Taxing Matters

The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.
---Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683)

Our previous year’s Federal return was thick and heavy enough to require a lot of extra postage, and 2006 doesn’t promise to be any improvement. [I’m a wary taxpayer who resists e-filing; the less personal information converted to electronic form the better.] The financial complexity of modern life is harder to stem than CO2 emissions, and the Internal Revenue code is there, watching over our shoulders and promulgating indecipherable rules for every product and activity that ingenious human beings devise.

Whether we’re talking about how we make money---salaries, pensions, interest, dividends, real estate etc. etc.---or how we spend it---medical bills, mortgages, tuition, charities, cars, retirement savings, etc. etc.---there are specific steps that the tax code says we have to follow to account for each transaction properly. And woe betide anyone who slips up; it is a maxim—undoubtedly originated by lawyers and judges—that ignorance of the law is no excuse. That the law isn’t written in comprehensible English is no excuse either.

But it’s futile to get upset at what the government makes us do every April 15th. The nearly-100-year-old income tax is constitutional, says the highest court in the land, and as denizens of the 21st century we have to accept it as we do with airport security, smog checkups, and e-mail spam.

Someday there will be a technological solution to our filing and compiling woes, a Taxtube or Tax.tv implant that will figure out the tax implications of everything we do in real time and have a report ready on January 1st. Until then all we can do is hiss. [Follow-on comment: as usual, the military has a colorful term for describing philosophical acceptance of an inescapable condition.] © 2007 Stephen Yuen