4 ms·

I am not able to find a citation for this, but I would be surprised if more than a small fraction of Americans had significant non-wage, non-financial instituti

• vonmoltke 9y ago
  That's just income. There is also the issue of deductions and credits, which covers many more people. The income portion of my taxes takes me about 5 minutes. Most of my time is spent on the deductions and credits portion.
  • obstinate 9y ago
    Seventy percent of households take the standard deduction or have no income: https://taxfoundation.org/who-itemizes-deductions/ https://taxfoundation.org/who-itemizes-deductions/
    • ams6110 9y ago
      For most people, taxes are not as complicated as they are made out to be. If you can file a 1040EZ you can fill out the form in 10 minutes. If you have a "normal" return with mortgage interest it's still not that difficult. Most people are just afraid of making mistakes (it's not a big deal if you do, you'll get a notice and you file an amended return). Or maybe they just feel their time is too valuable to spend an afternoon filling out forms. But most individual tax returns are really not that complicated.
      • marssaxman 9y ago
        Making sense out of the ambiguously-worded instructions has always been the complicated part for me. I have always found this to be infuriatingly stressful, so I hire professionals to deal with it.
        • ams6110 9y ago
          The trick is to not try to infer anything that is not there. The instructions are dumbed down to the point they actually are hard to understand. Just do literally what they say and don't think about whether it makes any sense.