往期内容

In Your Ear（英文）

By Tom Hoerr

1980年5月

此内容暂无简体中文译文，以下为英文原文。

Historical May 1980 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.

Filing one’s income tax return is never an easy or pleasant experience. As if it weren’t bad enough that the government takes chunks and chunks of our money, we have to run through a maze and fill out a myriad of forms to enable them to do this. Shakespeare should have said, “Beware the Ides of April!” On a scale of pleasure, filling out a tax return rates just above seeing your youngest daughter leave for the prom with a leering date who drives a van (and calls you by your first name) and just below the feeling you get when you’ve taken your car in for inspection and the mechanic begins the conversation by saying, “I think we’ve finally found the problem. . . .” Perhaps the sensation is close to that felt by yesteryear’s stagecoach riders when the highwaymen took their bullion and made them carry the chests. Over the years I’ve discovered that there are certain things one can do to make the tax preparation chore a bit easier. While a calculator, freshly sharpened pencils with extra large erasers, scratch paper, the proper forms, and complete records of expenditures help, I’ve found that there’s no substitute for some cold beer, cheap smelly cigars, chocolate cake, and a dog-eared copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. Rather than viewing tax time as a burden, all of these accouterments help transform the process from an arduous task into a challenge. Simply view the tax forms as nothing more than a rather poorly written creativity test!

For example, do you really have to be a biology instructor to deduct a Playboy subscription as a business expense? Can you consider all those now-empty cans of Miller Lite as a medical deduction because the doctor told you to lose weight? Why not count the expense of taking the neighborhood cronies downtown to drink as a home improvement expense? (There’s no question that this act improved the entire neighborhood’s property values. Besides, imagine what would have happened to your home’s value if you’d allowed the bumptious critters inside!) Given, then, the proper frame of mind, the entire ordeal can become at least palatable — perhaps equivalent to finding out that the van had a flat tire on the way to the prom and they were forced to take a cab.

I have a spate of suggestions for the IRS, Only one of which I’ll relate here. Why not let us choose where our specific dollars are going? Hold on to your W-4’s, that’s not as ludicrous as it seems (and certainly no more far-fetched than us paying thousands and the President getting a refund.) Anyway, why not have a list of areas of kinds of allocations which we could peruse and choose among to determine how our bucks should be spent? Would you rather have your taxes go for guns or butter? Given a choice between buying a bomber (well, at least a part of a bomber) or paying to have some judge’s robe cleaned or subsidizing a tobacco farmer, which would you prefer? Somehow I’d feel a bit better if I didn’t believe that I paid for at least a piece of San Clemente. (It’s more than I can bear to consider that I own a snip of the Watergate tapes.) On the other hand, I’d feel really good about purchasing a raincoat to be worn on a ship blockading Iran. My fear, though, is that some government bureaucrat will seize my idea and modify it.

Then we’ll be left with “them” doing just part of the job by telling us exactly what we’ve purchased with our taxes.

I’m afraid I’ll find that I paid to publish my tax forms!

Originally published in The Paper, May 1980.

Read this article in the original newspaper issue.