On The Tax Man Cometh

Well, it’s that time of year again. Gather up your W2s, find all those 1099s, and shuffle through that one drawer that has a million receipts that you thought would come in handy but is actually just a physical manifestation of your anxiety and just looking in its direction freaks you out. I’ve written about taxes before…I’ll probably write about taxes again in the future. When you write a free-form weekly essay for three years, anything that gets your blood pumping is worth writing about. This year, though, I’m not writing about taxes themselves, I’m writing about how in the United States of America in the year 2024 we’re still getting shaken down by an unnecessary industry just to pay our goddamn taxes!

You’ve probably had this feeling before (I know I have): why do I have to do all this paperwork to pay my taxes, doesn’t the government already know how much I make and therefore how much I owe or am owed?

Great question, but first a bit of history: the idea of withholding a part of your wages for tax purposes was first introduced in the Revenue Act of 1913…and then was repealed by the Revenue Act of 1916. It was then reintroduced by the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 in an effort to help fund the war effort. Since then, the government has known exactly how much you’re being paid and therefore exactly how much you owe or are owed (unless you’re one of those people who own “stocks” or has “appreciating assets” in which case your taxes are probably complicated enough deal with an accountant…or you’re a freelancer in which case may God have mercy on your soul).

Now that we have that out of the way, have you ever wondered how citizens in other developed nations pay their taxes? It’s pretty simple, in countries like the Netherlands or Japan the government simply sends you a pre-populated document with your income and your bill or payment and you can either approve it or amend it. That takes about 15 minutes. In the richest country in the world, however, we have an 11 BILLION DOLLAR industry that stands in the way of that.

As so artfully stated in this wonderful video by the New York Times, what makes a free market a free market is the fact you can walk away at any point. You can walk away from buying a new iPhone…you can’t walk away from paying your taxes, so when companies like Intuit (TurboTax) charge you to prepare your taxes, you should get mad especially because there have been efforts by every president since George W. Bush (besides Trump…huh who would have thought that guy wouldn’t want to fund the IRS, HMMM I WONDER WHY) to create a digital portal for Americans to pay their taxes for FREE. So, what has happened to those efforts? Like most attempts at progress, they’ve been derailed by lobbyists, this time at the behest of the tax preparation industry.

This is a non-partisan issue. I don’t care where you fall on the political spectrum from the left-est of the left to the right-est of the right, we can all agree that paying our taxes should be easier and should be free! I’m already giving you my money, don’t make me navigate a Rubik’s Cube of forms and mathematical formulae, AND THEN pay you $50!

So, now that I’m done yelling. How do you do your taxes? File them yourself, use tax prep software, throw money in a mailbox, and hope for the best?