Blaming "lobbyists" absolves the politicians of their responsibility. The fault lies with the politicians for creating and perpetuating this broken system.
Like anyone else, politicians respond to incentives. US crony capitalism is a large-scale systemic failure, and the tax filing system (and under-resourced IRS) is just one symptom.
If you want a narrow target, you can blame the GOP activists on the US Supreme Court, or if you want to go beyond that, blame the GOP senators/presidents who appointed them, the Federalist Society, the GOP donor base, GOP-aligned media organizations, etc.
Gutting campaign finance restrictions was a vast judicial overreach, performed for partisan advantage and the benefit of corrupt wealthy patrons.
I'd add one more in there for a tighter focus -- the lobby group "Americans for Tax Reform", which opposes all tax increases, and specifically opposes any effort from the federal or state governments to provide pre-filled tax returns.
The #1 most relevant goal for politicians is to get re-elected. (Personal enrichment is largely orthogonal.) Raising large campaign contributions is of obvious benefit to that effort, and is not directly a bribe per se. But it does have some of the same problems that bribery has.
It’s undoubtedly true that some US politicians have gotten bribes, defrauded partners or constituents, embezzled money from their campaigns or the government, used inside information to trade stocks, etc. But even if all of those were impossible, the nature of the US campaign finance system would create plenty of perverse incentives.
> Like anyone else, politicians respond to incentives.
Sure, but it's not like they don't have a choice. Regardless of any incentives, they're the only ones actually empowered to make these decisions. Lobbying, offers of bribes, campaign financing promises, etc. do not in any sense detract from their ability and responsibility to make the right choices.
Nearly everyone who takes any responsibility or even believes that there is such a thing as personal or professional ethics has been systematically purged from the GOP over the past few decades, and the GOP now has 6 votes on the Supreme Court and 50 Senators (=> effective veto of all legislation), and may well end up with congressional majorities after the next election.
You can’t un-screw a system by just telling the people inside who were selected for their mendacity and corruption to “make the right choices”.
> You can’t un-screw a system by just telling the people inside who were selected for their mendacity and corruption to “make the right choices”.
Of course not, but it's still the politicians (on both sides of the aisle) who are ultimately at fault for abusing their position and failing in their duty to their constituents, not the lobbyists for merely making suggestions or offering deals in their own self-interest. Restricting lobbying or campaign contributions wouldn't do anything to improve existing politicians' "mendacity and corruption". They'll just find other, less public, ways to serve themselves rather than their constituents.
In a democracy, it is the voters who are ultimately at fault.
But perhaps more to the point, it is the system that is at fault, and the system is very complex: institutions, physical infrastructure, social mores, common beliefs, canonical media and stories, traditions, language, ....
You can’t just point fingers at individual people in a large imperfect system and pretend that swapping them would fix it. Troubleshooting and improving large complex systems is really hard and improvements are usually incremental, except sometimes in extraordinary crises.
Intuit isn’t the problem. Politicians are. See Milton Friedman on this subject. A complicated tax code is used to reward and punish people. The tax code was complex long before Intuit came around.
That has nothing to do with the issue at hand. All tax codes are complicated, and you can always spend days minmaxing your taxes (or hire someone to do that for you).
But the US is unique in the developed world as making filing taxes hell even if you don’t try to minmax them, and that is primarily due to tax filing companies lobbying against the IRS doing what everybody else does (and secondarily due to the GOP very much wanting filing taxes to be as painful and error prone as possible, and for it to be as expensive as possible for the IRS).
But the US tax code is an order of magnitude larger than the Swedish one. Which probably means that it is several orders of magnitude more complex (however that might be defined).
Intuit lobbying hard to keep tax rules complex.