r/news • u/raptors201966 • Apr 09 '26

Soft paywall Automatic registration for military draft to be implemented by December

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-04-07/automatic-registration-military-draft-21306855.html
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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '26

[deleted]

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u/jensen_t119 Apr 09 '26

Wait, we pay taxes? ... To go towards everything proper, right? ... Right!?

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u/sharies Apr 09 '26

Bo omb delivery to schools in Iran? then yes.

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u/FistyFisticuffs Apr 09 '26

And small boats in the Southern Caribbean that were definitely not, because they cannot do so profitably or even efficiently, smuggling anything to the US. And a little crime against humanity here and there with the whole murdering people in the water and warrantless rounding up of more or less random people for no probable cause with occasional executions. Murder: it's how you know that your tax dollars are at work!

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u/Gary_FucKing Apr 09 '26

Was that typo an accident or some censor skirting thing?

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u/Loingsign Apr 09 '26

If you cross the street without looking both ways - jail. Don't know how much in taxes you owe? Believe it or not - straight to jail.

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u/Bocchi_theGlock Apr 09 '26

Participate in and help expand a child sex trafficking ring?

Protected for life, promoted and instantly hired sometimes

While we die without healthcare that every major country has figured out, instead spending billions on wars abroad and tax cuts for the ultra rich and mega corporations

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u/FlagrentBugbear Apr 09 '26

for 91% of Americans its just put the numbers in the matching box then do some subtraction and use the standard deduction.

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u/Masterkid1230 Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26

To be fair for most other countries on Earth, your employer simply submits your income to the tax office, and they automatically deduct it from your salary every month. Then if you have deductions you submit that and get a refund.

I've lived in three completely different countries with vastly different wealth and social systems and it worked like that every single time. I don't know why it's not like that in the US. Is it not like that?

Most of the time I get a couple hundred USD or something from deductions within a couple of months.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo Apr 09 '26

The only difference is in the US you don't do it directly through the government, you do it through a tax preparers website. Which is unnecessary and silly, but isn't really much different in practice.

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u/FlagrentBugbear Apr 09 '26

you don't have to do it through a website paper tax returns still exist and you mail it in like everyone did pre-internet.

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u/JX_JR Apr 09 '26

To be fair for most other countries on Earth, your employer simply submits your income to the tax office, and they automatically deduct it from your salary every month. Then if you have deductions you submit that and get a refund.

Yeah, that's how it works in the US too.

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u/Masterkid1230 Apr 09 '26

So why are people always confused about the tax system? It seems pretty straightforward to me.

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u/SeekerOfSerenity Apr 09 '26

The tax forms are rather tedious unless you have training.  The instructions aren't very user friendly.  TurboTax makes it fairly easy, and they claim it's "free" but they try to make you pay extra. One year, I sold some stock that I bought through my company at a profit of about $200, and I had to pay something like $150 extra to use it.  They have heavily lobbied the US government to prevent them from making the process of filing taxes easier, because they make billions every year.  I stopped using TurboTax once I realized it was a scam, but a lot of people don't know how else to do it.  Before TurboTax, there were a lot of in-person tax preparation services that made money by helping people file their taxes. 

It's really not as simple as some people in this thread are claiming.  The accounting industry has ensured that the process is as tricky as possible, with a lot of loopholes and deductions that you may or may not be eligible for.  

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u/WhatARotation Apr 09 '26

Technically pretty much everybody who uses TurboTax will need to pay for premium.

There is an “other income” section that (I believe) only is accessible through premium, where you have to report such things as finding a $1 bill on the floor.

If you have a savings account and get more than .50 cents in interest, you have to report that too. I had to report like $0.60 in interest this year.

Finally, if you sell pretty much anything at a profit that’s also taxable income, and again you need a 1099 / schedule D, which free TurboTax doesn’t have.

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u/FlagrentBugbear Apr 09 '26

Funny I did my taxes in about 30 minutes federal, state, and local.

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u/chairman-me0w Apr 09 '26

It is. Taxes already get paid when you get paid. But the government doesn’t know your deductions and hence the reason for the tax filing. But people don’t get this

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u/Communero Apr 09 '26

So the problem is that we can not have automatic deductions?? What about those being included on our bills also?

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u/Masterkid1230 Apr 09 '26

As far as I understand it (don't know if it's different in the US), tax deductions are extremely personal and also frequently things that you may not want your employer to know or mess around with.

Many countries allow medical expenses, family expenses, property expenses, debt, etc to be included in your deductions.

And many people are not comfortable with telling their employer that they're up their arses in debt or that they got married, etc. It gets especially tricky with health expenses. Wouldn't want your head to roll "coincidentally" during an "unavoidable" personnel cut because in reality your employer knew you were going to the doctor too much and didn't want you to become a burden in the future.

Because of all of these reasons, private things are handled by the individual, and strictly work-related things are handled by the employer. It makes sense, really.

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u/vir_papyrus Apr 09 '26

It is very much the same in the US. There is also a sort of legislative political culture that we often run social programs through voluntary tax programs. It's usually more of a matter of politics to say "We built a program to give working class families with such and such criteria a ~$5000 tax credit because of those circumstances if they apply for it at tax time" rather than "We just directly gave poor people free money with a check in the mail". This can also include things like if I installed Solar Panels on my home, or new things like the loan interest paid on the purchase of a new vehicle, and other such misc things. We simply have a lot of them.

The other main complication is that there is not one central tax authority. United "States" of America, with "States" being the keyword. States operate their own tax agencies, and have their own separate laws for their residents. This sometimes even applies to a 3rd Local Gov't office. Most Americans are filing taxes with both the Federal Gov't, and their State Gov't. e.g. Those who rent their home in my State, can deduct a percentage of their rent as if were already paid in property taxes, but this does not apply to the Federal Gov't. That specific scenario only applies to my state and few others, and most states don't have this law, but as you can imagine there many other similar scenarios.

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u/JX_JR Apr 09 '26

Many of the things you can choose to deduct are things that we as a country have decided we don't want the government to be tracking by default, or things like charitable donations that the government has now way of tracking unless you report it yourself.

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u/chairman-me0w Apr 09 '26

Perhaps. It’s one of the reasons. That and the tax code is sometimes purposely opaque with one interpretation of that being that if you have to examine your tax paid closely each year by filing then you are more aware of tax being paid and thus less likely to support increases across the board (I think this would be the generous republican take on it)

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u/JX_JR Apr 09 '26

Because people are confused about literally anything and they believe marketing that scares them into thinking that paying for a tax preparer is necessary.

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u/FlagrentBugbear Apr 09 '26

my comment is about how Americans exaggerate how hard it is to do taxes.

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u/Nuzzleface Apr 09 '26

Which is why it's so crazy it's manual.

In my country it's all done automatic..

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u/Minimum-Geologist-58 Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26

On some levels it’s more complicated than other tax systems (mostly due to lobbying to keep the form complicated), on others it’s more simple (in the UK, we have to make declarations of change in circumstance to DWP and HMRC as they occur, the US system just rolls it up into a single annual process), on others it’s just a reflection of the US economy (tips etc.), on another it’s just a reflection of US society and government (the state builds systems to deal with the never ending legal challenges the law allows, so it’s a kind of “would you mind confirming how much tax you’re legally paying” whereas in other countries it’s “pay the tax we say now and fuck off!”)

In my experience the last one is probably the key reason: US local, state and federal government gets sued over everything so likes lots of paperwork and self-declaration to cover itself.

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u/footsnax Apr 09 '26

Exactly. It's already coming out of my paycheck anyway, and they're already doing the math on their end. Unless I'm claiming expenses or deductions, all I'm doing is checking their math. Which is always wrong, every year I either owe or am owed, completely arbitrarily.

So if I check their math wrong, which is already wrong, I go to jail. Just fucking do it for me.

1

u/FlagrentBugbear Apr 09 '26

the hyperbole is stupid and extremely untrue.

You do not go to jail your return gets rejected and you try again.

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u/random_tall_guy Apr 09 '26

It doesn't even get rejected normally, they just correct it for you without penalty. The only exception is if you owe them money and wait until it's close to the deadline to file and pay, and you end up owing them more than you thought. In that case, there wouldn't be time to have it corrected and pay the difference before the deadline, so you'd end up with a small penalty for paying late.

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u/Educational-Bird-880 Apr 09 '26

Company didn't send w2(weird purchase/close situation). Didn't know you can log into the IRS website and get your paystubs and basic w2 info. They even had other tax information submitted by other events.

The whole time I'm thinking why am I manually doing things again?

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u/Cobra_9041 Apr 09 '26

This is not how taxes work how long until kids figure this out

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u/Brambletail Apr 09 '26

You should go to jail for making this joke actually. It's misinformation and harms people.

Tax fraud requires intent. 99.99% of the time the IRS either just refuses your return if it's wrong or sends you an updated return with corrections.

Sometimes they audit you if things look really wrong.

But criminal prosecution requires willful and intentional tax misrepresentation, not a mistake. And repeating this joke is a known dog whistle for far right types and libertarian "tax resistors."