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Notes -
Can someone please steel-man the American system of making individual citizens responsible for filing their taxes in a hopelessly complex tax code, then punishing them for making mistakes? From where I stand, it all just feels like racketeering by H&R Block et al. to extort fees year after year.
Now that's mostly the case, but the roots of this system were actually in minimizing governmental intrusion into private life. In order to calculate your taxes for you, the government has to be aware of a lot of things you are doing. Now, you would say this is true anyway, and you'd be right. But the way the system was designed initially, that wasn't the case - the government was supposed to know what you report to them, and no more. That, of course, went out of the window long ago, but the system remained. Thus the idiotic situation where the government has all the data about you and your business (unless you take special steps to hide it, which are mostly illegal by now) but they are now allowed to use this data to calculate your taxes, so you have to do it by yourself. Then they will be allowed to use the same data to catch you if you're cheating. For me, as a software developer often dealing with, by now, decades-old code, this is a common situation - the system started with one set of assumptions in mind, they changed, but rebuilding the whole system from scratch is too inconvenient, so now everything works in weirdest ways that make no sense anymore.
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