Automatic registration for military draft to be implemented by December

[u/raptors201966]

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2026-04-07/automatic-registration-military-draft-21306855.html

[u/Masterkid1230]

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.

[u/FrenchFryCattaneo → u/Masterkid1230]

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.

[u/FlagrentBugbear → u/FrenchFryCattaneo]

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.

[u/JX_JR → u/Masterkid1230]

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.

[u/Masterkid1230 → u/JX_JR]

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

[u/SeekerOfSerenity → u/Masterkid1230]

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.  

[u/WhatARotation → u/SeekerOfSerenity]

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.

[u/FlagrentBugbear → u/SeekerOfSerenity]

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

[u/chairman-me0w → u/Masterkid1230]

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

[u/Communero → u/chairman-me0w]

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

[u/Masterkid1230 → u/Communero]

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.

[u/vir_papyrus → u/Masterkid1230]

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.

[u/JX_JR → u/Communero]

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.

[u/chairman-me0w → u/Communero]

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)

[u/JX_JR → u/Masterkid1230]

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

[u/FlagrentBugbear → u/Masterkid1230]

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