Until someone on the ball notices and says "Your representative voted to keep your taxes complicated!" That won't go over very well in most red states (and quite a few blue states either).

Ya, but you're a customer. In Comcast's eyes you're like a snake. They're already squeezing out all sorts of cash from you, they just want a second entity to squeeze cash out of. (had to get the that snake squeezins' ref in)

Quite a lot of standard business is essentially legalized bribery.

What about JavaScript? I'd trust it even less.

It is nicer now that I can download stuff from the banks. However I still like to double check all those numbers with the actual papers I got from the banks (this is sort of personal penance for failing to balance my checkbook). However every year or two there's always something that's just a bit too strange and TurboTax asks me a question I'm baffled by. Ie, banks didn't used to have to report basis so I'd have to dig through old records trying to find this stuff out, agh. Then there was the SPDR gold trust with its strange calculations. Or the year I rolled over traditional-IRA to Roth-IRA and the bank clerk checked the wrong box on the forms and the IRS thought it was a premature withdrawal (oh how they sound so dirty at times).

Ya, there's not too much on my forms that the feds don't already know about. It's mostly the deductions. Charity, since the government isn't tracking that for taxpayers. I am not sure but I think they don't track things like vehicle license fees and other stuff that are common deductions.

However for people who are still in the 1040-EZ or 1040-A range, the government could do it all for them. But it is still up to the taxpayer to know when it is better for them to do the long form or not.

And even if the feds do all this, we're still stuck with the states. Each state basically takes the IRS form as its starting point, then applies a grab bag of slightly different rules to various things (ie, some bonds with the state are not taxable by the state). The states all have their own legislators who want to promote this or that special thing or recover funds for other projects (ie, do you get tax rebates if you installed solar panels or low water usage toilets). I think it would be a lot of effort for each state to get on the ball and start doing this, and until then they're going to demand to see your full IRS forms.

"Happy with it"? How do you know it's fair until you determine what you tax rate is and if it is the correct amount for what is deducted? In the US the deductions from a paycheck are not necessarily the same as the tax owed on the salary. It's based off of an estimate only, and that estimate can often be wrong (ie, you held two jobs during the year, and then did the math wrong when filling out the form for your new job). And as well you get deductions of course, at the very least when someone donates to charity that reduces taxes and in an ideal world if most people give to charity therefore most people will want to file the tax return instead of just accepting what the government says.

(this depends though, in the US we have a "standard deduction" which covers some of this, so if you only gave $1000 to charity and had no other deductions then you take the standard deduction instead of itemizing it, which also means you do the simpler and easier form)

Sometimes the tax is somewhat artificial. We have this goofy thing called AMT (alternative minimum tax). It was originally designed to try and get at least some money out of the extremely wealthy people who use lots of loopholes. Ie, it's meant for the type of person who joins the yacht club. It basically calculates your tax a different way with various items now taxable that were otherwise not taxable, and whichever tax is higher is what you pay.

However over the decades the limit for which AMT applies was not increased to account for inflation. So a lot of otherwise middle class people end up being stuck with AMT. And as well a lot of middle class people now end up getting stock options, which previously were things that only executives ever received and so the tax law also assumes you must be a rich bastard if you ever got an option. So if you exceed the AMT limit which is not hard especially with a two income family, you now owe taxes on a lot more things. You receive/exercise stock options and even though you have received absolutely no cash at all you may now end up paying taxes on it (you may even be prohibited from selling that stock). In the dotcom era it was not uncommon for some people to have to obtain a loan just to pay their taxes due to AMT! If the stock later plummets you can recover that by declaring a loss, but you can only claim a small amount of a loss per year, meanwhile you can be in debt due to that tax burden.

Some in congress wanted to change AMT due to all the problems during dotcom era, but so many were highly resistant because most of the country still thought of AMT as something only the extremely wealthy ever paid, and that fixing AMT was akin to giving tax breaks to the rich. Never mind that people lost their homes over this or had to arrange special payment schedule with the IRS because they literally did not have enough money in cash or assets to pay the tax.

It'd be nice if the whole thing could be in VAT. Simplify it all, eliminate the loopholes. Except that this doesn't intercept capital gains and lets really rich people just horde money, and a lot of people feel it's their duty to stamp that out.

Thing is, everyone has a differerent tax system, everyone changes the tax system over the years, just about every scheme has been tried somewhere, but no where has a perfect system been found (and if it is found, changing political views will soon make it imperfect).

The complexity is not just from the tax code, but because income is inherently complicated. It's simple if you just have a wage and you're done. That's why we have the 1040A and 1040EZ forms (I even had one form in grad school that I filed by using at touch-tone phone!). But start investing your money, even in cases where you're hands off and it's just a bank doing all the work for you, and things get complicated. Interest and dividends, gains and losses. Tax refund from state is income for federal tax. Of course, that's all reported to the IRS so they technically could do the calculations for you (and believe me, if you get one number wrong or forget one bank account you will get the scary letter in the email). Then it gets harder with things that aren't always reported or reported partially; stock options, individual stock ownership, home hobby that makes money, rental income, alimony, proceeds from trusts, etc. Subtract off retirement plan contributions, disability insurance payments. Include unemployment payments.

Then there are deductions. Mortgage interest deductions if you own a home, and deduction for property tax. Charitable contributions (not hard if you keep a list, but harder if you donate items instead of cash). Foreign taxes paid (rare but it comes up if your bank invests that way). Medical expenses (if they exceed a certain amount).

The tools handle all this though, and it's not hard. Apparently many professional tax preparing services use similar tools and give those to the customers to have them fill in the data first.

What about if you have noscript? I find a lot of online sites seem to work fine if you enable certain domains, then suddenly refuse to work at the last step, then you lose all your data when you enable yet another domain. I'd like to see more sites that only use scripts from one and only one domain instead of a huge grab bag (thought that would make it harder to block just ads and analytics).

Also wondering how good the online stuff is. Ie, is there a list of 100 easily editable entries for capital gains/losses where I can verify against paper forms, and if I click a button for help is it going to be idiotic about it and load a new page (losing all my work) or be slightly stupid and create a popup or be smart and open a new tab? Right now based on most web sites out there, including google docs and the like, the web is NOT ready for full applications.

I filed online this year. Because I was busy on a project and didn't want to stand in line at the postoffice.

The bizarre thing is that with TurboTax I can e-file for free with federal taxes, but have to pay $25 to e-file with California. That's absurd in my thinking. Why should someone have to pay to e-file? It saves the state money to get the stuff electronically rather than having to have employees open the envelopes and have the taxes scanned into the same computers. (free in some cases, but not a free efile if you have capital gains or losses) In past years I've e-filed with federal then stood in line to mail in to state (just to get the correct postage).

This is the important thing. Nothing in that referendum was legitimate, it was suspicious from the start. Russian troops were in Crimea within a week of Yanukovych leaving office, though they took off their insignia and tried to pretend they weren't Russian. A politician who couldn't even get local Crimean residents to vote for him, part of the leadership of an unpopular party in Crimea that couldn't get members elected, ends up being declared the Crimean prime minister behind closed doors. We don't know what the Crimean people want, we only know what Russian and the ultra nationalists in Crimea want.

What we really have is a nearly failed state in Ukraine with severely weakened power, and the local opportunists are taking charge where they can. These people did not like Yanukovych either, they're not really sad to see him go, they're just sad to see him replaced with someone less loyal to Russia.

(And Russia should beware of Crimea too in some sense. It's like the man who says "I'll get a divorce so we can get married" and is told "why would I marry someone who cheats on his wife?")

So if the people of Chechnya decide to leave, Putin will let them go?

Don't forget that most of those soviet republics were populated by people who hated the Russians. They were glad to leave. The problem were all the Russians who were left behind in countries that were no longer dominated by Russia. And those Russians had been purposely imported to those regions (starting in czarist times) to keep the locals in check and so were not viewed favorably by the non-Russian speakers. Russia doesn't see it that way though, it sees itself as the primary country in the region and that all the former parts of the empire should continue to remain grateful to have been associated with it, and that any Russians left behind should be seen as helpful brothers rather than as the former occupying force.

I think this greatly affects the Russian views of those countries, and they see it as an insult when those countries look west instead of east. This is similar to how some Americans saw it as an insult when France decided not to help out in the Iraq invasion ("they'd all be speaking German if it weren't for us!", "freedom fries", etc). Never mind all the weird propaganda that's been floating around Russia for decades ("Crimea has always been Russian").