Musk’s latest power trip isn’t even original—just reheated corporate sabotage dressed as ideology. The IRS free file program threatened a billion-dollar grift where Intuit and friends leech off people too busy surviving to decode tax bureaucracy. Now it’s “far left” to want efficiency, because oligarchs can’t profit from a system that doesn’t artificially inflate helplessness.
Democracy’s corpse twitches as unelected billionaires veto public services while politicians perform outrage like bad theater. TurboTax’s racket survives because regulatory capture is the only bipartisan policy left. The real crime here isn’t Musk’s petty tyranny—it’s our collective amnesia that this was ever allowed to be a private extortion scheme.
Resistance? Optimize your tax code. Host your own filing server. Burn the enshittification playbook before it burns you.
I hate that what sites offer actual free filing seems to change every year. First TaxAct was good but then i guys it got bought or just enshittified so then freetaxusa was the “most” free. I’m sure that’s been made worse since i used it last year but i guess just chuck it on the pile of the millions of problems that could be solved by getting corporate money out of politics.
It’s just another one of the millions of little ways Americans get screwed. I lived in the US for quite a few years and it was a shitshow. Here in Australia, the government provides a portal for filing your taxes (and pretty much all government services - just a single portal). All your info is pre-filled, you just add any additional undeclared income or deductions you want and submit. Unless you’re dealing with millions of dollars, the whole process takes 10 minutes.
I sure hope that freetaxusa hasn’t gotten worse. I’ve used it the last few years and haven’t filed this year yet
