Tax Rant

I’ll refrain from posting my own tax rant (believe me, it’s better for both of us).  But Megan McArdle’s rant warrants posting, and is especially close to my heart because I, too, made a mid year move (and, as with McArdle, it was from New York, which has even more insanely complicated tax-filing procedures — as well as far higher taxes — than other states):

Every libertarian fiber in my body has been quivering with indignation for a solid twelve hours. Obviously, like everyone else I do not enjoy contemplating my cash outflow to Uncle Sam–I can think of a lot of uses for that cash. That, however, is the price of living in a free society. What bothers me is that it’s so bloody complicated.

I should not have, in the course of paying my debt to society, to spend nine hours answering questions about my educational habits, proclivity to recycle, the location of my potentially qualified small business, whether or not I happen to farm, or any of the 87 trillion other things TurboTax wanted to know. It might have been 87 zillion. Frankly, I lost count.

More than two hundred years ago, we fought a whole revolution and everything to get the government to leave us the hell alone. Now it thinks it’s entitled to know whether I am a qualified small business owning woman. Small business? Check. Woman? Check. Qualified? Who the hell do you think you are, Mr. Tax Man?

All this useless activity is so that our politicians can look like They Care by giving tiny tax breaks to all of their favorite people–that is to say, the people who vote for them and give them money. All of these tax breaks, almost without exception, do the most good for the people who least need them. Meanwhile, they waste time for the rest of us, distort the economy, and require us to pay extra people to process tax returns. It’s lose-lose-lose all around unless you owned a seal-fur farm between 1987 and 1991.

If only. I think I was watching Ninja Turtles reruns during that time frame.