You’re talking about laws. They’re talking about the IRS.

The IRS doesn’t make the laws. They’re an agency like any other, and a very important one.

if you fuck it up, you go to jail

No, no you don’t. This is an actual child’s understanding of how it works.

If you fuck up they often don’t even notice unless it’s substantial, otherwise they just send you a notice. You have to be willfully refusing to pay taxes for a while, repeatedly, before you’re in trouble (tax evasion) or commiting actual tax fraud.

Why would the IRS send you to jail for making mistakes on your taxes? Where taxes are now paying for your incarceration, and you can’t work to make the income to pay taxes.

Strictly speaking, tax filling software, even the free ones, have simplified it all so much that for people who have a single source of income from work and not a lot of tax forms to collect (most Americans), it’s pretty trivial. Maybe 30-60 minutes, once a year.

Less than ideal but far from the grueling, soul sucking work I was told would plague my adult life when I was a kid.

That’s why the IRS is finally doing their own online filling system. No more making Americans shell out for software, so everyone gets a nice, simple tax season.

That’s just for free tax filling software, i.e. a government sponsored TurboTax alternative. And that was definitely needed.

What they’re talking about is not having to actually do the filling at all, or at least only having to file in certain cases. The government pays for employees that look at your stuff, says “that’s the amount”, and asks you to confirm.

Granted, with the way tax filing software has advanced, and how simple the vast majority of people’s filings are going to be, the difference is not very substantial anymore. The majority of people just need to click through the screens and answer the questions, so it takes a little time but it’s hardly a true hassle.

The reason it’s been like this in the US for so long is because of the heavy lobbying to keep software like that proprietary and the system complicated enough that people need to use it.

But it’s also been because of decades of conservative bullshit refusing to fund the IRS to the degree that they could provide the services that other countries get. IRS literally could not and cannot afford the manpower to handle the taxes of every American for us. Software lets them circumvent that.

Vote for people who will increase funding to the IRS so they can manage all this.

The reason it’s been like this for so long is because they don’t have the manpower or (until recently) the technology to handle the sheer numbers. Lobbying from TurboTax and shit also played a big part, but even without that, they straight up can’t afford to do all this when they’ve been strangled of funding from decades of conservative legislation.

They were supposed to destroy these when they closed the locations, to prevent exactly this.

Which is a tall order for minimum wage restaurant workers. The fuck they gonna do? Take it down to the local steel mill and T2 it?

This is a new thing that smaller towns are trying to do to take advantage of an increase in remote work.

The meme is also misleading because it’s implying that this is something they’re giving to everyone that moves there for a limited time, when it is only 10 people. It’s also implying that there’s not enough people there to pay taxes, which doesn’t actually make sense because that’s not how taxes work. There would definitely be enough tax income if they didn’t care about the future of the town. What they’re trying to do is revitalize the area and trigger growth, and they need more income to fund that revitalization.

We’re talking local here, not national.

Even if they started taxing the rich, there wouldn’t be many to tax in the area.

The median household income in Cumberland was $47,235 in 2021, which marked an an increase of 903(1.95%) from $46,332 in 2020. This income is 63.31% of the U.S. median household income of $74,606 (all incomes in 2022 inflation-adjusted dollars).

Top 5%: The mean household income for the wealthiest population (top 5%) is 302,286, which is 173.49% higher compared to the highest quintile, and 3113.14% higher compared to the lowest quintile.

https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/cumberland-md-median-household-income/#income-by-quintile

$300,000 is upper middle class, just barely enough to maybe call “rich”. Even so, it’s likely the only reason they live there is low taxes. We’re not talking national taxes here, this is local, and they can be absolutely sure if they locally tax those wealthier people any more than they are, they’ll move away.

They absolutely should do that, and give a firm middle finger to the back of the wealthy assholes as they move to their new mansion in whatever backwater they’re moving to next, but it doesn’t solve the inherent problem: the tax base is too small and too poor.

This is just a mountain town that has died slowly after the death of industry there post World War II, and frankly there is no good way to save it because there’s no way to convince anybody to take their industries up there. The state can subsidize it but it’s not going to grow.

What they’re doing here is trying to use the new changes in remote work to potentially trigger a revitalization and expand the tax base. Even then, they’re only giving it to 10 individuals, not anybody that moves there as the meme is implying. It may work, but I have my doubts.

It was the lose of jobs as industry moved away, a trend started after WW2.

The culture probably helped but it’s a much larger trend than people simply not wanting to live in a conservative town.

No, it’s to attract people with jobs. Explicitly.

I’m not sure why there’s all this guessing and pontificating going on in here, you can just look the story up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/08/30/cumberland-maryland-revival/

Why are we assuming all work from home jobs require fiber?

This is explicitly for full-time remote workers.

As part of a broader effort to recapture some of the city’s former vitality, Cumberland is hoping to take advantage of the pandemic shift to remote work by giving $20,000 to 10 home buyers who promise to invest in those properties and become part of the community.

[…]

It’s really to attract people who will benefit your community,” said Cumberland City Council member Laurie Marchini. “It’s not a social services program; it’s to bring people in who are employed.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/08/30/cumberland-maryland-revival/

Having third party clients is not good for security.

If the first party provider told you this, you should always second guess them.

Moreover, providing an option that informed users can choose doesn’t hurt security. This idea the user can’t be trusted to use the appropriate type of messaging if provided options needs to die.

You have absolutely zero guarantees, with or without their policy on third party apps. You can not send sensitive information to someone else’s phone and tell yourself it couldn’t possibly have been intercepted, or that someone couldn’t get ahold of that phone, or that the person you’re sending it to won’t take a screenshot and save it to their cloud.

A lot of software nowadays is doing a real disservice to their users by continuing to lie to them like this by selling them the notion that they can control their information after it has been sent. It’s really making people forget basic information hygiene. No app can guarantee that message won’t be intercepted or mishandled. They can only give you tools to hopefully prevent that, but there are no guarantees.

Moreover, this policy does not exclude them from including third-party functionality and warning the user when they are communicating with somebody that isn’t using encryption.

Too many of these apps and services are getting away with the “security” excuse for what is effectively just creating a walled garden to lock users in. Ask yourself how you can get your own data out of these services when you decide to quit them, and it becomes more apparent what they’re doing.

That just feels like shooting themselves in the foot. Just inform the user SMS isn’t secure. That’s it.

Not being willing to trust the user with the information so they can make a choice is asinine. It’s the same reason why I stopped using Tuta. Complete privacy and security are great but if there’s no option to make things a little more open for the sake of convenience or interconnectivity, I’m just not interested.

Security and privacy shouldn’t be a prison.