Taxes, Schmaxes

An Open Letter To the President, Vice President, Congress, And Anybody Else Who Won’t Listen

Hey, you folks. Congress. Prez. Veep. Remember us? We’re the ones who pay your salaries. (Not your campaign contributions – those are the 500-foot-yacht people (5FYPs). More on them later.)

We’re the regular people.  The ones you routinely fly over, even though you say you don’t, no matter what state we live in. And boy, am I in a state.

I’ve just finished doing what regular, non-5FYPs do this time of year, namely, navigate the fifty thousand or so pages of the United States tax code to figure out which of those pages actually apply to little old me.

For this of course, I (like so many others who proudly refrain from throwing up their hands and pitching the whole mess over the transom to the nearest CPA) – I say I, a proud and independent American, throw myself on the mercy of the heavily concentrated industry known as Tax Help Software.

I love jokes. Like the name, Tax Help Software. Oh, sure, after I get asked more questions than a mafia gangster being anally probed by the FBI, this stuff will spit out a bunch of numbers and forms and claim (as if I could ever verify) that it’s getting me “the best possible refund.” And then proceed (for a fee, ALWAYS a fee – more on that, too), proceed to send the feeble story of my life (income, investments, exceptions, more income, the quarter I found on the street, the dollar I gave to the panhandler, whatever) – this story that NOBODY really cares about, to you, oh great Federal Unblinking Eye of Collection (or FUEC). And I wonder, after doing all this, if I’ve really been safeguarded from perjury, criminal behavior, or whatever is worse than that; or if, like so many Americans, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been FUECed.

FUECed. By my own stupid decision to Go It Alone, to use Tax Help Software, to embroil myself once again in this annual process of being stuck like a fly in the amber of our taxation system.

This isn’t even a rant about high taxes. That’s too easy. No, this is a rant about the hidden tax that we all have to pay. The tax of spending dozens, nay perhaps hundreds, of hours wrangling our way through receipts, medical bills, W this and W that forms, 1099 (who in the HELL gave it that number, anyway) R, INT, DIV, OIP, OINK OINK OINK forms, Form This Number That Number, 1099, 4868, HIKE! We amass collections of little bits of paper, digital exhaust of all kinds, notices that come in the mail labeled IMPORTANT TAX INFORMATION (so that we’ll pay attention to these, instead of the ones that (I kid you not) come to us ON PAPER to advise us that we can look up our account information ONLINE to SAVE PAPER).

Puh-Leez.

I am not a paragon of organization. Still, I’m probably better than a lot of folks. But sometimes I think the consumer economy works something like this:  I buy shoes I DON’T need so I can get my hands on a shoebox I DO need in order to save receipts I have to retain longer than my mother’s old furniture, so that these receipts can be presented as evidence, in the event that some overworked and underpaid IRS schlep has the misfortune of auditing my money life.

Is that the circular economy people are raving about? Seems like it to me.

Back to that other economic miracle, the Tax Help Software. What is it with this stuff, anyway? As soon as I install it and run it for the first time, it goes about updating itself. Every dang time. WHAT is going on? Is the tax code changing on a daily basis? Are they shoveling software “improvements” my way? I’ll never know, lost as I am in “blue bar land,” waiting for the program to start.

Using the program is SO much fun. Who are you? How old are you? Where do you live? What weird health conditions do you have?

And then income. Tell us where you make your money. No, really. And don’t hide it – we even want you to report embezzlement income. I think I had interest income based on the toothpaste residue drying on my toothbrush. I didn’t know I was making money off my hair, the color of my eyes, the flowers I planted, what I had for dinner the last three hundred days. Honestly, it feels like that.

And then deductions. And STOP walking me through these weird things like, “Did you have to spend money harboring space aliens in your back yard?” Followed by that marvelous parenthetical phrase, “This is not common.” No $#!t, Sherlock, it’s not common. Who put THAT in the fifty thousand pages of tax code?

And then fees and upgrades. Seriously. Make more than 5 bucks last year? Sorry, no “free tax software” for you. Want a question answered? That’ll cost you. What, you have a middle initial? Upgrade. You bought a book on Amazon? Upgrade. Your spouse just walked in and asked what is making you turn purple and sending your blood pressure through the roof? Upgrade.

You go from Standard to Deluxe to Awesome to Astronomical in the blink of an eye and the push of a button. And the only thing Astronomical about the Final Solution upgrade is its price.

Oh, and you have STATE taxes? Well, well, well. We’ll give you one for “free” (i.e., bundled in your Astronomical price), but if you want to “E”file (and who doesn’t), well, those electrons and that repeatable process is going to cost you.

Mind you, I (and you ordinary NON-Congressional person, if you’ve read this far) have gone through this process every doggoned year. Every year. Is it the same? Never. There is always a gotcha.

This year, my “Tax Help Software” let me get all the way to the e-file step before deciding to throw me into an infinite loop that wouldn’t let me file.

After tossing a few hours of my life in the direction of the Tax Help Help Desk (and no, it doesn’t fix things to put two “Helps” together, just like two wrongs don’t make a right) – that THHD person (who was nice, but helpless in every sense of the word, so no bashing on her) suggested that I would need to do a paper filing.

Which is hardly the point of why I bought the software in the first place. Warranty of Merchantability, anybody? (But I suppose I gave away that right when I accepted the “War and Peace”-sized EULA.)

And then they closed the ticket. After all, we measure help NOT by whether someone is actually HELPED, but how many tickets are closed.

Which brings me back to Congress, the Prez, and all the rest. How about giving us poor ordinary folks a break? I mean, you already insist that we pay at least ninety percent of our taxes as we go, or else we get penalized. But on top of that, I figure that if several million of us are spending several hundred hours each, navigating this morass of moneyed muck, that’s a heck of a big hidden tax right there. We could be doing a lot better things with our time, believe me.

Why not do us a favor and just set a doggone rate (or two or three) and be done with it? Five percent for poor folks, twenty percent for most of us, thirty percent or so for the big fat weenies at the top. Put all those CPAs and Tax Helpers and Tax Code Software Developers to work fixing the damn roads or working on climate change or something. That would be much more useful than endless interpretations of somebody’s latest brainchild attached to some omnibus bill or other that adds yet another form, another instruction booklet, and another place where the software can go wrong, into an already ridiculously bloated mess.

Put the tax code on a diet, for crying out loud. And while you’re at it, with simplified rates, do away with billionaires parking oodles of cash overseas to avoid taxes, and stock buybacks that let the big four tech companies rake back 870 billion dollars from the market (1) and award themselves and rich shareholders with earnings taxed at a different rate. Collect some “fair share” amounts from the 5FYPs, for a change – maybe they’d have to settle to be 3FYPs (oh, the horror! the horror!).

I don’t mind paying. I really don’t. (Though transparency is another issue, and I’m out of space and time – gotta get back on a call with the THHD, to continue the futility.)

Just make it simple. I’m getting old. I’m tired of being FUECed.

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(1) This is true, by the way: Apple - $417B, Alphabet - $207B, Microsoft - $126B, Meta - $121B; see https://www.britannica.com/money/stock-buyback-explained