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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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I'm sure the complicated nature of the American tax filing system is exaggerated, but the comparison here would be something like the Finnish tax system, where the "filing process" for many typical employees at the tax filing date would be... doing nothing at all, since almost everything has already been calculated on your behalf in the system, or at most checking the government's site to confirm everything is correct.

If I was doing the same thing I do now as an employee, the only thing I'd need to add would be the household services tax deductions for hiring a cleaner and using renovation services a couple of times - the standard housing credit deductions, child deductions etc. would already be on file. Since I'm a sole proprietor my tax stuff is somewhat more complicated, but my accountant takes care of it and her standard hours for doing all my accounting are one hour per month, one extra hour if there's some particular thing to take care of and one hour annually for annual tax stuff, so it's fairly limited on that end, too, and (AFAIK) since all my business and invoicing etc. happens online all the tax stuff can be done online, too, without a need for any physical receipts or filings.