>and while it is not hard, it definitely looks intimidating and takes time to understand, especially the deductions.
Even this is overselling it.
Most people have ZERO deductions to deal with. You put in your W2 pay, you take the standard deduction, and you file and get your money back.
Next time you use something like turbotax, download the forms it generates and look at them. There's zero complexity. Turbotax doesn't do anything. It's literally filling in 14 rows of numbers that come directly from your W2.
Hell, turbotax purposely runs fake animations and makes you waste a ton of time saying "Oh we are looking for all these deductions" but it's all a lie. None of the animations actually do anything. Most of the deductions it is supposedly checking for would Never apply to someone with a normal job. They want you to think it's complicated. They will ask you questions they know the answer to just to waste your time. Every single year, TurboTax asks me if I'm eligible for the earned income tax credit, and every single year, TurboTax knows from the previous questions that I cannot possibly be eligible. They ask me anyway, because it seems like a complicated credit so it makes taxes seem more complicated.
Taxes could take less than 15 minutes for nearly all Americans. Turbotax's bullshit, even disregarding the stupid tax they are charging the whole country just to copy some numbers from column a to column b literally wastes everyone's time every year.
People who insist that taxes are complicated are flat out wrong. If you run a small business, you absolutely have the choice to just file extremely simple taxes and pay a higher tax rate. It is a choice to attempt to take every possible deduction. Each and every one of those deductions is a handout to business owners. They bitch and moan about how bad taxes are, but their taxes are complicated so that they can make more profit.
Guess what? Nobody forces you to run a business, which again, is a handout to capital owners. A few hundred dollars in permits or registration every year is a perfectly valid cost to enable you to take advantage of the insane benefit of "you can literally cause hundreds of deaths but as long as you weren't obviously grossly negligent you are in the clear". Nobody forced you to attempt to take every single handout offered every single year. Nobody forced you to be your own boss, to own capital, to profit off of the labor of others.
Such entitlement. These same people will turn around and cry about "freeloaders" and "welfare queens" and "handouts"
Even this is overselling it.
Most people have ZERO deductions to deal with. You put in your W2 pay, you take the standard deduction, and you file and get your money back.
Next time you use something like turbotax, download the forms it generates and look at them. There's zero complexity. Turbotax doesn't do anything. It's literally filling in 14 rows of numbers that come directly from your W2.
Hell, turbotax purposely runs fake animations and makes you waste a ton of time saying "Oh we are looking for all these deductions" but it's all a lie. None of the animations actually do anything. Most of the deductions it is supposedly checking for would Never apply to someone with a normal job. They want you to think it's complicated. They will ask you questions they know the answer to just to waste your time. Every single year, TurboTax asks me if I'm eligible for the earned income tax credit, and every single year, TurboTax knows from the previous questions that I cannot possibly be eligible. They ask me anyway, because it seems like a complicated credit so it makes taxes seem more complicated.
Taxes could take less than 15 minutes for nearly all Americans. Turbotax's bullshit, even disregarding the stupid tax they are charging the whole country just to copy some numbers from column a to column b literally wastes everyone's time every year.
People who insist that taxes are complicated are flat out wrong. If you run a small business, you absolutely have the choice to just file extremely simple taxes and pay a higher tax rate. It is a choice to attempt to take every possible deduction. Each and every one of those deductions is a handout to business owners. They bitch and moan about how bad taxes are, but their taxes are complicated so that they can make more profit.
Guess what? Nobody forces you to run a business, which again, is a handout to capital owners. A few hundred dollars in permits or registration every year is a perfectly valid cost to enable you to take advantage of the insane benefit of "you can literally cause hundreds of deaths but as long as you weren't obviously grossly negligent you are in the clear". Nobody forced you to attempt to take every single handout offered every single year. Nobody forced you to be your own boss, to own capital, to profit off of the labor of others.
Such entitlement. These same people will turn around and cry about "freeloaders" and "welfare queens" and "handouts"