The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You maybe remember Trump’s promise to simplify your taxes. Said he’d make em fit on a postcard. Well sir, he kept his promise, at least the part about fitting on a postcard. My 1040 really would fit on a postcard. At least page 1. Page 2 would fit on one too, maybe the back side. Course there was the Schedule C for my so-called bizness and don’t forget the Schedule SE for paying my own part of Social Security most folks’ employers pay. And Schedule B that showed interest on savings. Big whoop, that, considering that interest on a savings account or a CD is lower than inflation and inflation is pretty damn low. Then there was Schedule 1, additional income and adjustments where I got to deduct half of those self- employment taxes, and don’t forget Schedule E for supplemental income and losses.

Half of these would fit on a postcard, the others not really. All together they add up to a vacation that lasted a month with a postcard to everyone you know sent every few days. A lot of forms. A lot more than the good old days where most of that was on a 1040 somewhere but now is fairly obscure and way harder to find. Line 17 on form X goes to Line 54 on form E, then that gets moved after a subtraction or two to Line 22 on the 1040. It’s a little like picnicking in a woods that has 3 or 4 trails and poor signage. Although to be fair, you can go online and dig out the trail from a PDF. Again and again.

Now I know, being a small biznessman, one of those vertebrae in the backbone of the American economic engine, that my taxes are probably nearly as complex as Amazon’s. Even if I actually pay something and they do not. Fair is fair and I don’t want to come off as a Whiner. But … even though some of my taxes fit on a postcard they are not simpler. They got a lot more convoluted and complex. I ended up doing them twice because I screwed up a critical component early in the calculations and since I don’t have Turbo or Turgid Tax to redo the math, I spent half a day figuring out all those corollary tangents that octopused out into fiduciary hell.

What you figure out along the way, kind of like Dorothy on her way to Oz, is things aren’t as they seem. All those caveats and loopholes and deductions for this and depreciations for that, they’re in there for a very good reason and the reason is not simplification or transparency. They’re there for obfuscation. You’d have to be a forensic accountant to follow all these threads and when you got to the other side, surprise, surprise as Gomer used to say, shezam, the rich get richer. Is that simple enough for ya….?

Hits: 165