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by GFK_of_xmaspast 3880 days ago
"All US persons have to put up with at least this amount of calculation every year "

This is most certainly not the case. My taxes aren't that complicated (despite having to file in two states each of the last few years, and three states this coming year), and I was doing the 1040-EZ up through about 2009-ish.
2 comments
logfromblammo 3880 days ago
You can't know if your itemized deductions will exceed the standard deduction unless you itemize your deductions on a draft schedule A. There is a chance that you could have owed less tax if you used the regular 1040 form, rather than the 1040-EZ, if you had medical expenses, gave to charity, had a home mortgage, suffered a loss due to crime, paid tax in another jurisdiction, etc, etc, etc.

And if you use the 1040-EZ, there's also a good chance that you filled out some worksheet to see if you were eligible for the earned income credit, or some other speculative calculation that might reduce your tax, if and only if the number you get at the end of the calculation is nonzero. And in theory, everyone always has to check to see if the AMT is greater than their calculated 1040 tax.

One of the perennial excuses I hear for not replacing the bracketed tax tables and forms with a single polynomial function is that it would be too complicated. Clearly, that's a bullshit reason.

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GFK_of_xmaspast 3880 days ago
> You can't know if your itemized deductions will exceed the standard deduction

Yes I could, because I had a rough reckon of what my deductions would have been and knew I didn't have to bother.

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logfromblammo 3879 days ago
That required you to have prior knowledge of what you could have deducted. If you didn't have such knowledge, your ignorance might have caused you to pay a higher amount of tax than you otherwise needed to.

This is why automated tax software asks so many questions about potential deductions.

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GFK_of_xmaspast 3879 days ago
You fill out a form a couple years in a row you start to notice things?
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mirceal 3880 days ago
the point is that there is almost always a non-zero amount of work you have to do to file your taxes. Depending on your situation the amount of work can increase.

For a large chunk of people the IRS already knows what they're supposed to be paying. Those people are still put throughout the 'tax return' exercise.

I think the other commenters are right that for someone that's not familiar how taxes work in the US this seems overwhelming. I know I had a few people laugh/be amused when I was first attempting to figure out how it works and actually attempted going through the 1040 instructions. The reactions I got: blank stare + dude that's what turbotax is for...

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steve-howard 3880 days ago
And TurboTax spends a lot of money on lobbying [1] and advertising [2] to ensure that, first, it doesn't get any easier to file directly with the government, and second, that consumers think "TurboTax" when they think about tax software. The last sentence of your comment is exactly what Intuit wants to engineer.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-these-taxpr...

[2] http://adage.com/article/special-report-super-bowl/turbotax-... The ads themselves aren't important so much as the fact that they air during the Super Bowl, one of the most effective and expensive ways to make sure millions of people see your message.

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