3 ms·

Following tax forms is so braindead simple, I honestly can't see how anyone can be that incapable without being mentally deficient enough to be under conservato

Following tax forms is so braindead simple, I honestly can't see how anyone can be that incapable without being mentally deficient enough to be under conservatorship. It's literally step by step "Add this" or "subtract that". If you have a calculator and a 3rd grade level understanding of English, I can't see how you'd have a problem.

llukas 3y ago
We can have a problem with forms being on paper and not doing "add this" or "subtract that" automatically? It was available in other countries 10+ years AGO ;)
hedora 3y ago
The US tax code is 70,000 pages, and is revised an average of once per day: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-many-words-are-tax-code/ https://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-many-words-are-tax-code/ A typical federal tax filing for our household is over 100 pages long, and that’s just the stuff that we need to mail. The accompanying directions and worksheets are probably close to 1000 pages. Also, lots of the directions are incredibly obfuscated once you start getting into those 1000 pages. > If you do A and not B then you can do C. > Example calculation of C (usually over a page long): > Bob wants to do C but encountered corner case exceptions E and F in the absence of event G. That implies B, so here’s the arithmetic for doing D (which is covered elsewhere in this book, and is probably irrelevant to your situation). This is just standard stuff TurboTax handles. God help people with filings too complicated for that! (And, yes, I used to do taxes by hand.)
jcranmer 3y ago
> Following tax forms is so braindead simple One year, I had to spend a good deal of time working around a cycle in my taxes--VA wanted me to do my CA taxes first and CA wanted me to do my VA taxes first, and the instructions that explained how to handle this situation were only one on the one form that needed to be used to solve it, with nothing telling you maybe you should look for that form instead. Furthermore, there's quite a few cases where the instructions basically tell you "fill in the number that belongs here" without giving a good idea of what numbers actually belong there. Here is an example of such an instruction in its entirety: > Enter in line 5 the amount of pension, annuities, IRA/Keogh distributions not taxed on your Massachusetts Form 1. The hard part of taxes isn't knowing whether or not to add or subtract two lines. It's knowing which lines shouldn't be 0!
- anon291 3y ago
  > It's knowing which lines shouldn't be 0! Whether or not you do your taxes by hand, you should probably have a good idea of your income sources.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    It's not about knowing the income sources. It's about knowing how those income sources fit into the tax rules. Put differently, for the purposes of taxes, your money has a kaleidoscope of colors, with different colors incurring different tax rules, and most people are to a degree colorblind when it comes to their money's colors. Not completely colorblind, but trying to work out if your color is mauve or magenta, for example. The solution to this of course is to simplify the tax code so that you don't have so many colors to your money. I very much would love to see this happen, but it will produce howls of protests from every special interest group who benefits from special tax advantage to their interests.

llukas 3y ago

We can have a problem with forms being on paper and not doing "add this" or "subtract that" automatically? It was available in other countries 10+ years AGO ;)

hedora 3y ago

The US tax code is 70,000 pages, and is revised an average of once per day: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-many-words-are-tax-code/ https://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-many-words-are-tax-code/ A typical federal tax filing for our household is over 100 pages long, and that’s just the stuff that we need to mail. The accompanying directions and worksheets are probably close to 1000 pages. Also, lots of the directions are incredibly obfuscated once you start getting into those 1000 pages. > If you do A and not B then you can do C. > Example calculation of C (usually over a page long): > Bob wants to do C but encountered corner case exceptions E and F in the absence of event G. That implies B, so here’s the arithmetic for doing D (which is covered elsewhere in this book, and is probably irrelevant to your situation). This is just standard stuff TurboTax handles. God help people with filings too complicated for that! (And, yes, I used to do taxes by hand.)

jcranmer 3y ago

> Following tax forms is so braindead simple One year, I had to spend a good deal of time working around a cycle in my taxes--VA wanted me to do my CA taxes first and CA wanted me to do my VA taxes first, and the instructions that explained how to handle this situation were only one on the one form that needed to be used to solve it, with nothing telling you maybe you should look for that form instead. Furthermore, there's quite a few cases where the instructions basically tell you "fill in the number that belongs here" without giving a good idea of what numbers actually belong there. Here is an example of such an instruction in its entirety: > Enter in line 5 the amount of pension, annuities, IRA/Keogh distributions not taxed on your Massachusetts Form 1. The hard part of taxes isn't knowing whether or not to add or subtract two lines. It's knowing which lines shouldn't be 0!

anon291 3y ago
> It's knowing which lines shouldn't be 0! Whether or not you do your taxes by hand, you should probably have a good idea of your income sources.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  It's not about knowing the income sources. It's about knowing how those income sources fit into the tax rules. Put differently, for the purposes of taxes, your money has a kaleidoscope of colors, with different colors incurring different tax rules, and most people are to a degree colorblind when it comes to their money's colors. Not completely colorblind, but trying to work out if your color is mauve or magenta, for example. The solution to this of course is to simplify the tax code so that you don't have so many colors to your money. I very much would love to see this happen, but it will produce howls of protests from every special interest group who benefits from special tax advantage to their interests.