This is going to be a disjointed sort of column, I have to warn everyone in advance. It will be nothing more than a few random thoughts strung together on one subject, in no particular order. This is because my brain is rather frazzled right now, here at the end of tax season.

As Benjamin Franklin once said, the only things that are certain in life are death and taxes. Taxes are what we pay to keep society humming along and providing governmental services to its citizens. That's the basic theory, at any rate.

The American tax code is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most Byzantine monstrosities ever developed by human beings. A lot of this is intentional, as businesses and wealthy individuals convince Congress to create special carve-outs for them, but while doing so make them so obscure and convoluted that the average person isn't even aware of their existence. This is how gigantic megacorporations that generate plenty of profit wind up paying zero (or close to it) in taxes.

This complexity has been metastasizing for a very long time. Even efforts to change it are eventually defeated, as the Byzantine nature of the tax code takes on a life of its own. Case in point: the basic Form 1040 that individuals use to figure their taxes. About a decade ago, Republican tax reformers convinced themselves that they could simplify things, so they created (as they put it) a tax form "that could fit on a postcard." The result was 2018's Form 1040, which had indeed shrunk down to about the size of a postcard. But to achieve this, they had to create a handful of new forms that did all the calculations that used to exist on Form 1040. Schedules 1 through 6 appeared out of nowhere. So while the main form drastically shrunk in size, it needed six more forms to reach such small proportions. Eventually these were consolidated into just three forms (Schedules 1, 2, and 3), but this year, a new Schedule 1-A appeared, to handle all of Donald Trump's new tax changes (in his big, ugly bill last year). So now we are up to five forms where there used to just be one. This is progress?

In their fervor to create the "postcard" tax form, the tax-reforming politicians did something monumentally stupid. They did away with two other tax forms, Form 1040A and Form 1040EZ. These were shorter, simpler tax returns designed for people who had very few complications to their tax situation. If you didn't itemize deductions and made a limited income, you could use Form 1040A. If your taxes were pathetically simple (and you didn't have children), you could use Form 1040EZ. But because their new postcard-sized form was supposed to be so easy to use, the politicians killed off the two simpler forms. Now that the postcard has grown back to a full sheet of paper again (and been supplemented by four other forms to boot), having a simpler tax form would indeed be beneficial to the millions of people with very simple tax situations. But there has been no move to revive the simpler forms.

For everyone else, filing income taxes is now so complicated (for people with any but the simplest income sources) that it almost requires a computer. Starting with the advent of the personal computer, there have been a few companies that sell tax software that makes the process a lot easier. You just type in all the numbers from the end-of-year forms you get and the program fills out the federal tax forms for you to print out or electronically send to the government. The only problem with this arrangement is that it doesn't have to be this way. The New York Times ran a great article earlier this month that pointed this out in a big way:

This tax season, as you wade through the absurdly expensive and complicated process of filing income taxes, remember to thank the Trump administration.

Filing taxes should be really easy and completely free. It is in most other developed countries. And in 2024, the Biden administration debuted a pilot program called Direct File that could have made tax filing easy and free for most American taxpayers, too.

President Trump killed it. He has destroyed things that are more important than Direct File, but this one sticks in my craw. It was a straightforward way to make life a little better for a lot of Americans. It was a step toward the kind of easy-to-use, efficient, high-tech government services that everyone claims to want. It worked. And now it's gone.

Almost every president since Ronald Reagan has said that the government should create a simple electronic system for filing federal income taxes. The necessary technology has existed for decades. Many developed nations operate such tax filing systems. In countries including Japan and the Netherlands, the government handles the paperwork and then provides most taxpayers with a statement for review and approval.

Americans, by contrast, spend an average of 13 hours and $290 to file.

Why? Because tax preparation companies and Republican lawmakers have a shared interest in torturing taxpayers. The companies want to ensure that Americans remain dependent on their services. The Republicans want people to hate paying taxes.

Doesn't that idea sound easier? The government, which already has access to all your financial records, fills out a tax form for you, sends it to you, and then you just review it without having to do all the basic work. If it is correct and you agree with it, you sign it and send it back to them. If it needs changes, you make them and send your own version back to them. It wouldn't be perfect -- it wouldn't catch everything -- but for most people it would probably work pretty well. You'd still have the option of doing everything yourself, but you'd have a starting point of an already-filled-out form to work from.

Or the government could (as the article points out) provide their own tax-filing software, for free. This is the program Trump killed. Decades ago, the idea was proposed. The tax-filing industry fought hard against it. They swore that they would offer a "Free File" program that could be used by most people with basic taxes. However, it mostly turned out to be a scam:

Intuit’s behavior has been particularly egregious. ProPublica reported in 2019 that the company had concealed the landing page for the Free File version of its product so that it was invisible to Google and other search engines. It also created a stalking horse called TurboTax: Free Edition, which pushed users to pay for add-ons. After it got caught, the company abandoned the Free File program.

Finally, under the Biden administration, the federal government set up its own free system, called "Direct File." It was launched for the 2024 tax filing season, but only on a very limited basis (taxpayers from only 12 states were able to use it). Over 140,000 taxpayers used the system in the first year, so it was expanded (to 25 states) the next year. It was still a pilot (it did not handle more complicated tax situations), but in the second year almost 300,000 taxpayers used the service.

Then Trump killed it.

The free government service was still in its infancy, but it had the ability to be further expanded and improved. As time went on, it likely would have grown to handle more and more complex tax situations and would have been available nationwide. Once it truly got robust enough to handle most families' tax returns, it would likely have crushed the for-profit tax preparation industry. Why pay money for tax software when the government offers it for free?

Thankfully, the Direct File source code still exists. If some future president and some future Congress decide to revive it, the Direct File program could one day live again and be further developed until the point where the only people who needed more powerful tax-preparation software or services were the ones with incredibly complex tax situations.

It's not just powerful industries convincing politicians to change the tax code itself (to add a few goodies for them and bury them in such obscure language and forms that normal people won't even realize they're there), but also one powerful industry convincing the politicians not to allow the government to compete against their own tax-preparation golden goose.

Which is a shame. Because it doesn't have to be this way. Which is where that article ends: "All that's missing is an administration willing to stand up for the public interest."

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant