Trego's Mountain Ear

I read that Americans pay an estimated 400 billion dollars to cover the cost of complying with the income tax.   With 330 odd million Americans, and a billion equalling a thousand million, that translates to something over a thousand dollars for every man, woman and child before any taxes are paid.

About 60 percent of American households paid income tax in 2022 – so it’s not out of line to SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess) that the average cost of compliance is in the neighborhood is closer to two thousand per head. 

For well over a half-century, I’ve been receiving W2 forms – which I then combined with the tax form to determine how much to pay the IRS.  Most of the time there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the standard deduction and the itemized deduction (when there was, like the year when I encountered cancer, there was an obvious reason for it). 

So a simple proposition would be that a computer in the IRS basement would be set up to add all of the W2 forms and all of the 199 forms, and arbitrarily fill out my 1040 for me and calculate my tax obligation.  It might even have a spare page to let me report why a standard deduction just didn’t apply this year.  Better accounting minds than mine could work out the form.

The thing is – if it costs my wife and I four thousand to get all the calculations in for compliance, and the difference between itemizing and taking the standard deduction doesn’t look anywhere close to $4,000 for the household, it could be a lot easier to file the income taxes – and both the state and the fed have that data.  The little bit of lumber and hay sales could go on that extra page, and the labor of paying taxes could be greatly reduced.