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The real impact of Citizens United showing more and more

H&R Block snuck language into a Senate bill to make taxes more confusing for poor people

H&R Block's entire business model is premised on taxes being confusing and hard to file. So, naturally, the tax preparation company has become — along with Intuit, the company behind TurboTax — one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill arguing against measures that make it easier to pay taxes. For example, the Obama administration has pushed for automatic tax filing, in which the IRS uses income information it already has to fill out your tax return for you. That would save millions of Americans considerable time and energy every year, but the idea has gone nowhere. The main reason? Lobbying from H&R Block and Intuit.

But H&R Block's latest lobbying effort is even more loathsome than its opposition to automatic filing. At the company's instigation, the Senate Appropriations Committee has passed a funding bill covering the IRS whose accompanying report instructs the agency to at least quadruple the length of the form that taxpayers fill out to get the Earned Income Tax Credit.
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Think about what tax breaks are being targeted here. These are all refundable credits, which, with the exception of the college credit, overwhelmingly help low-income and working-class people. H&R Block is not pushing to make the mortgage interest deduction more complicated, or to make the charitable deduction more confusing. Tax breaks that mostly help rich people go untouched. H&R Block knows that rich people already use TurboTax or hire accountants; because it wants new business, it has decided to prey upon the poor.
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Gross.
 
HR block sneaks language into bill to make taxes more confusing for its shitty "tax preparers"
 
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Somebody who trusts the IRS to determine how much tax they owe will be somebody who ends up paying more taxes than they should.
 
Buried in the budget deal that now has emerged from Congress is a provision by which the IRS will be actively forbidden from enacting new rules in 2016 to rein in the obvious scams in which most of the 501(c)4's engage. I don't care how loudly the flying monkeys howl at Speaker Paul Ryan for "betraying" them by striking a deal at all, this is the real joker in the deck, and the fact that this principle was so easily bargained away says a great deal about the people in power from both political parties. They have accepted the new reality of legalized influence-peddling and are finding ways to prosper in it. This, I guess, is another New Normal in our politics. Absent a constitutional amendment, campaign-finance reform legislation now appears to be as expendable in negotiations—and, therefore as dead—as sensible gun-control legislation is. But, as we always take pains to point out, we still have Justice Anthony Kennedy's assurance that "…independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption."
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http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a40674/budget-deal-irs-501c4/
 
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