Snow is started to fall and/or stating to melt. The Christmas trees on the curb on trash day let me know which of my neighbors are fucking cowards that have already given up on festivity. But most of all, my mailbox is starting to fill itself pressure-sealed self mailers1 from all the big corporations that manage the Boring Adult Shit in my life.
That's right, it's
Tax Season
the time of year where the United States collectively rejects the one good thing computers could do to improve our lives, and we all do a bunch of database operations by hand even though the IRS already computed the answer we're going to mail them.
Myth: Doing taxes sucks, but that's not anyone's fault. It's the emergent behavior of a complex system with lots of stakeholders, and there's no one who cares one way or another about your personal experience.
Fact: Millions of dollars are spent for the specific purpose of making taxes difficult and burdensome.
The government already knows what your taxes are, and is perfectly capable of doing the work for you. They already do that work so they can check your forms for fraud, and if you call them and ask "hey is this the right number" they'll tell you. They are capable of doing your taxes for you. This is how it actually works in some countries.
So why don't they?
Fuckin' TurboTax
Of course, the largest culprit of the tax prep industry, headlined by Intuit (TurboTax) and H&R Block. Their source of income is people's aversion to doing taxes themselves. The amount of taxation is immaterial to them; they just want the process of being taxes to be time-consuming. They want this problem to be bigger, so that more people give up and throw money at the problem to make it go away.
So, those two companies each spend about three and a half million per year on lobbyists to prevent and streamlining to the process. California actually had pre-filled tax returns available for some people at one point, but Intuit managed to kill their marketing budget so no one ever knew this program existed.
To summarize: these companies decided that it's acceptable for them to add substantial burden to the lives of every single American, so that they can extract rent in exchange for reducing some of that burden.
Grover Fucking Norquist
Anti-tax advocates want no taxes at all, but they believe that if taxes exist, then they should be as painful. The purpose of this policy is that people have a visceral aversion to taxes.
The goal is to prevent productive discourse about taxes, by ensuring that everybody gets angry when the topic is brought up. Again, the goal here is to make you suffer because it advances their agenda to do so.
The total amount spend on lobbying on perpetuating this problem looks to be around ten million dollars per year, and honestly the part of this that makes the most angry is just how small that is. Christ, that's all it costs to inflict psychic damage on a few hundred million people? That's how cheap lobbying is? Fuck's sake, why to companies waste their time on developer outreach when you could probably spend like twenty bucks and make it mandatory that all consumer drones are programmed in Zig or whatever.
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Hat tip to @stu for confirming these are not named "intergluteal clefts."