Real tax reform can’t and won’t happen in this country. It’s a sad example of how those we elect trash us.
Those of us who pay taxes spend billions to have our taxes prepared. The more complexity in the tax code, the bigger the bills we pay. The people who sift through the complexity and collect the billions own our elected officials, we don’t have a say in what kind of tax code we have. Simple as that. Lobbyists and campaign donations decide that.
Not only do we pay billions to have our taxes prepared, but we pay billions more to employees of the IRS to process our taxes. Here’s what we get for those billions.
Only 61% of the more than 100 million phone calls made last year to the IRS were answered. For the 61% of callers who were lucky enough to get someone to answer, the average wait time was 17 minutes.
Like everything else in politics it is a money issue. If we increased the budget, they could do a better job. Just like the educational system. We already spend more than any other country to educate our children, but they don’t get a quality education. We all know why, but can’t face up to fixing the problems.
Want to fix the IRS call problem? It’s simple. Put the income tax return on a 0ne-page form, no other requirements needed. The 100 million calls go to one million. Mostly for forms. Thousands of IRS agents who don’t really care about the people who try to call them and can’t get through, have to get a real job. Thousands of CPA’s have to find other types of work. H&R Block and the others go out of business. See why we can’t fix the problem? There is pain involved and we are pain avoiders. We can’t get rid of bad teachers, and improve education and we can’t get rid of bad IRS employees.
Why can’t we accept pain? Because the media will feed you hours of sob stories every day. You are the problem. This country has become a soap opera. Someone sobs and we buy the tears. Somewhere down the road there are big pains waiting. Our kids and grand kids will learn about the pain we are accumulating by watching the soap opera and not dealing with reality.
Here’s some reality. We don’t have to have a complex tax code. We choose to live with what we have. We don’t have to pay government employees not to answer the phone. We choose to tolerate that. We don’t have to have under-educated kids, we accept that.
Here’s an example. In Illinois, the worst-run state in the country, there are four gentlemen running for the Republican nomination for governor. Three are career politicians up to their eye-balls in connections and the substance that put the state where it is today. The fourth is a billionaire who has no reason to steal anything and owes no favors and has proven he can run a business. The billionaire wasn’t invited to the first debate. In the second he was attacked for his lack of political experience. There are voters, probably the majority of them, who bought that criticism. We don’t get many people who want to fix what’s broken and when we do, we listen to those who break things tear them down and elect the same thieves we have now.
It’s all on us.
