Life as Crisis Management: The Great American Taxpaying Kiada

It is time once again for that dreaded event that happens every year in the United States, paying one's taxes. I spent several hours doing mine yesterday all in the midst of being told by the fascist and vampiric CVS Caremark a division of the skanky and slaggy CVS Health, that a medicine I have taken since 1990 and which I depend on would no longer be available to me because it was no longer one of the elect on the corporte formulary. This meant, in turn, that this essential medicine had become too expensive for someone on a very limited budget like me to purchase. This just added to the inherent pain that is doing one's taxes in the backward we love the stone age United States.

Over the years, despite the stated intentions of those governmental and corporate elites who have the power and authority to determine how taxes work in the United States, doing one's taxes has become ever more difficult. It did not used to be this way. At one time the US Internal Revenue System, the government bureaucracy that collects American taxes, had what they called an 1040 EZ form that people who had limited incomes and who took the standard deduction could file. Between 1982 and 2017--the day the EZ form died--I always used the 1040EZ to do my taxes save for one calender year when I was self-employed while working on the Encylopedia for New York State thanks to Syracuse University Press's decision to treat its Encyclopedia personnel as freelancers rahter than employees for obvious reasons. Then Dandy wolf boy Donnie "Tangholio" Trump and his "tax reforms" came along and the EZ form disappeared and those of us who had no problem doing the EZ form were suddenly faced with a far more daunting and absurd project, doing a much longer tax form, the 1040.

Those of us with tiny incomes did have another option by then. We could do our taxes online. Of course, tax preparer services, both independent and corporate, have been around for some time, something that is at least partly a measure of how easy and difficult filing taxes in the US was and is.The private H&R Block, for instance, was born just after World War II to help taxpayers do their taxes. With the coming of the brave new digital age, not surprisingly, tax preparer services went digital offering software that could be purchased and used by taxpayers to file their taxes and later online services that could be purchased by taxpayers and used to file taxes. Turbo Tax, for instance, came into existence in 1984 and offered software for sale to those who wanted an easier way to file US taxes and now offers the same services online.

In the early part of the twentieth century, after some criticism of the cost of these private services, the Free File Alliance of tax preparing bureaucracies arose and entered into a public-private partnership with the IRS in order to allow those on limited incomes to file their American taxes online. This public and private partnership is supposed to allow Americans who make less that around $70,000 dollars a year to file their federal taxes (and in some cases state taxes) free. But do they?

To take Turbo Tax, a service I have used for several years now and which opted out of Free File Alliance in 2021 after being at the forefront of its founding, investigative reports have, over the years, found that this now Intuit owned corporation made their free tax service forms hard to find and that Turbo Tax intentionally steered free form users to paid services. They still do. Turbo Tax, for instance, which I have used to do my taxes for the last several years, channelled me, thanks to, they claimed, the massive $26 dollars in book royalties I received last year, onto a pay platform despite the fact that my income was well under the $70,000 dollar threshold--it is around $20,000 dollars--the fact that I owed no taxes and got no tax refund, and despite the fact that $26 dollars in royalties does not an aristocrat make. I could find no way around this honey money Berlin Wall like trap pot Turbo Tax had put in place though there supposedly is one, according to online posters, if you want to start all over again--and have lots of fun, fun, fun in the process--and then hitting some virtual buttons. 

To digress a bit, I had the exact same problems with Tax Act and another "free" tax service whose name I have forgotten this tax filing year in addition to Turbo Tax. Free for them is not what we generally mean when we talk about getting something for  free, namely not paying for it. They make it virtually impossible for the uninitiated not to pay for their "services". Perhaps I will see what EZTaxReturn is like next tax season. I suspect I will find more of the same.

This political lobbying by private corporations, of course, points up the real nature of the public and private partnership between the IRS and various private for profit tax preparer services in the US. The IRS, which could easily do the taxes of those who make below a certain income threshold and who take standard deductions, is handcuffed by the fact that the wolves, in this case the for profit tax preparer corporations and the politicians they control, are in charge thanks to their economic and political power and lobbying efforts and they have no interest in supporting programmes that would help most Americans but cut into their profits. 

These private companies use all sorts of strategies to maintain their privileged positions including lobbying the American legislature, contributing to political candidates, and forming their own "governing" bodies. Paradoxically, it was Intuit which helped form the Free File Alliance to head off possible federal government investigations into their flim flam and snake oil practise of using the claim of "free" tax filing to entice those who use their services onto pay platforms in order to futher enrich themselves. Like Hollywood and like comic book peddlers in the US a before them online tax preparers instituted a private body to allow them, the wolves, to continue to guard the henhouse without any government "interference" to assure that what the tax preperation services said they were doing, namely offereing free tax services for those on iimited incomes, is what they were actually doing. 

This cynical prophylactic seems to have worked at least for the moment. But, as I noted, the rhetoric is different from the reality. "Free", for these vampire corporations, actually means getting as much blood from the stone as they possibly can. Will things change in how the US collects their taxes? Will the IRS be given the power to file forms for taxpayers who make less than a threshold income and who take the standard deduction? Will American politicians put people over corporations and their never ending obsession with nore and more profts, an obsession that borders on if not passes over a sadomasochistic fetish line? Will a private corporate service arise to help online tax filers get around the firewalls put in place by tax online tax preparers to wring monies out of tax filers for a fee, of course. I doubt it. See the government-corporate complex. But hey, stay tuned, perhaps Pollyanna was right and America isn't a bunch of pink houses for the 99% to live in.