Let’s start with a little sarcasm. This is my favorite time of year – lots of slush, no fishing yet, and everyone is crabby (except me). This is also the time for two of my favorite things – filling out senseless forms that usually have numbers and letters on top like 1099-R (which makes me wonder if it took 1,098 earlier versions to get to this gem), and doing math. I love doing math. It’s so … Pythagorean. (End of sarcasm)

The stupidity of this process by which we fund our government is mind boggling, and after we do fund it, we have no say on where the money goes, not even if it’s for somebody’s golf vacation. Couldn’t I at least have a tax deduction for the amount I spend on fishing equipment every year? I mean, it stimulates the economy; it’s good for my health; it helps the ecology of the country, and it occasionally provides subsistence. Win-win-win-win. Also, I’ve done a search through the entire tax code and there isn’t a single deduction for chocolate. What are they thinking? You can’t deduct the amount you spend on the food of the gods?

I think we’re doing this deduction thing all wrong. I mean that progressive taxes, and some unreadable code for what can be deducted that is written by and for lawyers – just doesn’t cut it. I suggest that we each get to choose a deduction, the one thing we care about the most. If you have kids, you should be able to deduct what it cost to raise them that year, not some measly $1800 for a kid, but the actual money you lost, I mean invested that year in your kids. Then the deduction list could go mostly by age. If you’re in college and your parents are mostly paying for it, then you would get to deduct the entire amount you spent that year on pizza. Doesn’t that make sense? If you’re a musician, your deduction could be musical instruments that year. If you’re a cook, it could be knives and band-aids. If you’re a stay-at-home mom, it should be the total cost of aspirin, paper towels, a van, gas, diapers, in addition to whatever else that kid cost you. Think of the benefits. You’d be happier knowing you got a tax break for something you really care about; you would stimulate the economy by spending more on the things you care about, and the government could easily track “Here’s what people really care about.” Then, as usual, after you take your deduction, the government would tax everything else. It’s a beautiful thing.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking, so I’m going to re-boot.

So it’s tax time, the funniest time of the year, the time when the insanity of humanity reaches a crescendo, and the most hilarious part is that none of it matters. Allow me to explain, or better yet, to illustrate my point with two parental stories.

The first story happened quite a few years ago when we were visiting a parent whose identity will be disguised because I still appreciate Christmas presents, and while we were there, I heard a string of nasty words that ran from personal insult to pure blasphemy. I thought this parent was having a heart attack, so I hurried into the dining room and saw this parent pressing both sides of this parent’s head with his/her palms in a gesture much like that in Dickens’s Great Expectations when another esteemed parent with too many children regularly pressed his own head as if he could lift himself off the ground by locking his head and hair in his hands and lifting. Before the red-faced, steaming parent were stacks of forms spread out on the dining room table, a large calculator, and a pile of crumpled yellow legal sheets.

“Are you okay?” I said, innocently.

“It just isn’t working out,” the esteemed parent said. “I filled in the bottom line with how much money I want to get back like I do every year, and then I work backwards to fill in the spaces to get to that amount, but – It. Just. Isn’t. Working.”

“Wait,” I said, “You write in your refund first and then just fill in whatever numbers get you to that refund? How can you do that?”

“I don’t just fill in just any numbers. That’s illegal. I look at my receipts and records and estimate. Sometimes I round things up or down. Once in a while I have to put something in a different pile. I do it every year. It’s the only fair way to do taxes. If you don’t, the government gets all your money and spends it on thousand-dollar pens that will write in outer space or some study on the sex habits of fruit flies. Besides, this is real money to me. To the government it’s just peanuts.”

“Huh?”

“Fruit flies. They’re wasting my money on fruit flies.”

“I don’t think that’s what an actual study was about. I mean, they may have been using fruit flies-”

“Of course it was. Fruit flies. Are you telling me you don’t fill in your refund and work back from there?”

“Um, no,” I said.

The esteemed parent just shook his/her head at me with such a look of pity bordering on disdain that I could do nothing but slink away. It was no fun to do taxes that year.

I visited another parent recently to help out, but before we got to the subject of taxes, this parent asked me to look at their checkbook.

“The spaces are so small, I can’t write in the numbers for reconciliation, and I can never get that darned computer to work.” I was shown a large-button calculator that apparently ran on solar power, and I could see how that might be a problem if this parent worked on banking after 4 PM, especially in the kitchen where this parent once surprised me after I moved a chair to stand on because one of four ceiling fan lights was out, and I unscrewed the burnt-out bulb and this esteemed parent stopped me by saying, “Oh, that’s not burnt out. I unscrewed it because it was just shining on the refrigerator and we don’t need to light the refrigerator.”

“Huh?” I guess I say that a lot when I visit parents.

“Just leave it. The refrigerator has its own light when you open the door. It’s modern.”

So I turned on the three of four ceiling fan lights on this last visit to be sure the calculator had enough power to run, but the esteemed parent said, “Don’t use that computer. When I use it to subtract, it always comes out with less than I expect. There’s something wrong with it.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll use the calculator on my phone.”

“You have a computer in your phone?”

“Yes. These modern phones are mini-computers in a way.”

“Well, I hope the numbers come out right. How does it know you’re not just dialing someone up when you punch in numbers? I mean, you could be calling China, and then the Chinese will take all your money by reversing the charges.”

“My phone just knows. It has separate compartments for different sets of numbers so I don’t call China by mistake.”

“That’s amazing.” The esteemed parent shook his/her head in genuine admiration.

So I looked at the checkbook and pointed out that if the lines were too small to write in numbers, it would be okay to use two lines at once and no one would care.

“I don’t think I could do that,” the esteemed parent said. “It wouldn’t feel right to go outside the lines. It would just be – messy.”

“Okay,” I said, “messy is not good,” and then looked at the bank statement, noticing right away that the balances didn’t match. This bank statement included mini pictures of each of the checks written that month, but when I looked at the checkbook, none of those checks had been recorded.

“Um, you didn’t record any of the checks you wrote this month in the checkbook,” I said innocently.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. There’s plenty of money in our account. The bank can figure that out.”

“But you don’t really know how much you have. You can’t just keep writing checks and not record them in your checkbook.”

“Well, sometimes I do. It’s just that the lines are so small. All I really need is an estimate. Just estimate those checks and put that one amount in the checkbook. It will be fine. If there’s a problem, Linda will call me.”

“Linda?”

“She’s my friend who works at the bank. When they’re busy I just wait until I can see Linda. She’s really sweet and has three children, even though she’s just a young girl, so she has to work, I mean her husband works, but not very hard, and she fixes things when I go to the bank, and she never forgets to ask if I want a lollipop.” What followed was ancestral information on Linda’s forebears, who she was “from home,” and why the only banker in town worth seeing was Linda.

“But what if you go to the bank and Linda’s not there?”

“Well, then I just pretend I forgot something and come back another day. You can do that when you’re old and retired.”

After that, I did my best to record their checks, (in pencil, just in case), compare the balances, and then add a line for reconciliation to put an extra $14.27 into their account because the bank said they had that much, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where it came from. I suspected that six months ago, someone used the large-button computer without turning on the three lights in the ceiling fan and for once, the result of some subtraction that came out as expected, if incorrect.

“See, the balances match,” I said proudly.

“How did you do that?”

I started to explain, thought better of it, and said instead, “The calculator on my phone has always been accurate. If anyone else helps you, Linda or anyone in the family, be sure they know I did the balances in pencil on purpose, and I’ve recorded all the checks in the last statement.”

“You really don’t have to do that.” What followed was another encomium on the wonders of Linda.

After working on their banking, this esteemed parent said, “That’s enough for one day. I’ll have your sister help me with the taxes when she comes out. I just put in the same numbers every year anyway.”

“You do what?”

“We’re retired, so the numbers don’t change much. I just copy the numbers from the previous year. If anything changes, I put that in, but for the last couple of years the numbers are close enough.”

“Huh?” I said.

“The numbers. They’re always pretty much the same. The only problem is that the spaces are so small that I can’t write them in the boxes anymore, so I’ll just have your sister do it when she comes out next week. One time the government sent a paper saying I added wrong, which was ridiculous. I didn’t add at all because the computer is always wrong, I just copied what we had from the previous year, and the paper said we owed them 24 more dollars, so the refund they sent was $24 less than what we were supposed to get back. I thought of calling them up to complain, but I figured it wasn’t worth the trouble, so I just let it go. You have to watch the government, though. They’ll cheat you if they can. Most people probably wouldn’t even notice. I’m not worried because last year they sent us the right amount for our refund like in the previous years, so I figure there was just some new person who didn’t know when they got our tax forms that year.”

“And Linda doesn’t work for the government,” I said.

“Exactly,” my esteemed parent said.

Some day, I think I’m going to go up to the bank and give Linda a present. She’s earned it.