Finished them last night – between prepping for the NH GOP Annual Meeting and these despicable taxes, you now know why I’ve been AWOL here. TMEW schlepped them off to Post Office this morning. Done, mission accomplished, and fini. Really – fini! That’s it, I’m done. Really done.
Done doing them. No mas!
For years, I have done my own taxes. Did it before TMEW and I had our daycare center (just a wage earner), did it when we had the daycare center – afterward too. And still do. Rather simple: “regular” taxes with no dependents, a home office, and the ‘Grok (we do take in money, and we do spend money on stuff). But for the last few years, I’ve kept thinking “why am I doing this to myself”? It just seems that each year, it just gets harder with more pages to read to figure out how to fill in the same number of pages and the same number of forms. I have two scientific degrees – I may not be the brightest bulb in the box, but I’m not the dimmest one either. Yet, I kept finding myself asking “what the heck does THAT mean?”. In fact, I complained to some friends:
I did notice the “more cumbersome” – I have ALWAYS done our taxes, and the last few years the instruction manuals for the forms have kept getting longer and longer – this year, more pages and in a lot more places, far more technical.
I’m out of my league in doing this. Laws should be few, short, and easily understood by all for intent if not for obscure outlier conditions (we all know – do not kill except in self-defense IF needed). Taxes? The opposite
And I had started it off with this:
This is the last year I do my own taxes – After getting about 1/4 of the way of processing through the AMT sheet to see if I had to file that way, I swore that our Legislators ought to have to do this for 5 small biz people a year just to put them through the pain of trying to figure out “er, what does THIS mean???” And the way that the forms go “circular” (can’t finish this part until you do this other form, but that form almost needs you to finish the first form), I can understand why the IRS support folks can’t get it right either. PLEASE!
- Give us a straight consumption tax. Failing that:
- No more automatic deductions – every week, ya gotta send in a check for the Fed income tax and FICA
- Move election day to the day after Fed income tax is due.
As was pointed out on TV yesterday on one of the talking head shows, isn’t there something wrong with this crap when the 2 page 1040-EZ instruction manual is 88 pages long?
Do those two things, manual-send-in-money and move the election date – you’d see smaller government pretty darn quick! Then I saw this – and knew I was right:
Yeah, I had a reason to really start hating doing this. I told TMEW that we’ll find a pro to do this. Maybe it is me, but shouldn’t pay one’s fair share, actual share, be something that the ordinary person should be able to do without having to be a para-CPA or JD? What does it say about the regulators and our chuckleheaded politicians (who never do this for themselves) that have created such a system that it REQUIRES a professional?
I just hope I guessed right…
(H/T: Cato Institute, who also had this observation: “This year the instruction book for the 1040 is 189 pages long.”)
