It shouldn't be this hard, or this costly, to pay taxes.
My TurboTax bill this year came to $278, and my time came to about nine hours collecting the data and preparing the return. It saved me oodles of more time than that, as well as the fear and the frustration, but still, it's a giant pain in the butt, and an annual expense which just seems to get larger every year.
Average American Spends 13 Hours and $290 to File Taxes
Meanwhile the income tax code is not proportional, which is to say it is not fair.
If the tax code were proportional, everyone would pay the same rate.
Instead it is progressive, which means you pay at higher rates the more you make, and some people pay nothing at all.
The rich are not equal to the poor . . . by law. And in between the rich and the poor are all those people who are arguably the least equal of all, because they don't ever get the privilege of paying nothing at all. Something close to one third of filers pay nothing, and they are mostly rich and poor, even though everyone who works does pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, which incidentally almost everyone pays equally because they pay at the same rate.
Shouldn't that be the case with income taxes, too?
Consider that grand total federal outlays in 2022 were $6.27 trillion, which includes the Social Security and Medicare programs in addition to all other federal spending, on defense, interest on the debt, etc.
That year gross national income came to $26.23 trillion.
The implied tax rate for almost everything is therefore 23.9%.
Collect that right off the top when you earn it or receive it and no one would need to go through the hassle of filing a return, and the budget would have balanced too. And individual income tax filers wouldn't have to spend $464 billion or whatever it is, using TurboTax or a CPA or some other tax preparer, or paper, pencil, and untold hours of time.
Instead we collected taxes in 2022 which were $1.37 trillion short of the $6.27 trillion in outlays, which we had to borrow and which got added to the national debt and increased the interest expense which we must cover out of current tax receipts.
Of course I would be upset if I had to pay 24% on all income as I earned it because I don't pay anywhere close to that. But that is the true cost of government, which is one reason why we don't pay that way. It's more prudent to hide the truth, and pit one group against another instead of treating people as we would wish to be treated. The rich are a small minority, which is why they can be bullied to pay more equally than others.
Another reason we don't pay the way I have described is because people would demand we spend a lot less if we did.
And we can't have that, now can we?
