Diary 10

Saturday March 28th

There really was no reason for me to avoid it any longer, so I tried to focus and do my taxes. Actually, that’s a misnomer, because I’d already amassed the various documents and handed them in an untidy bundle to my tax preparer. One might think that two people such as my wife and I, both with fairly simple jobs and not much in the way of expenses to write off, might have a straightforward tax situation. So why the tax preparer?  Um… to keep us sane, I think is the most straightforward answer. The dear lady thus charged with maintaining our mental equilibrium got to work. Phone calls flew to and fro. Documents arrived by email and were scrutinized. And so on. 

The completed paperwork came, I noticed, to 63 pages. 

If I were running a multi-national corporation with government tax incentives and who knows what else then perhaps I would understand this. As it is, I don’t. I’m just grateful for the people who can steer me through this. I thought the ‘new’ tax laws enacted by our current administration were supposed to make things simpler?  Can’t say that happened.

I’ll point out the obvious, here. I actually want to get this tax stuff right.  I want to pay my share. I’m trying to be a decent citizen. I’m not working the loopholes like Jeff Bezos so I pay absolutely nothing at all. I wonder how long his tax print-out is? How do people manage who can’t spare the extra money to pay a patient, careful, and almost saint-like tax preparer such as I have?

Perhaps it’s this new, pared-down simpler life of social distancing that throws all of this into such sharp relief for me. And, in a world where places like Australia have now limited social gatherings to just two people, it must seem like I’m whining. I don’t think I am. I’m reflecting on how complicated the pre-corona world had become, and how that seems strange now. Perhaps, when this is all over, we will re-think this and other aspects of how we live.