It's not a stupid question at all. In practice the U.S. tax code is not quite as simple as "Here is the tax burden for your income level; tell us if you have a

It's not a stupid question at all. In practice the U.S. tax code is not quite as simple as "Here is the tax burden for your income level; tell us if you have any deductions." Right off the bat, you need to determine your "filing status" (single, married, head of household, and some less common options) from a list of five choices, each of which has different rules for all the calculations that follow. Furthermore, for a large portion of people making modest incomes, various tax credits, most notably the "Earned Income Tax Credit" but also education and child-related credits, cause enormous swings in their taxes, for example perhaps from $1,000 to -$3,000 (many people pay negative income taxes). None of these things can be determined by information the government has. So for many people any "provisional" return that the government is likely to create will be very inaccurate. Now, you suggest that maybe this would just be some sort of provisional return that could be adjusted to match your correct situation. That is a fine idea. But in order to make that convenient, the government would basically need to develop their own implementation of TurboTax. That has its own issues (is the government likely to do a good job? will they apply the laws in a biased way?) but even if they are resolved we are still talking about a vastly greater effort than "just give people a pre-filled return." So I would ask advocates for simplifying tax filing to either admit that they are demanding that the government author its own fully-featured tax preparation software, or explain how they will otherwise address the complexity of the U.S. tax code.