I'm not sure where, in this thread, I have asserted any positive allegiance on your end. It's possible that I've done that elsewhere, I suppose, but I'm afraid I don't recall where.

I think the austerity is happening, whether anyone wants to admit it or not. Note the smaller portions at restaurants.

This is slashdot. Nobody is ever required to do anything at all here.

I'm just kind of chuckling here at "I am simply pointing to the sign that says 'bridge out'" followed by "crowd who believe they have no alternative".

At a sufficiently high level of abstraction, you're akin to Sri Mick Jagger, belting out "I can't get no satisfaction". Shall we read your double negative literally, and deem you satisfied, or take the spirit of the lyric, and deem you still seeking the satisfaction? This many decades on, did the seeking, itself, become a destination, affording some meta-satisfaction?
Trying to serve it humorously, sir, but I find you a crapflooder, albeit less tedious than ram_degistrars.

These arguments are not "reasonable". I can't find an "reason" based arguments to venture beyond heterosexuality. Political arguments are not infrequently based upon stoking envy along sexual, racial, historical, and material lines.
Politicians demagogue, and low-information voters vacuum it up.

I don't dispute that this is an issue, but if we think in terms of seller/marketplace/buyer, I want to know what we're doing to ensure adequate numbers of sellers. That is, WTF competition?

First: No, I don't think political parties should be protected by the First Amendment if they are organized as limited-liability corporations (C-corps, S-corps, LLCs, etc. -- unencorporated partnerships, on the other hand, are just fine).

Second: Political parties are, in general, a cancer and government recognition of them should be abolished. Closed primaries, faction-based voting and Gerrymandering are all violations of democratic principles caused by the existence of political parties, and the extremism & gridlock in Congress is an excellent example of the harm that results.

Third: Nothing I've said would in any way whatsoever harm like-minded people's ability to get together and advocate some political ideology. Said group neither needs nor deserves special recognition under the law that is not afforded to individuals, however!

No, I'm big on that too. It's just that "peaceably assembl[ing]" and "combining assets while being shielded from public scrutiny and any liability" are not (or at least, should not be) the same thing.

Should groups of humans be able to exercise free speech rights?

No. If several humans happen to want to say the same thing, they can each say it separately.

Now, missing a deduction or forgetting to include income is a completely different thing. However, you should print out your 1040 at the end anyway and check through it for just those kind of issues.

Exactly - and there's no real way to understand which deductions you might be eligible for without going through the instructions yourself. Otherwise you get to (for example) Line 50 and say "retirement savings credit? what's that?" and then have to go read the instructions anyway.

Not to mention H&R Block made me pick between married/joint or married/separate at the beginning of the process, whereas when I did the calculations with a spreadsheet I could just change that input and see my tax calculated both ways (because either could be better depending on circumstances). H&R Block was able to figure out whether I should take the standard deduction or not; it should have been able to do the same for filing status.

My effective tax rate was about 1%. It would have been more like 10%, but the Saver's Credit canceled out my entire liability except for the Self-Employment tax. But the best part is that means I got some Roth IRA contributions in that are completely tax-free instead of having only tax-free gains.

If I'm really lucky -- if all my (and my wife's) income is W-2 and and I'm able to keep the AGI low enough through retirement contributions -- then I might get to 0% in 2014!

I had a (full) 1040, Schedule C-EZ, Schedule SE, Form 8880, and a Schedule A (that I ended up not using because the standard deduction ended up higher) and it wasn't that big a deal to do the calculations by spreadsheet. Granted, I'm not running a business that has employees or inventory and I don't have rental property (yet), but as long as I have experience doing my simpler taxes in previous years I see no reason why I can't learn to do the more complicated ones as the issues arise.

I don't trust tax software, so I did all my calculations using the 1040 instructions and a spreadsheet. Then I put the info back into H&R Block Online (so that I could e-file federal and state for free) and checked the PDF output against my calculations before submitting the return.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I think that's the only safe way to use tax software.

I actually prefer doing my taxes "by hand" (i.e., using Fillable Forms and e-filing) but it's unreasonable to do so because my state doesn't have a similar system and then I'd have to mail paper. Instead, I ended up using H&R block because it was free for both Federal and state (given my age and income).