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Covid-19 Sentry

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Contents

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From Preprints

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+🖺 Full Text HTML: Behavioral activation method for depression therapy +
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From Clinical Trials

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From PubMed

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From Patent Search

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+The Frakta bags are made out of the same blue plasticky material as Ikea’s large open shopping bags, except they’re shaped like duffel bags and have a zipper and extra straps that can function as a backpack. I know about them from a Facebook page called Dorm Chatter, a 35,000-follower-strong bastion of mostly moms who debate the best fans, sheets, and, yes, storage bags, for moving their students to college. +

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+In the early ’90s, I attended a state university with standard cinderblock dorm rooms. I decorated it with posters, milk crates, and a brown, beat-up, rented mini-fridge. So I was not fully prepared for what these amateur dorm experts were telling me my kid, who will be a freshman this fall attending college six hours away, “needed” for his room. +

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+First and foremost, the Frakta bags. Group members posted tons of pictures showing how much stuff could fit in one and their superior stackability in the back of SUVs. Plus, they can have a second life as travel bags or as laundry bags. I was convinced. +

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+But then it started to get more esoteric. There’s the Woozoo, a globular, oscillating fan that also moves up and down for superior cooling, which regularly sells out at Costco. There’s the Lucid mattress topper (oh, shit, he needs a mattress topper?), for which it had been determined that the 3-inch thickness was ideal. There are multiple pool noodle hacks — a shockingly popular DIY tool — including one in which you slice the noodle in half lengthwise and put it on the bottom edge of a lofted bed so taller kids don’t hit their heads on the frame. +

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+There were questions about temporary wallpaper and bedskirts and even the feasibility of portable in-room washing machines. I quickly panicked, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff. I had to shut my laptop and calm myself down before I mindlessly spent hundreds of dollars on over-the-fridge storage shelves and dozens of Command hooks. +

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+A post shared by Pretty Dorms (@prettydorms) +

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+The dorm shopping economy is a robust one, with plenty of places to buy things that you see on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook groups. In addition to Amazon, the traditional dorm retailers like Target and Bed Bath & Beyond offer dorm registries, complete with discounts. Then there are specialty retailers like OCM, DormCo, and Dormify that offer dorm-specific storage options and decor. They even sell full packages that allow students and families to buy everything all at once, like OCM’s 27-piece, $250 package that includes everything from sheets and towels to a laundry bag and surge protector. +

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+Dormify, which has the trendiest products of the bunch and even offers design services, just landed a Series B round of private equity funding this spring and counts American Eagle Outfitters as a strategic investor. Social media has changed the game on dorm shopping, but also, students look to express their personalities via decor and parents see one last opportunity to take care of their children at the end of their childhoods. +

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+Aaryn Peterson, a parent in Portland, Oregon, estimates she spent close to $3,000 buying stuff for her freshman daughter Grace last year. She posted a picture on the Dorm Chatter page of her in a UHaul on the last day of school surrounded by boxes, with an impassioned plea that read, in part: “Don’t be me. Learn from my mistakes.” She got almost 500 responses in return, including some sweary and defensive DMs. She says she was just trying to provide some hindsight wisdom for all of us newbies. +

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+“[Grace] didn’t want 7,000 throw pillows. She didn’t want them, but I kept buying cute ones,” says Peterson. “And it was because I just kept thinking, ‘She needs this to be comfortable. She needs this to feel all the things.’” +

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+I empathize with the pull of that inclination as I debate whether or not my kid needs a special bed caddy for his electronics. +

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+According to a July report from consulting firm Deloitte, which publishes annual college shopping surveys, $26.7 billion will be spent on back-to- college items, an average of about $1,459 per student. Computers and gadgets make up a big chunk of this, but dorm appliances/furniture will account for $6.8 billion of the total. +

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+“It’s really expensive to outfit a complete dorm. It can be thousands without really even going over the top,” says Fran Bardio, the founder of the Dorm Chatter page. The group’s first iteration was for discussing college admissions, a process she found stressful and confusing. Other parents did too, but the conversation soon transitioned into dorms, so she started Dorm Chatter separately three years ago when her first child was heading off to school. (She says she gets about 60 comments a day on the page and currently there is a queue of 1,000 people requesting page access.) +

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+Typical dorm rooms are small and sparsely furnished with a desk, a closet, a small chest of drawers, and a bed that can usually be lofted to different heights. The shopping checklist my son’s school sent out was a few dozen bullet points of mostly obvious items: towels, hangers, chargers. A comprehensive document floating around on Dorm Chatter is four pages long and includes helpful items I didn’t even think about like water bottles, and things I’m not sure are really necessary, like husband pillows. Once you start getting into decor like fairy lights and ornamental headboards (more on this extremely hot item shortly), you can see how the bill can climb. +

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+This is, of course, on top of ever-increasing college costs that leave many students with debilitating debt. Tuition for the 2020-2021 school year averaged $41,411 at private colleges, and $11,171 for in-state students and $26,809 for out-of-state students at state schools, according to US News data. Room and board can add thousands of dollars more to the total. +

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+The McMansioning that is sometimes happening in dorms can have the unfortunate effect of mirroring the financial inequality in society. “You can definitely tell where the equity gaps are based on what someone’s room looks like. We see some people investing quite a bit of money on their residential spaces and then some who can’t afford to do that at all,” says Melantha Ardrey, the director of student life at the College of Charleston. +

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+In a Reddit post a few years ago, a user said she grew up homeless for part of her childhood but was attending “one of the best colleges in the country.” This reality was highlighted before she even got to school. “The most basic dorm supplies at stores [are] incredibly out of my budget. My family and I live paycheck to paycheck so we can’t afford to spend anything else on bedsheets, a comforter, mattress topper, a pillow, toiletries, lamp, etc. It adds up so quickly!” she wrote. +

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+About five years ago, highly designed and coordinated dorm rooms went viral. It’s a trend that has been popular for a while, particularly at Southern schools, per the retailers I spoke to. The concept, with the help of social media, has since trickled into the mainstream. It’s prompted the market to come up with all sorts of specialty items for dorm spaces as well as an often pricey outlook about what a dorm can be. +

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+“Five years ago, it was treated more like, ‘This is like sleepaway camp for the semester.’ And now [students are] treated like adults. This is your first home away from home,” says DormCo founder Jeff Gawronski. When he was a college student in the early ‘00s, Gawronski created a bedpost shelf called the Mini Mantle, which allowed students to keep their stuff close by on a lofted bed. He sold it on campus door-to-door, then eventually launched his own company. He founded the current iteration of DormCo in 2010, and it sells everything you can imagine for a dorm room on a rather utilitarian website. +

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+A post shared by Bed Bath & Beyond (@bedbathandbeyond) +

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+But Amazon, dollar stores, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, and other big box stores are often the first stop for students of all budget levels. These places are easy and affordable. Target and Bed Bath & Beyond even offer dorm registries that come with discounts of 15 and 20 percent, respectively. Often families will register and just buy the whole order themselves at the discounted rate. While these stores have historically offered basics for dorms and a limited variety of sheets and comforters in the dorm twin XL size, they are ramping up and meeting the desire for more personalized rooms. +

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+Bed Bath & Beyond, which has been struggling financially for years, is in the midst of attempting to turn around its business. Part of the strategy of the new CEO, a former Target executive, is to launch several private label brands that will likely appeal to dorm shoppers. Simply Essential is a less expensive brand for the shopper who wants basic sheets and towels. There is a storage brand called Squared Away, featuring chests of drawers and drying racks that are more stylish than the usual plain plastic fare. But the most blatant attempt to win over Gen Z is the eclectic and colorful Anthropologie-esque brand, Wild Sage. (You could be forgiven if you confuse it with Target’s Wild Fable clothing brand or its Opalhouse home decor brand.) +

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+The goal is “to create a customer that we don’t have today,” says Neil Lick, the senior vice president of owned brands at Bed Bath & Beyond. Lick says that internal research showed that Gen Z doesn’t identify their decorating tastes as “modern” or “traditional,” but rather that they want their space to reflect their identities and personalities. They also are cooking more at a younger age, so the retailer is selling smaller personal blenders and other dorm-safe appliances. He says it is also marketing to that group multifunctional, smaller-scale furniture pieces, like a $150 bar cart that can be a “side table or a study area.” (The top of my ugly rental fridge was my bar cart.) +

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+So ostensibly this is all meant to appeal to students, but it’s also obvious that parents and caregivers — often the ones paying for everything — are emotionally invested in their kids’ space. +

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+Many students don’t necessarily care if they have a hanging tapestry that matches their throw pillows. My son told me he wanted gray sheets, but was not at all interested in discussing specific shades of gray with me. I told him about a mom on Dorm Chatter who wrote that her son never used a shower caddy because he just squirted some shampoo on his head and body wash in his hand and walked down the hall to the showers; he could relate. +

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+But there are enough people who do want to personalize and organize their rooms, and investors have taken notice. Dormify is the ascendant retailer in this space, and it looks like the Gen Z child of Instagram, Pinterest, and Glossier. Pictures of beautiful dorm tableaus on the site feature fluffy pillows and neon signs announcing “GRL PWR.” +

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+A post shared by dormify (@dormify) +

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+Dormify offers room “stylists,” has IRL pop-ups in several cities like Boston, Chicago, and New York City where you can make a styling appointment, and has virtual tools that allow shoppers to see what all the pieces will look like in a room. “That combination of an e-commerce platform with a comprehensive solution and the engagement factor was something that we didn’t see out there,” says Lisa Myers, the co-founder and managing partner of Clerisy, the firm that invested an undisclosed amount in Dormify in March. +

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+Plus, just like the bridal market, there is a never-ending supply of new customers. “You get 2 million new college students who you reload the gun with every year. Not to mention the 18 million across the country that are in college over the four years,” she says. She hints that the brand aims to stay with these young adults as they finish college and enter starter apartments. +

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+Amanda Zuckerman founded Dormify with her mom in 2011 while she was still in college, growing a blog about college life and dorm decor into a business. As a student, she was into fashion and couldn’t find stylish, fun bedding in the twin XL size. She partnered with American Eagle in 2015, when the retailer was interested in making home goods for the Aerie brand. It invested $3.45 million in the company in 2018. Dormify has grown from there thanks to a commitment to engaging with its customer cohort on social media and active recruitment of influencers to work with the brand. +

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+Zuckerman says the typical Dormify customer is finding inspiration from the social media accounts of older influencers. “From an aesthetic standpoint, there has definitely been a shift. Twelve-year-olds think they’re 25, and18-year-olds want to be 30. Everyone just wants to be super sophisticated and much older than they actually are,” Zuckerman says. So they’re aspiring to the homes of influencers like Danielle Bernstein/We Wore What and Emma Chamberlain. Dormify attempts to translate the aesthetic into attainable bedrooms. They also partnered on a collection with Katie Feeney, a TikTokker with over 6 million followers who is headed to Penn State as a freshman this fall. +

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+Headboards ($99 to $199) — fluffy, tufted, textured — have become bestsellers for Dormify. They’re never discounted. The ones the site sells attach to the wall via velcro strips or Command hooks, and many feature charging stations. Zuckerman says customers often buy headboards before they even decide on a color scheme. White faux-fur pillows are perennial bestsellers. Must-have lighting includes both a desk and floor lamp, but now decorative strings and LED strips are de rigueur as well. Removable wallpaper that looks like faux bricks has also been flying off the shelves. And gray everything, much like in the larger home decor world, refuses to go away. +

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+It’s easy to mock all this blatant consumerism for a temporary room that someone may live in for less than a year. And I have certainly mocked myself for getting influenced. But there are some strong psychological and developmental phenomena at play here that these retailers have been brilliant at exploiting or supporting, depending how cynical you want to be about it. +

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+First, there’s a bit of helicopter parenting, something I have enough self-awareness to realize. I’m far from alone here, though. Of the dorm move-in and decorating process, “We definitely have had more parental involvement over the years. This is sort of a generational change that we’ve seen,” says Ardrey of the College of Charleston. +

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+So many moms on Dorm Chatter have noted that all this frenetic gathering on behalf of our children feels like a second nesting phase, akin to the one many parents go through when they are pregnant. To me, making sure my son has new shower flip flops and a convenient laundry bag feels like a final, momentous caretaking task. +

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+A post shared by dormify (@dormify) +

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+“It’s this weird emotional time. You’re so proud of them, but yet you want to hold onto the life that you knew and it’s never going to be the same. Your kid’s not going to be with you for the daily interactions. So it takes a very emotional toll on parents,” says Bardio, the Dorm Chatter founder. +

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+For the young adults going out on their own for the first time, they want to visually show off their identities via their living spaces. It’s often the first test of their newfound independence. Bed Bath & Beyond’s consumer research led them to conclude that for this generation “the importance of your space as a nurturing escape from the world or a place you’re proud of combined with the ability to show off and share your space with the world has put the importance of dorm decor more on the radar than ever before.” +

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+Mychelle Oliver, a student at Kent State, was excited to decorate her dorm. She used graduation money to shop at Target, Home Goods, Dormify, and home decor store Kirkland’s, where she worked and had an employee discount. She scrolled through Pinterest and watched dorm tours on YouTube for ideas, and credits her mom with having an interior designer’s sensibility. +

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+“It made me feel very independent, and I have always loved decorating. It was like serotonin when I was able to decorate something,” Oliver wrote in an email. “The level of decor compared to my friends’ and peers at school was to the extreme lol… They were always amazed how I made a small, empty room into something I called a second home.” +

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+But yes, it all adds up to a ton of shopping. +

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+“We’re making ourselves sick trying to make sure that our kids have this Disney World experience every single day that they’re at college. It’s not necessary,” says Peterson, the mom from Portland who wrote the Facebook post arguing against buying too much. “They just want to experience college.” +

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+But I still bought the Woozoo fan. +

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+Robert Reich +

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+Well, they’re not so dangerous. They’re just not paying their fair share of the dues, for being a part of a society and a part of the world. And I think they’re also kind of thumbing their nose at society. They’re saying, “We can live in our own world, we can go into outer space, we can do anything we want, we have the ultimate freedom. And by the way, you guys don’t.” +

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+Jamil Smith +

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+That’s something I think you addressed very well in one of your earlier chapters in your book last year, with regard to how the rich get to enjoy socialism — and the rest of us have to deal with the consequences of capitalism. +

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+Robert Reich +

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+I think this is a very fundamental, important point that distinguishes American capitalism from almost every other form of capitalism. Here we have the harshest and most brutal form of capitalism. We have almost no safety nets. Our safety nets that we did have are unraveling. +

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+If you are poor, if you’ve had bad luck, if you’ve had a bad illness, you’re in terrible trouble. You are constrained in ways that almost nobody else in the world, in advanced countries, is constrained. We have no sick leave. We have no mandatory paid paternity or maternity leave. We have no child care. We have nothing for most people except Social Security and Medicare. But if you are rich, if you have rich parents, if you’ve had the best luck, if you if you’ve gone to good schools and you have the right connections, you are in a different, and it’s a socialist world in the sense that you’re too big to fail, too rich to fail. +

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+The government will bail you out if you’re a banker and you have completely screwed up. You get tax breaks. The Federal Reserve Board will give you extra benefits and we’ll take the debt off your hands. You’ve got enough political power to get everything you want. +

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+Jamil Smith +

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+And that’s the thing I don’t understand, going back to the Democrats: You have the power, you have the presidency back, you’ve rescued it from these incompetent, malevolent people who were in charge and you have a majority in Congress. Why aren’t you using it? +

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+Robert Reich +

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+I want to say, in just fairness, I’m impressed by the stimulus bill that got through. I’m impressed that an infrastructure bill is going through. I think the Democrats actually are accomplishing more than the Obama Democrats or the Clinton Democrats in the first two years. +

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+But as a progressive, I want more. I want to see the minimum wage raised. I want people who are in poverty, who are in who are being kicked out of their homes or their rental units. I don’t want people at the border to be put into prisons or jails or cages. As a progressive, as a liberal, I want much more than the Democrats seem to be able to deliver. I want voting reform. And I’m angry. +

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+Jamil Smith +

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+There’s this kind of partisan theater that sometimes takes us away from what we need to be focusing upon. You’ve been in Washington as the labor secretary. You’ve filled a lot of different roles in our politics. +

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+Is working with Republicans even worth it? +

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+Robert Reich +

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+I would say now, probably not. I was in Washington at a time when it was possible for Democrats and Republicans to come together. There was a generation of people who had gone through some traumas: the Vietnam War, voting rights, civil rights. They had been forced to work together. They had been through the Nixon administration. +

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+They understood they needed each other. They understood they were there for the common good, for the country as a whole. That is now not the case. The Republican Party essentially stands for two things for the two basic parts of its constituency: low taxes for the wealthy and white supremacy for the white working class. +

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+Jamil Smith +

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+And Republicans exploit that to maintain power because they can’t win national elections anymore, especially the presidency. And they certainly can’t do it without huge amounts of voter suppression. +

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+Robert Reich +

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+Oh, yeah, that’s the key to their survival. And I think they’re playing with long-term debt. +

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+Jamil Smith +

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+They got people scared about using their full capabilities as a citizen. It’s not simply targeting the undocumented folks, but also the people who are here legally but aren’t, in Republican views, fortunate enough to be white. And they want to make sure that those people, even though they are here legally and they are citizens, feel like they aren’t fully part of the American franchise. +

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+And that is inherent to the whole philosophy because if you make people feel like they’re not fully Americans, it’s easier to dehumanize them. And it makes their job easier, in terms of maintenance of power for the service of oligarchy. +

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+Robert Reich +

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+Absolutely true. I think the oligarchy in America wants black people and white people, working-class, to distrust each other, even hate each other. That way they prevent the working class and much of the middle class from looking up and seeing where all the wealth has gone. That is the central goal, I think, of the richest people in America. +

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+Jamil Smith +

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+And of course, that’s who we’re speaking about. When we talk about oligarchy, we don’t have dukes and kings and queens in this country. But money allows folks to assume those kinds of de facto royalty positions within our society. +

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+Robert Reich +

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+I look at the fact that we’ve always had an oligarchy. We’ve always had a lot of inequality in this country. But the last time we had the degree of inequality was in the so-called Gilded Age, where a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people suppressed votes. They suppressed unions. They did not want any competition for their fortunes. And, of course, it ended badly. +

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+So what’s the bottom line? It is interesting. It’s actually in the economic interest of the oligarchy of the wealthy to prevent and to cure the degree of inequality we now have. They are raking it in, but the next depression is just around the corner. +

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+Jamil Smith +

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+And they don’t see it. They don’t understand that they would be doing better, that white supremacy hurts us all, and so does their employment of white supremacy and its tactics in order to preserve power. +

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+But also, I think Republicans and oligarchs understand race and racism in this country probably better than a lot of Democrats do. What do you think about how our evolving attitudes on race and racism and misogyny and other forms of discrimination and bias have affected how Republicans seek to retain power? +

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+Robert Reich +

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+What I don’t think we faced is that there’s a connection between racism and the maldistribution of income and wealth in this country. We haven’t faced the fact that voting rights are not simply a matter of making sure that everybody can get to the polls. Voting rights is also a matter of making sure that our government is not overwhelmed by big money. +

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+Jamil Smith +

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+There are so many different things that would make this a better country, and make it run more efficiently and more equitably. What do people need to do right now? For voting rights, for the minimum wage, for all of it put together. And if not taking to the streets, what do you feel might be the best way for us to go after these goals? +

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+Robert Reich +

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+Well, it’s always nice to take the streets, but I worry that demonstrating is sometimes a substitute for the hard work of political organizing. And it mustn’t be. I tell my students that the best way to make change is to help people organize for change. The best way to improve society is to either run for office yourself or to get other people to help support candidates in your communities, in your states. Organize, organize, organize. That’s what needs to be done all over the country. +

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+I don’t want to be understood as pooh-poohing demonstrations. But we really do need people who are working the political system, who have a very long view. This is not going to happen in one year. It’s not going to be happening over one election cycle. +

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+Now, let me just say one more thing: I am very sympathetic with people who come to me and say I’m burnt out. You know, I’ve just been banging my head against a wall, trying to make change, trying to make social change that is progressive. And I can’t do it anymore. Yes, of course, I understand that. I feel the same way. +

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+But often, people who are burnt out have been doing it the wrong way. They’ve been taking too much responsibility on themselves personally. They’ve not been allocating responsibility to others. They’ve not been policing themselves. They’ve not been thinking about the long term. +

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+Jamil Smith +

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+One of the things I think about when you mention that is how burnt out we all got over the previous four years in this administration, just the constant onslaught of bad news, of vitriolic speech, of defending the indefensible. And I think that speaks to your assertion that people take too much upon themselves. They feel like they [must be watching] CNN and MSNBC 24/7 and reading every article. And I keep telling people, “I’m in this business. I used to work in cable news. I don’t watch it anymore.” +

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+Robert Reich +

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+I think the biggest danger, honestly, is not burnout. The biggest danger is cynicism. If many of us and by us, I mean progressives who care about this country, who want social change, who believe in the ideals of this country, if too many of us just say no way, this is not going to happen, then it won’t happen. +

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+And that’s what the oligarchs and the white supremacists would really want more than anything else. They want us all to feel that nothing is going to change. Because if we give up, then we cede the entire ground to them, and we must not do that. Anger isn’t bad. We can be outraged. That’s not bad. But let’s not be cynical. +

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+@rbreich +

+Folks, there is nothing radical about forming a society based on justice and dignity. +

+♬ Pretty young twearkalator - ✨yUh✨ +
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+Jamil Smith +

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+In that respect, I think you’re an early adopter of common sense. How do you feel like you’re now using your platforms, whether they be in the classroom at Berkeley or on Instagram and YouTube? How are you trying to reach people, to further the kind of change that we need? +

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+Robert Reich +

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+I consider myself an educator. I mean, that’s what I do. I think people need to understand context. They need to be able to connect the dots, economics, politics, philosophy, history, law, and I guess my faith is that to the extent that they are able to do this, they will be constructive citizens. +

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+So my little contribution now is to teach. I love my students. I love teaching, and to teach through social media. Books are a very difficult and inefficient way of reaching people these days. I don’t want to sound negative about young people. I think they’re acutely sensitive to visual cues, and they’re acutely sensitive to musical cues. They grew up not geared to nearly as much the written word as my generation was. And again, I want to stress that my generation cannot see and hear nearly as well as young people. +

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+I even started to do something on TikTok. Now, I don’t understand tech. I really don’t. +

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+Jamil Smith +

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+You and me both. +

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+Robert Reich +

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+We’re not grandiose here. We’re talking about little-scale reaching, reaching generations. So that’s great. +

+

+You’ve got to continue to fight. I don’t say this out of cynicism. I see this out of hope, because I believe that a good society is a society that understands that these battles never end. A good society has got to continuously train young people to fight these fights, for some of them to devote their entire lives to these battles. You don’t expect everybody, but maybe 1 or 2 percent. Because these are the front lines in the maintenance of democracy. +

+

+Jamil Smith +

+

+Speaking of someone who was on the front lines: Tell the listeners who Michael Schwerner was, and who he was to you. +

+

+Robert Reich +

+

+Well, it’s hard for me to talk about this, because I almost always get emotional. I mean, everybody has their own story about why they do what they do. And my personal story involves Michael Schwerner, because when I was a kid, I was very short. I still am very short, and I was bullied. And my defense against this was to find older boys who would protect me. I kind of created my own private protection racket. +

+

+And Mickey Schwerner, when I was a kid, was one of the older boys who did help me. And then in the summer of 1964, I learned later that Michael Schwerner had been in Mississippi, registering black people to vote, along with two other civil rights workers, when he was brutally murdered. By the Ku Klux Klan, including the sheriff of the county. +

+

+And when I heard that my protector had been tortured and killed, I think my life changed. I think I started to see that power was a central animating force in a society, in ways that I didn’t understand until then. And that stopping the bullies, whether they’re economic bullies or financial bullies or political bullies, is what we must do if we’re going to have a good society. +

+

+

+ +
+ Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images +
+President Biden delivered remarks on the need for his administration’s proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief legislation alongside Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in February 2020. +
+
+

+But it could also pay for an improvement to the tax system itself. While no one in the administration or Congress seems to be making much noise about this, the IRS funding plan could be a golden opportunity to force the agency to join the rest of the world in offering a free, easy-to-use service that all Americans can use to file their taxes. +

+

+The timing is auspicious for such an endeavor. As you may know, if you make $72,000 or less, you’re eligible for a free return through the IRS Free File program, including software provided by Intuit, the company that operates TurboTax. If you make more, you’re eligible for Free File Fillable Forms, an Intuit product. +

+

+That system is now falling apart. Intuit is pulling out of its arrangement with the US government, which could mean the end of the only online tax filing systems available free of charge to all Americans. +

+

+But this collapse may present an opportunity. +

+

+For decades, the tax prep industry has succeeded in preventing the IRS from doing what the tax authority in just about every other country does: providing a free, effective, easy-to-use online service where all taxpayers can file their taxes. But it’s doing so just as the Biden administration is attempting to pour billions in new funding into the IRS. +

+

+The end of Free File and the conversations in Congress around IRS funding could make this the perfect moment to dismantle our broken tax filing system and build something better. +

+

+How to file your taxes for free, explained +

+

+Right now, if you’re an American who wants to file your taxes without paying any additional fees to a private company or preparer, you have three options (besides limited “simple return” promotions by the big companies). +

+

+You can role-play as someone living in the 1970s and print out the 1040 tax form, along with any associated schedules or forms for tax credits and deductions for which you may be eligible, and compute it all by hand, meticulously collating physical copies of your W-2 and 1099 income statements and any other documentation you need. +

+

+Your second option is only slightly less tedious: You can use Free File Fillable Forms, a free service implemented by Intuit that simply copies the physical IRS tax forms and makes them “fillable” so you can type in the numbers. It’ll even do some basic math for you. But you still have to manually enter everything, you can’t import PDFs of your W-2 or other statements, and it’s easy to get confused about exactly which forms you’re expected or required to fill out. I’m an IRS-certified tax preparer, and I gave up using the website this year out of frustration. +

+

+Your final option is only available if you make $72,000 a year or less. In that case, you’re eligible for a free return on private tax software through the IRS Free File program. But careful: You might get a ton of spam from whatever company you choose trying to upsell you and get you to pay for fancier options. One investigation found that 14 million Americans were charged by companies for Free File returns that should have cost nothing. +

+

+The IRS also funds community tax organizations that can file returns for low-income people, but I can say from experience as a volunteer tax preparer that these groups are underfunded and overworked. +

+

+This is an unacceptable state of affairs. Americans should not have to choose between these obviously inadequate and half-baked free options for tax filing and paying a private company. Paying taxes is a legal requirement, and it should be possible to easily do it for free. And it just isn’t possible right now; it’s no wonder that over 91 percent of individual returns filed in 2019 were filed through a paid preparer or a private online service. The current system almost forces you to pay for the privilege of paying your taxes. +

+

+Intuit, H&R Block, and America’s broken tax filing system +

+

+The Free File and Free File Fillable Forms systems can perhaps best be understood as a kind of peace treaty between the IRS and the private tax preparation industry, specifically Intuit and H&R Block. +

+

+For years, the government leaned on those two companies to provide free tax services to Americans in need. But the basic problem with relying on private sector companies that provide paid tax services to provide free ones is that they will always have an incentive to make the free service worse and to make the paid one more attractive. That’s been the story the past couple of decades. +

+

+In 2002, as part of a broader effort to improve government technology to take advantage of the internet, the Bush administration proposed that the IRS develop “an easy, no-cost option for taxpayers to file their tax return online.” +

+

+This, as ProPublica’s Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel reported, led to a massive lobbying push from Intuit, including a coordinated letter from Republican members of Congress demanding that the IRS not “compete” with private companies, with an implicit threat of reduced IRS funding if it did try to offer free filing. +

+

+So the IRS, hamstrung by limited funding to start its own free filing program anyway, negotiated a deal with the tax preparers: The companies would offer low-income Americans free tax prep software, and in exchange, the IRS would promise not to set up a free filing program of its own. +

+
+ David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images +
+Blame the H&R Block guy for making your taxes suck. Well, not the actor, he’s just doing his job. Blame the CEO, Jeff Jones. +
+
+

+This is the system that has held from 2002 to the present. The IRS brags that 70 percent of Americans are eligible for Free File, but for the 2019 tax season, only 4.2 million returns out of 157.2 million total were filed through Free File, or 2.6 percent. +

+

+H&R Block and Intuit succeeded in making the program a non- entity. In 2019, Elliott and Kiel began documenting how the two companies were undermining Free File, from hiding their Free File options from Google results to tricking their clients into paying when they could file for free. +

+

+Their reporting led by the end of the year to significant changes to the Free File program. The IRS added an addendum to its deal with tax preparers. The new provisions prohibited companies from blocking Free File search results and tried to reduce deceptive marketing, and, more crucially, dropped the ban on the IRS developing its own free file option. +

+

+This, perhaps unsurprisingly, led to backlash from the tax prep industry. +

+

+Last year, H&R Block became the first preparer to leave the Free File Alliance, meaning it would no longer provide free returns to all low-income Americans through the program. Intuit followed suit this July by announcing it would pull TurboTax from the program as well. +

+

+This doesn’t entirely gut the program — other services like TaxSlayer and TaxAct are still available — but it removes the program’s two most popular service providers. Most importantly, Intuit’s withdrawal throws the future of Free File Fillable Forms, which it develops for the Free File Alliance, into question. +

+

+This chaos is particularly important for low- income people. Some of America’s most important safety net programs exist as parts of the tax code, in particular the earned income tax credit (EITC) and the child tax credit (CTC); so did the economic impact payments, better known as “stimulus checks,” last year. Having access to a free program to file taxes and access these credits is consequential for a lot of families. +

+

+But this chaos could also provide an opening for something better. +

+

+How Biden and the IRS can fix tax filing +

+

+The IRS desperately needs to put together an easier-to-use, simpler way for people to file their taxes and access benefits free of charge. Accomplishing that, of course, is easier said than done. The IRS has been underfunded for decades and does not have sufficient in-house technical expertise to build a free file system on its own. +

+

+But there are signs suggesting that the limitations keeping the IRS from enabling free filing are falling away. +

+

+First, the agency removed the ban limiting it from offering such a product in 2019. Then the Biden administration made increased funding to the agency one of its top domestic spending priorities, as well it should — funding the IRS increases tax revenue and pays for itself several times over. While the provision fell out of the bipartisan infrastructure deal over Republican opposition, it’s set to be used as a pay-for in Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending package. +

+

+That could provide the funding necessary for the IRS to make free filing a reality — and Intuit’s withdrawal from the Free File program could provide some sense of urgency. “The problems with Free File lead me to conclude that it is time for IRS to develop the technology that will allow individuals to access our tax system with minimal burden,” Leslie Book, a professor of tax law at Villanova, told me, in a judgment that echoes many tax law experts I’ve spoken with. +

+

+In the near term, the IRS will need a stopgap measure for free tax returns next spring, especially if no provider in the Free File Alliance steps up to replace Intuit in running Free File Fillable Forms. The IRS will likely not have funding and staffing in time to set up an in-house program by then, which means that on a temporary basis it will likely have to repeat the Free File formula of relying on private preparers. +

+

+Daniel Hemel, a professor of tax and constitutional law at UChicago, has proposed a simple temporary fix: have the US government pay TaxSlayer, TaxAct, or any of the other remaining Free File companies on a per-return basis to prepare returns for taxpayers, at least low-income ones. +

+
+
+

+Congress would say: “Hey TaxSlayer, FreeTaxUSA, & anyone else who wants to get in on the game: We’ll pay you $10 for every valid Form 1040 w/adjusted gross income <$100k e-filed via you, provided you also allow the taxpayer to file a free state return” 2/ +

+— Daniel Hemel (@DanielJHemel) July 21, 2021 +
+
+

+Hemel notes that while this isn’t the same as having the IRS do things in-house, it’s also an improvement on the Free File model, in which tax preparers aren’t compensated at all for Free File returns and thus have tremendous incentive to upsell. “Under Free File, companies have literally nothing to lose if they try to upsell & then you quit,” Hemel writes. “Now, they’d be losing out on real revenue.” +

+

+In the long run, though, there’s no reason to compensate private firms on a per-return basis. What the government could do instead is build its own free-to-use software for tax filers. +

+

+Nina Olson, who served from 2001 to 2019 as the national taxpayer advocate, a position in the IRS advocating for taxpayers and for improved customer service, has been proposing this for years, and today argues for it as executive director of the non-government Center for Taxpayer Rights. +

+

+Here’s how it would work: The IRS would start by putting out a request for proposals (RFP) for a new system to be built by private software/IT firms. That RFP could lay out a replica of today’s system, with full-featured software for low-income people and Free File Fillable Forms for others. But it could also just make the full-featured software available to everyone — and should, in my opinion. +

+

+It could also create a simplified system for people who don’t owe taxes but are owed the earned income tax credit or child tax credit, to keep the IRS updated on how many children they have and what they’re earning so they can receive their full benefits. +

+

+As part of this process, the government would likely lean heavily on some in-house technical expertise. Groups like the US Digital Service, housed in the White House, and Technology Transformation Services, a division of the General Services Administration (GSA) that provides technical assistance to federal agencies are home to software engineers and project managers who can help with designing the RFP and the procurement process. +

+

+“What Intuit’s leaving has done is created the momentum. There’s a vacuum now. The IRS is going to have to take some action. It’s an opportunity for US Digital Services etc. to see if they can be of assistance,” Olson says. +

+

+A world without tax returns +

+

+The IRS could also go a step further from just free filing and experiment with pre-filled returns, an idea that has been floating around tax policy circles for decades. +

+

+The actual work of doing your taxes mostly involves rifling through various IRS forms you get in the mail. There are W-2s listing your wages, 1099s showing miscellaneous income like from one-off gigs, etc. The main advantage of TurboTax is that it can import these forms automatically and spare you this step. +

+

+But here’s the thing about the forms: The IRS gets them, too. When Vox Media sent me a W-2 telling me how much it paid me in 2020, it sent an identical one to the IRS. When my bank sent me a 1099 telling my wife and me how much interest we earned on our savings account in 2020, it also sent one to the IRS. If I’m not itemizing deductions (like 70 percent of taxpayers), the IRS has all the information it needs to calculate my taxes, send me a filled-out return, and let me either send it right back to the IRS if I’m comfortable with their version or else do my taxes by hand if I prefer. +

+
+A California ReadyReturn document Via Austan Goolsbee/Brookings Institution +
+A sample return from California’s ReadyReturn pilot, which briefly allowed for pre-filled returns to be mailed to most Californians, sparing them from filing themselves. +
+
+

+This isn’t a purely hypothetical proposal. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Chile, and Spain already offer ”pre-populated returns” to their citizens. California experimented with a version called ReadyReturn before it was shut down under pressure from H&R Block and Intuit. +

+

+Olson notes that an RFP from the IRS could demand that a free-file option enable pre-filled returns or, at the absolute least, automatically import forms that have been sent to the IRS associated with your or a family member’s Social Security number. +

+

+The steps needed from here are simple. +

+

+Congress needs to authorize more funding for the IRS. It also ideally would pass the Tax Filing Simplification Act, a proposal dating from 2017 and championed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that would order the IRS to put together a free-filing system and to offer pre-filled returns. The act could perhaps be included in Democrats’ forthcoming budget reconciliation bill. +

+

+The hardest steps toward simplification would involve fixing the tax code itself. In 2019, Olson in her capacity as national taxpayer advocate enlisted Book and other experts to propose changes to make tax code benefits easier to access. They proposed simplifying the earned income tax credit so it was paid out without reference to how many kids a worker has, which could make it easier to pay out over the course of a year rather than at tax time. In exchange, the child tax credit would be enhanced and made bigger, which President Biden has already made steps toward. +

+

+A reform like this could make tax filing totally unnecessary for most low-income people. Eliminating breaks like the mortgage interest and charitable deductions would make returns unnecessary for most middle- and upper-middle-class people too. +

+

+But those are heavy lifts. A huge first step would be to simply fund the IRS adequately, have it pay private tax preparers to process returns for now, and have it hire a software firm to build a real free-file system with pre-filled returns. That would eliminate the tax prep industry’s stranglehold on our tax system and make the entire process vastly easier for Americans, especially low-income Americans. +

+

+

+

From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From Ars Technica

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