-or-less the same - it just gets shuffled around more evenly. (And we get rid of a bunch of rules that trap people in poverty, which is what the grandparent was talking about.)
If prices were going to rise, we would have seen it already - a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk would cost a minimum-wage day's worth of labour because there are many who could easily afford this. For various reasons, this is not the case, and I don't believe introducing a universal basic income would cause this either.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday April 19 2018, @04:51AM (4 children)
You are claiming that the food prices will not rise, but explaining this theory "because market." But market loves to rise prices. There is no reason why producers, distributors and vendors will not add a little extra price to the goods. The rule of the market is that everything costs as much as the customer is ready to pay.
This extra money (say, $12K/yr UBI * 300M of eligible population = $3.6 billion per year) has to be created from thin air, as that salary is not balanced by equivalent amount of products. Being dropped from helicopters (see Ben Bernanke,) it will result in an instant inflation. Housing prices are the most sensitive indicator. Everyone will want to grab his piece of this wealth for himself. Inflation will result. And now consider that it's impossible to survive on $12K/yr and you need to at least triple that figure...
But who then will be working, if sitting at home for an hour is equivalent to a full day of hard labor? We are not on Solaria [wikipedia.org] yet. Work has to be rewarded. How?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:37AM (2 children)
One can see the error in this "rule" by looking at its converse. "The rule of the market is that everything costs as little as the seller is willing to sell for." There's no real distinction between buyer and seller in most markets (I grant that there are occasional exceptions such as a near monopoly or extreme information asymmetry, that might change that). So why should something heavily favor one side?
Except the reason they didn't do it already. If they could sell something for more than they sell it now, then why aren't they selling it for more now?
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:56AM (1 child)
Don't you see some asymmetry between a hungry man, who wants to eat, and a fat cat, sitting on sacks of food?
They are. They are just covering all wealth strata. Some stores sell common food of debatable health value for little. Other stores (Whole Foods, for example) deal in more exquisite goods for a larger price. We cannot look at the market as if there is only one seller and only one buyer. Certain math is involved. For example, if the vendor rises his prices, he may lose revenue, as the customers leave him and buy something else, maybe completely different. A wise merchant calculates the sweet spot by varying prices for a short time and monitoring sales. A seller is in a far better position than a buyer in this aspect.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 19 2018, @09:55AM
Nope. The fat cat needs to eat too. And if he doesn't sell his food for cheaper, better quality/experience, etc, he starves as well since the hungry man goes elsewhere.
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:43AM
The way I see Universal Basic Income is that it is primarily about redistribution, not about injecting "extra money" into the economy. (Or dropping it from helicopters, although that would be a sight to behold!)
A society takes all the money it spends on welfare and instead of grudgingly paying a pittance to those that meet stringent requirements and grovel enough, they simply pay every citizen a weekly stipend. When I say "welfare", I mean all of it: unemployment payments, housing assistance, the various versions of "middle class welfare" (every country differs here), payments due to parental leave, and the pension. Simply take all that cash, and pay it out equally to every citizen over the age of sixteen.
The reason I believe we won't see a massive increase in the price of everything is that the total amount of money in the system stays the same. It has simply been redistributed.
Now to address some of the points raised in your reply. I'm not claiming that food prices will not rise, I'm simply stating a belief that if they do rise, the rise will not be particularly dramatic. A rise in food prices could also be seen as a good thing - it means that the poorest in our society can now afford the basics.
I think I've addressed your points about helicopters by talking about redistribution.
You're not wrong. Rent under a UBI will be very interesting - particularly at the very bottom end of the market. I can't imagine UBI will affect the middle and top end of the sector.
Your final question: "who then will be working, if sitting at home for an hour is equivalent to a full day of hard labor?" I wonder if I hadn't made my point sufficiently because the answer to that one is "only a fool". I was trying to draw a comparison between prices in the marketplace today and prices under a putative UBI model. So I wonder if we are talking at cross-purposes.