| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Thursday 14 February 2002: |
| Mmm, taxes. Those of you not American have probably seen American sitcoms featuring people bitching about taxes. You probably don't realise why - I didn't. In England, "doing your taxes" consisted of "doing absolutely nothing", as an employee, because all that stuff is dealt with quite efficiently and correctly on-the-fly. In America, it's different. The tax-withheld-from-wages part is purely a clumsy guesstimate. And you have to do tax papers anyway, even if you somehow managed to pay exactly the right amount of tax. And you have to do the tax papers for two different places, because they can't just, say, have the state take both state and federal taxes and forward the federal ones appropriately, oh no, it has to come straight from the end-user, for maximum complete fucking waste of time and paper and maximum potential to fuck everything up. If you're very lucky, you also get to have your tax withheld by Virginia when it's due in Maryland, to pick an example from, well, our taxes this year. Which means finding out about obscure forms with which to politely ask Virginia to "give me my fucking money back you useless tossers". If you're unwise, you might even only discover that at the last minute, which would leave you paying several thousand dollars to Maryland from a credit card or something, while you wait for the refund from Virginia which won't, of course, include interest. Conveniently, we are not so unwise. Also fun is when you finish filling all the tax forms, and sealing them in envelopes, and then a W-2 from an old job arrives, meaning you have to start all over again. I have nothing against bureaucracy. I just loathe bureaucracy that could be managed several hundred times more efficiently by implementing the most pathetically obvious of modifications. [17:39] |