When Trump's TaxScam meant that affluent people no longer had to use the paid version of Turbotax, Turbotax started charging poor people, disabled people, students and elderly people

In most countries, you don't have to pay an accountant to prepare your tax return: the government already knows how much you made, so every year they just send you a pre-filled in form to check over and sign.

In the USA, the highly concentrated tax-prep industry used its lobbying muscle to suppress the creation of a similar system, promising instead to offer free tax prep to millions of Americans through the IRS Free File system.

Then they lobbied to zero out the IRS's budget to advertise the existence of this program so no one knew about it. Then they deployed every dark UX pattern known to the internet to deceive people who were entitled to use Free File into using a paid tax-prep service instead.

But the hits keep on coming! Last year, Trump and the Republican legislature passed the #TaxScam, which gave away trillions to the richest people in America and did away with the need to itemize deductions for for mortgage interest and charitable donations if you're making more than $75k/year.

This presented a problem for Big Tax Prep. Services like Turbotax charged extra to complete the itemized deduction forms, pushing its most affluent customers out of the Free File and into its premium products. Now that these forms were no longer required for wealthy people, how could Turbotax and its ilk find customers for its premium product?

Simple: they moved the forms that students, poor people, elderly people and disabled people need to complete as part of their tax returns out of their Free File offerings. Read the rest