Moné

The IRS already has every number it needs to file your taxes for you. It has your W-2. It has your 1099s. It has your bank interest. It has your mortgage interest. It has everything. In most developed countries, the government fills out your tax return and sends it to you for review. You confirm or adjust. It takes minutes. It costs nothing. In the United States, you are required to calculate numbers the government already knows, report them back to the government on forms the government designed, using software sold to you by private companies that spent decades lobbying to keep it this way. Intuit, the company that makes TurboTax, spent $3.72 million on federal lobbying in 2024, a record for the company. In the first quarter of 2025, they spent another $1.2 million, their largest quarterly spend ever. They also donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration. Their target: killing the IRS Direct File program, a free tool that launched in 2024 and allowed millions of Americans in 25 states to file directly with the IRS at zero cost. It worked. The program is being shut down. For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged what ProPublica described as a "sophisticated, sometimes covert war" to prevent the government from making tax filing free. Internal company presentations used the term "encroachment" to describe any government initiative that would make filing easier. The IRS once agreed not to develop its own filing system as long as private companies offered a free option for simple returns. Intuit then hid its free filing page from search engines using HTML code that blocked Google from indexing it. The FTC sued Intuit for this practice. Intuit settled with 50 state attorneys general for $141 million after being found to have steered eligible taxpayers away from free options and into paid products. A simulated filing by Senator Warren's office found that a taxpayer who qualified for free filing would end up paying $128 through TurboTax after being upsold multiple times during the process. The same filing through Direct File: $0. Americans spend approximately $35 billion per year on tax preparation services. Intuit alone generates over $16 billion in annual revenue, with its consumer tax division representing the largest segment. Intuit (INTU) trades at roughly 35x forward earnings with 80%+ gross margins on its consumer tax products. Revenue has grown at approximately 13% annually. The tax prep business is a recurring annual obligation that every American adult must fulfill. The addressable market doesn't shrink. Complexity in the tax code creates demand. Lobbying against simplification protects the moat. The stock has compounded at approximately 20% annually over the past decade. I'm not recommending Intuit as an investment. I'm pointing out that the system you find frustrating every April exists because it's extraordinarily profitable for the companies that maintain it. And they've been paying to keep it that way for twenty years. I'm hosting a once in a lifetime webinar where I go over the exact things I know as a former banker and world class investor. It's 100% free to join, sign up with the link in my bio.

Mayoral Obama I fear. He might be ruled out of Presidency but with no term limits on Governor he might run New York for the rest of his life lmao.

No one talks about this side of living in New York… 🫣

John Bunn, wrongfully jailed at 14 in the 1991 murder of a correction officer, weeps as he’s exonerated

I planned to work heads down today but my coworker Teams’d me the trade news and I literally cannot focus on anything else