Very little time to blog this weekend. I allocated some time to blog this afternoon, but I spent it filing our taxes instead. It was long and frustrating, but I got it done. We owe a little less than we were thinking too, which is a could-be-good-or-bad thing. On the one hand, paying less money is good; on the other, it makes me wonder if I messed up somehow. Oh well. Whatever. I entered everything as honestly and accurately as possible. Nothing I can do other than that.
It's all such a racket. I'm obviously not the first person to complain about our Byzantine tax code, but it's like -- to what end? To what end is all this 1099-INT, Box B, Line 3 stuff? Do we need it as a society? I understand there are benefits to giving people tax breaks on certain things. It's an easy way to incentivize things we like. But if we just trashed it all and said, it's x% across the board, or something close to it, would we be any worse off? Remember Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan? If we did something like that, only with a higher value, wouldn't that be better? I think it would. It would be easier and less expensive to calculate, much less stressful on everybody, and harder to cheat -- no loopholes, no deductions, just x.
Actually, come to think of it, I'd change the percentage based on how much you make. So, I'd keep the tax brackets but still make it an easy percentage. Something like, your first $25,000 is not taxed, $25K-$50K is taxed at 15%, $50K-$75 at 20%, so on and so forth, until you get into the multimillions and then everything is taxed at like 75%. (I'm a soak the rich proponent.) Something Paul Ryan (remember him?) used to advocate for were tax laws that allow your to file your taxes on a 3 x 5 note card. I'm totally down with that. But I suspect we would have different opinions about the magnitude of the numbers that would be on the card.
Anyway, Tax Day got extended this year to May 17, so we still have a month to go, but S got really antsy about it. Usually she does the taxes, but this year it was a calamity of errors. She bought TurboTax on her personal computer because her work computer (her preferred computer) has all this firewall protection software on it. But her personal computer has an outdated operating system and can't run this year's version of TurboTax. So then she bought the new OS... and realized she doesn't have enough space on her computer to install it. [Sad trombone sound.]
And that's how I got tasked with it. I haven't seen S that annoyed with anything in a long time, and so I figured for the sake of matrimonial harmony I should take care of it sooner rather later. That's how today ended up as tax day, and that's why I have to go now.
Until next time...
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