The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Will Rogers, Illiterate Digest (1924), “Helping the Girls with their Income Taxes”
Tax season should start out with the sound of a starters pistol and the cry “Ready, set, prevaricate!”
The tax code is so mindnumbingly complex that over 60% of us willingly pay people to fill out the forms for us. Economic behaviorists say this ‘diffuses’ the responsibility we might feel to tell the truth about that donation of 12 boxes of condoms to Goodwill.
Simplify the tax code and we could fill out a single sheet form online and send it off with a click and the single finger salute.
There was an attempt at tax code simplification back in 1986, but we’ve got over 100 years of codes and revisions, all written in very small print, in language that any English teacher would be horrified at.
According to Nina Olsen, the National Taxpayer Advocate, U.S. taxpayers and businesses spend about 7.6 billion hours a year complying with the filing requirements of the Internal Revenue Code. Furthermore, if tax code compliance were an industry, it would be the nations’ largest.
You’d surely think there would be better uses for our time, like watching Billy Mays infomercials or cleaning tile grout.
Ms. Olsen goes on the say that “Since the beginning of 2001, there have been more than 3,250 changes to the tax code — an average of more than one a day — including more than 500 changes last year alone.” It’s no wonder we’ll pay anything to avoid facing the beast.
Even trying to play by the rules can get you into trouble: either you overpay, since you can’t understand the stuff, or you accidently underpay because…. which shoebox was that receipt in? This amounts to damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. One change suggested by experts is that courts start with looking more into the intent - or lack of it - in the infraction and less at the transposed numbers and goofed up forms.
Tax code is a perverse world of rules telling you how much tax to pay and then follows it up with hundreds, if not thousands of rules that resulted from court cases where the IRS prevailed and caught a cheater. One cheater equals one new rule. Thousands of tax cheats equal … well, you get the idea.
Like your garage, once something goes in, it never, ever comes back out.
To make the tax code even more complex is the fact that at least half of the items in sections 101-140 (items specifically excluded from gross income) are there for a particular special interest - namely corporations represented by a highly paid lobbying firms. For example, what about, “exclusion of gain from the sale of principal residence?” Could the National Association of Realtors have a stake in that one? Hmmmm. The list of industries at the trough is endless. You name it and they’re there.
Trying to take on any one of these would result in the fist fight to end all fist fights, and nobody in Congress wants to start it.
Like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, I believe paying taxes is the price paid for living in a civilized society. Unlike the tea-party anti-tax types, I don’t think you can run a country on donations, faith based initiatives or the energy produced by flag waving.
It seems like we should be able to pare down the estimated 3.7 million words currently comprising our tax code, make it a percentage of gross income, cut lobbyists out of the loop, and give our elected representatives the chance to do the right thing rather than the thing that will get them re-elected. But that might involve campaign finance reform.
For better or worse, my taxes are finished and filed. I’m headed for a nice cold martini now.
maven
Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 16:42 