[logfromblammo]

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.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

> 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.

[logfromblammo]

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.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

You fill out a form a couple years in a row you start to notice things?