What if we pushed government to be better, faster, clearer?

Every once in a while, an article in the New York Times or The Atlantic will worm its way into my head and lead me to investing 20 minutes reading one post on my iPad. Today was one of those occasions and it was a podcast transcript, of all things. 

It was Ezra Klein and his wife discussing her new book and her in-depth research on "the time tax" that government creates for all Americans... though hardly uniformly and definitely not fairly. 

Here is the thing that struck me as something I should have realized... but did not.

The IRS knows exactly how much I should be paying in taxes without me struggling through TurboTax each spring. After all, we take the standard deduction and have no mortgage (and I assume the IRS could know what that is from some bank form). 

The truth is that every bit of our income, other than a handful of very small payments for judging from various organizations, goes to the IRS electronically. Our investment income is all reported to the government right alongside the forms mailed to us. Our retirement income (social security plus PERA) comes from government and those totals are also automatically shared. 

In a way, the current system is based on the weird choice of making us take a test, so to speak, just to see if what we come up with is accurate. The IRS already knows.

If we foul up on the "test," trouble follows. Mostly fines and penalties.

Most modern governments just send out notices about what should be paid in taxes, with an opportunity to respond if there is a discrepancy or some special case. We could do this, as well, and many IRS professionals are quite clear that the service is quite capable of doing that.

As the podcast episode makes clear: the Republican Party is almost entirely responsible to the convoluted tax filing system we have. The goal is not mysterious. Republicans want us to hate the government and creating laborious paperwork is part of the plan. 

Ironically, many Republican voters are victims of the "you need to earn everything and pain comes with the experience." To their credit, many Americans have been taught to hate government so much that they are quite willing to vote against their own plain interests.

Shockingly, the U.S. tax system is chock full of all sorts of twists and turns that mostly serve tax preparation companies as well as -- who would ever guess -- really rich people. 

The podcast contained all sorts of other outrages and governmental clumsiness, created on purpose by both parties, BTW, but most of those affect my fellow citizens who are not doing so well. To be poor in America necessitates a certain amount of suffering... again, part of the plan.

In America, too many times the cruelty is the point.