Derb: Once again, David Boaz has the goods, pointing us to this Washington Post article about someone who wants to mandate an increase in employer withholding levels:

One idea is to take advantage of people’s desire to get a refund at the end of the year.
“What some people do when they are doing their taxes is they do a first draft and see how much they are getting back,” said Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago economist who studies how people think about money. “If they owe money, then they do a second draft. They keep finding deductions until the refund is positive.”
Thaler said mandatorily increasing withholding levels so more people get refunds could increase compliance because taxpayers would no longer have to go to great lengths to get a refund.

So, employer-nannying, at the very least, is probably popular with the IRS since it increases compliance. That said, while I’m no fan of paying taxes, I’m also not much of a fan of dealing with them, and in that sense, employer withholding doesn’t bother me all that much. However, I tend to agree that people should total up and pay what they owe every year: I suspect that actually writing a hefty check to the federal government each April would do quite a bit to increase support for smaller government.