#^%# Taxes!

Well, I finished working up my taxes, then I did what I always do these days - I took my finished work to my tax preparer anyway.

Why? Wel, in spite of some of my posts, I am not a complete idiot, and where the government is concerned I have learned - through painful experience - to take as few chances as possible. If the blinkin' tax code would stay the same from year to year, I could have confidence that I could learn how they want things. But the Congress of the United States lives - to some degree - to serve other interests than the needs and ideals of the common taxpayer, so every single year they change the rules.

EVERY.

SINGLE.

YEAR.

I have more than a sneaking suspicion, that there is not a single person who has been elected to the House or Senate, who has doen his or her own tax preparation in many years. If there were, they would long ago have noted that this ritual of self-disembowelment to satisfy the IRS that we are complyng with their draconian edicts. I'm not blaming the Internal Revenue Service, actually, but those narcissistic mandarins in D.C. who contend that the fairest tax system must be one where everyone is led to worry that they have made a mistake which will cost them, and to miss a few details which could let them get a few bucks back. So we are driven to either deliberately short-change ourselves in the hope of staying out of trouble, or else we pay someone to check our work and get a little bit more of our own money back, but for which we pay a fee.

Withholding from each and every paycheck is not enough, we have to do more paperwork to prove what is already known.

And I do not recall a single politician in the last half-decade, who seriously proposed a bill to change that racket.

Well, that's my rant for today, but I am strangely confident that someone else may share my sentiment.