Filing Your Taxes Is an Expensive Time Sink. That’s Not an Accident.
A miserable annual ritual survives because of corporate lobbying and Republicans’ long anti-tax crusade.
As you settle into tax season, you may not be shocked to hear that the Internal Revenue Service has about 800 different forms. For some of them, the instructions literally state that to determine whether you need to fill out the form, you first need to fill out the form. Each form is interlinked with many others, so that you can work your way down a form only to be halted in your tracks by a line demanding that you fill out three other forms first and then bring the results back to this one; and each of those three can send you down other wormholes, so that your desktop is littered with dozens of open and partially filled-out documents. By the time you make
