Tax Day

Today is April 15. Anyone who's ever worked for a living knows the significance of this date each year. Tom Herman of the Wall Street Journal, who retires today after 16 years as a tax writer, has a funny column in today's paper, citing the quirks of our tax code.

Some 40 years ago, frustrated with the difficulty of filling out his own tax return, he wrote a tax story in which he asked five different tax preparers to prepare a return for a hypothetical family. If you've ever tried to fill out a 1040 you can guess the rest. If you can't, check out the Mr. Herman's column today.

Don't be too hard on the tax preparers. At 70,000 pages the Tax Code is too complicated for professionals, let along average working people. How complicated? This complicated:

• There are 16 different retirement savings incentives in the IRS code. Each has its own eligibility requirements, contribution limits, withdrawals, loans, and taxation of contributions and distributions rules.


• There are more than 100 "temporary" tax provisions, ensuring that if you've figured it out this year, you'll mess up next year.


• The Tax Code recognizes 11 different tax exemptions for saving and paying for education, but each defines what qualifies as tuition and fees differently.

No wonder that more than half of all American taxpayers raise the white flag and trundle down to H & R Block or some other professional tax preparer, according to Mediamark Research & Intelligence.

In a research brief, the Center for Media Research reported yesterday that the remaining 50% of taxpayers meet their tax obligations in a variety of ways:

• Less that 20% of adults use commercially available tax preparation software to figure out their taxes


• Wealthier households (Incomes of $100,000 or more) are 15% less likely to sharpen their pencils and do their taxes by hand than less-wealthy households


• Those wealthier households that do their own taxes are 26% more likely to use Turbo Tax or a similar product to do their taxes, rather than relying on a professional tax preparer (I guess that's how they got wealthy in the first place--saving those tax prep fees each year)


• Only 13% of adult tax filers do it the old-fashioned way: by themselves and by hand.

I think there is something wrong when you need to buy software or hire someone to help you meet a basic civic obligation. We don't hire people to teach us how to vote. Who buys software to show them how to recycle their cans and plastic bottles? And we don't look at people who pay their bills by hand, writing checks, as some sort of antediluvian throwbacks, do we?

So why should paying taxes be any different?

Democrats claim they were elected to clean up the mess that 20 years of Republican rule over the last three decades has supposedly caused. Well, here is one place they can start. If they want to show they're really friends of the "forgotten man," simplify the tax code. Institute a flat tax. Of, if you don't have the moxie to do that, at least bring it down to to two brackets and eliminate most of the deductions.

Look at it this way: If the tax code were simpler, maybe Democrat politicians like Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle, Charlie Rangel, Kathleen Sebelius, Hilda Solis, and Nancy Killefer might have been able to do what the average American is doing today--paying his damn taxes on time.

With a flat tax, maybe next term Pres. Obama might actually fill some Cabinet positions on the first try.

Just thought you might like to know.