Joe Windish, tech editor at The Moderate Voice, posted today about a California program called “ReadyReturn,” which takes the information that banks and your employer already are required to send to the state and plugs it into a tax return for you, eliminating the most onerous part of filing.   It also has cost-saving benefits:

California does it, and it’s a real money saver. They say it costs $2.59 to process a paper return; 34 cents to process a “ReadyReturn.” Funny thing, though. The state only spends $10,000 to promote it.

The New York Times offers an explanation as to why the program is so under-touted:

“Publicity remains one of the most formidable obstacles,” said John Chiang, the state’s controller.

California has budgeted only $10,000 for getting word out. The meagerness of the funds allotted for the ReadyReturn program reflects the strength of its political opponents, Mr. Chiang said. The most vigorous opposition comes from companies that sell tax-preparation software, “principally, Intuit,” he added.

INTUIT, which publishes TurboTax, does not dispute this description.

“We’re a California company and actively participate in the political process,” said Julie Miller, a company spokeswoman. “Our position has consistently been that ReadyReturn duplicates what is already available.”

I, for one, would love to have a simpler tax filing process in place.  This is, unfortunately, a circumstance in which a market inefficiency is present – California is providing a service free of charge, but political opponents are doing everything they can to prevent consumers from accessing full and complete information.  Intuit would rather keep taxpayers ignorant in order to fleece them for another $35, rather than see the market for tax filing be truly free, thus leading to the demise of TurboTax and their other products.

This is a pretty clear example of a market inefficiency promoted by a dominant industry player…

As we’ve all learned, this Friday’s episode of the Tonight Show will be Conan O’Brien’s last. In honor of Conan’s last week on the Tonight Show and his unrealized dream of servicing what he called “the greatest TV franchise of all time” for more than a few months, I thought I’d select a couple of videos here that illuminate Conan’s genius.

Conan, I only hope that you’ll continue to patronize the intellectual, younger viewers who have been so loyal. It may not be as large of a group as the baby boomers who prefer Leno’s softball and blue-collar attitude, but you have managed to compromise yourself to a much smaller degree and still attained unimaginable success. I look forward to seeing you back on the air in September!

Conan’s Class Day speech at Harvard:

Also, here’s the intro to the very first Late Night with Conan O’brien in 1993.  Embedding was disabled, so youtube will open in a new window.

After spending a painful long weekend without internet access, I’m back in the nation’s capital.

The buzz in DC is all about the race for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts. No one really knows what the outcome will be this evening, but Ezra Klein and David Weigel took on the issue on bloggingheads today. Their conversation highlights the structural elements of our democracy that make this Senate seat so important (the security of the Democrats’ supermajority), and whether these rules are arcane and backwards:

The NYTimes’s editorial today spoke out against the free hand given to private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan:

…the government has not prosecuted a single successful case for killings by armed contractors overseas. An Iraqi lawsuit against American military contractors by Iraqi victims of torture at Abu Ghraib was dismissed by a federal appeals court that said the companies had immunity as government contractors.

Furious that the Nisour Square case was dismissed, the Iraqi government said it might file civil suits in the United States and Iraq against Xe. But its chances of success are not considered great. The families of many of the victims of the rampage accepted a settlement from Xe last week, worried that had they pursued their civil suit they might have gotten nothing.

There are many reasons to oppose the privatization of war. Reliance on contractors allows the government to work under the radar of public scrutiny. And freewheeling contractors can be at cross purposes with the armed forces. Blackwater’s undersupervised guards undermined the effort to win Iraqi support.

Amen to that.  It’s hard to rally support for this issue, as the government can claim some separation of responsibility.  If U.S. troops had perpetrated similar crimes, the military justice system would have dealt with them far more severely.  Though it goes largely unnoticed, many U.S. soldiers have been convicted of illegal killings in the Iraq war and are currently serving long sentences.  It’s unfortunate that these killings take place at all, but there ought to be some form of accountability in place.

As a nation of laws, we cannot continue to work within the margins of established international and domestic justice systems.  Guantanamo Bay was an attempt to find a way to lock people up without any possible legal repercussions, and immunity for Blackwater (Xe) is a way to wage war without worry of embarrassing legal convictions against Americans fighting in Iraq.   It’s clear that the losses from abandoning international law far outweigh any tactical gains in the fight against extremism.

I don’t always agree with Fareed Zakaria, but he’s spot on in his column in the Washington post today, Dont Panic.

Overreacting to terrorist attacks plays into al-Qaeda’s hands. It also provokes responses that are likely to be large-scale, expensive, ineffective and possibly counterproductive. More screening for every passenger makes no sense. When searching for needles in haystacks, adding hay doesn’t help. What’s needed is a larger, more robust watch list that is instantly available to all relevant government agencies. Almost 2 million people travel on planes in the United States every day. We need to isolate the tiny percentage of suspicious characters and search them, not cause needless fear in everyone else.

We often overreacted during The Cold War, and I’d like to furnish a Herblock cartoon that was drawn in 1949 and still resonates today:

Library of Congress Source: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/herblock/fire.html