Promises, Promises

The promise made to us was that we Americans would be able to file our taxes on a form the size of a postcard.  Well.  It’s no surprise that this was a lie.

What a joke the new form is. It’s as if the purveyors of this tax scam took all the lines of the previous tax form, threw them up in the air and let them fall haphazardly on their dirty trickle-down floor.  Then they swept the lines into random piles, and pasted some of them onto six or seven new itty-bitty half-pages of forms.  They made sure to leave out the lines for your exemptions. The 1040 has turned into a monstrous pile of numbered “Schedules”. 

I knew the old 1040 form better than the back of my AGI.  For simpler returns than mine, we already had the 1040A and the 1040EZ.  Why go mucking it up by destroying the old mainstay 1040?   Just so you could say you shrank it to a postcard?  5” x 8” - that’s a mighty big postcard, Paul Ryan.

Last year our return had 5 forms; this year we have 9 forms.  Instead of my self-employment income getting its own line (copied once from Schedule C) it is like an afterthought, jammed into a little space where you can easily forget to add it in.  My self-employment income is downright insulted.  Maybe to make up for that, they made me copy that number to three different places.

This reveals the High Muckety-Mucks’ assumption: they assume the average mortal is not able to do her own tax return and turns it over to a software program or a paid tax preparer.  Well, I do it myself and it used to make sense to me.  This year it was needlessly complicated.  I generally don’t object to paying taxes, but I do object to having to jump through hoops to file and pay.

Welcome to this Brave New World.