Considering the meager amount of personal income I accumulate each year, a derisory sum that condemns my bank account to a form of financial manic-depression, I must conclude that my taxes are too high, too complicated to complete, and cost far too much to file even when employing the services of a virtual accountant on the Internet.
Declare this; deduct that; submit these; exempt those; claim them; complete worksheet 9a for schedule 21c and attach to form 1040a. Then enter your 1099-MISC, 1099-DIV, 1099-R, 1099-INT, 1099-H, and W-2's. What debased and unhinged mind has dreamt up all this nightmarish paperwork? The tales of Edgar Allen Poe are mere whimsy compared to the spine-chilling immersion in unimaginable horror authored by the Internal Revenue Service. I suppose there's a good reason why H.P. Lovecraft looks like an ersatz tax auditor. I am about halfway through my IRS return for 2018 and already quite willing to swap quests with Odysseus. I'd have no problem sailing my ship between Scylla and Charybdis but the Greek hero could never decide between itemizing or taking the standard deduction.
It's also that wearisome time of year when psychopaths start announcing they are running for President. Frankly speaking, I'd vote for absolutely anyone who pledged to simplify the American tax system, even if their only other blowhard policy was to incinerate Asia. At this point, I'm almost willing to exchange less Byzantine bookkeeping for one global disaster and its ensuing humanitarian crisis. As Orson Welles asks of Joseph Cotton in The Third Man when perched high above the ground and gesturing toward a crowd of Austrians below, "Would you care if one of those tiny dots stopped moving?" No, not if it only took five minutes to fill out a single tax form that processes my annual refund from Government, Inc.
Those are desperate measures to be sure. But these, as any rationalizing relativist will concur, are desperate times. Of course, I understand it's important to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. But it increasingly seems like greedy Caesar is furtively sticking his name on lots of my stuff that doesn't actually belong to him.
