Thoughts While Doing My Taxes

The following is a politically incorrect rant. The fact is, while doing my taxes I become a spiteful, angry individual. It takes me a full weekend locked in my office to finish my taxes. I'm not some uneducated moron, nor am I someone who just doesn't get tax-related issues. I have a MBA in finance, an undergraduate business degree, I have found good employment in the field of finance and accounting for the last fifteen years, and I'm assisted by an internet-based tax preparation package. I blame the special interest groups, who feel their rate should be lower than other people with similar incomes, and the politicians who cower to them.

Here's the most offensive, politically incorrect example I can think of to explain how special interest groups have complicate the tax code. If you don't like to be offended, please log off now. Ok, ready to hate me? Good. Here goes: Blind people get an unfair tax deduction.

I knew it. I knew that even if you stayed despite my warnings you would still be offended. Before you collect the villagers and the torches, please allow me to elaborate. You may say, being blind is terrible and I would not disagree. But should being blind allow one to pay less taxes than someone else who is deaf? How about a paraplegic? How about someone with AIDS or cancer? Don't get me wrong, I'm as compassionate as the next guy, but who's to say being blind is worse than my other examples. Yet my other examples don't get that break. They say tax incentives spur behavior. Let's hope that the $600 buck largesse isn't enough to inspire mass Oedipal blindings.

My absurd example aside, special interests really do control government policy. Ronald Reagan is a hero to me because he simplified the tax code in the late 1980's; rates were low and loopholes were few. When Reagan left office, George H. W. Bush had no problem complicating the tax code, raising tax rates on the rich and adding additional (higher) tax brackets. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were even worse. Clinton embraced "targeted tax cuts," code for giving money to people who behave in a Clinton approved manner (including having children out of wedlock). George W. Bush further complicated the code to do things that conservatives like, such as making money in the stock market and taking out student loans. Additionally, the Alternate Minimum Tax, which Reagan did not fix because it impacted only a few rich people, impacts far more taxpayers due to nearly two decades of inflation.

Silly me, I thought income taxes should be based on how much income one made.