Before we moved, Karen used to spend an inordinate amount of time in the fall raking leaves.
We had a big yard. We had several 100-year-old oaks. She did a little every afternoon. I helped a little on weekends.
She complained about it, but if she hadn't wanted to do it, we would have hired a neighborhood kid. That's what everyone else did.
I do our taxes for the same reason. Every grownup ought to be able to drive a stick shift, change a tire, and do their taxes. Since Karen admits that she cannot change a tire--in the event she could not raise me, her strategy, she says, would be to "stand by the road and cry," I can claim the full adultness merit badge for our household.
This year I'm not concerned about going to prison. If I made any mistakes, they were honest ones and probably in the government's favor. I'm conservative about deductions; we have two legitimate home offices but I only claim one. Almost all my spending could be considered work-related by some lights, but I didn't try to write off the "special edition super deluxe" box set version of the Beatles' "Revolver" I wrote about last year. I don't amortize the depreciation of my guitars. I don't save liquor store chits for the government.
Peace of mind is more important than saving a few hundred dollars. Plus, since the Trump administration "simplified" the tax code a few years ago, we're usually better off taking the standard deduction anyway. To give credit where credit is due, it used to take me a full working week--between 40 and 50 hours--to do our taxes. Last year, it took 17 hours. It took a little longer this year, but some of that was me frantically searching for documents that didn't exist.
(On the other hand, if companies like TurboTax and H & R Block didn't lobby to keep the tax code byzantine and gnostic, we could have a European-style system where the government would just send you a refund check--or bill--every year.)
We still can't file on a postcard, but there were years when our printed tax returns ran a couple of hundred pages, about four inches thick. And there were years I filled them out longhand, with a pencil and a pocket calculator. For the last dozen years or so I've been using one of the brand-name software programs; I can get by with the level that costs around $250. I like it because when I get to the end it runs a little program that estimates my risk of being audited.
For the past few years, we've been at really low risk. But from around 2008 to 2016, we were consistently in the red zone, with what the algorithm decided was a medium-high risk of being audited. Maybe if you itemize, like we did then, you increase your chance of being scrutinized. Maybe that makes sense from the government's point of view--it is looking to maximize tax revenue--but it also would seem to deter people (especially nervous people) from claiming all they're entitled to. It's not fair, but then few things about our tax code are.
While it's somewhat easier to do our taxes (I still work out what our bill would be if we did itemize, because even though the standard deduction has been better the past couple of years things might change) we certainly aren't paying less than we used to. Every year about this time, the U.S. government takes a big electronic bite out of our joint checking account. Then the slow-paying state (were Arkansas a client, she'd have already received a couple of polite dunning letters and there would be one mentioning debt collection on deck) offsets that a little bit with a check.
I don't get this tax refund stuff people are always talking about on TV. Unlike a lot of high-rolling captains of industry and corporate entities, we haven't had a federal tax refund in 30 years.
I'm not complaining about this; it's by design. Karen and I aren't one-percenters, but we get a lot of income in dribs and drabs, and most of the people who send us the dribby-drabby stuff (for which we are grateful) don't withhold taxes because they figure we're grownups and that it's not their problem.
And I would rather draw some meager interest on the money rather than have the government hold it for a year and give it back to us like it's a present. (I'm not in the business of floating loans, especially not to some profligate uncle who'd rather put the touch on me than his super-wealthy buddies.)
On the other hand, that meager interest is taxable, so the government is going to get its taste anyway.
I understand what taxes are and why they're necessary, and don't feel persecuted by having to pay them. Still, I do wish everybody paid their fair share and it's embarrassingly obvious that they don't. Our tax code favors the people who pay the people who write it, not the workaday schlubs who shake their heads when they see what's been withheld from their paychecks.
But one of the best tricks the devil ever pulled off was convincing Americans that they were all potential millionaires, just a lucky strike or a dead aunt away from enjoying their own fortunes.
It's like Steinbeck said: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
I have a lot of qualms with socialism, but most have to do with execution and aesthetics rather than the idea that society has a duty to its least fortunate members. But it's dangerous for a society to promote the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few while the standard of living of ordinary folks drops.
Though the tax code is written to favor the masters of the universe at the very top of the food chain and there are lots of loopholes that ought to be closed, I'm not sure that if somehow total fairness were imposed, Karen and I would be paying less in taxes. For us, America is still a good bargain.
And so long as no one is handing out pitchforks, it's always easier to kick the issue of income inequality down the road. And before long everyone will be too busy dealing with angry weather, floods, droughts and pestilence to worry much about money.
I just hope I'm in a position to do my own taxes next year.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com