Income Tax Rules GRRR

Woke up this morning and had breakfast with Erin at Panera, coffee and a bagel are always a good way to start the day :) Church was a double-feature today - Peer Ministry commissioning (see my last blog post) and the annual youth choirs musical, which is always a treat. This year's musical was on the story of Noah's Ark and it was just fun to watch - at one point there were about 50 kids on stage dressed up as pairs of animals. I am so glad our church recognizes this kind of thing as another form of ministry - and probably one that a lot more people pay attention to, as well as something that gets young kids involved.

At 1:30, I headed over to the American Legion and played until 3:00 with the Notochords band (the jazz band I'm in) for their annual musicians guild meeting - really probably an excuse for the guild to have drinks afterwards, but fun for us to be there playing for other musicians who really appreciated what we were doing.

I got home and started working on my taxes - that's when the day went down hill. Usually my taxes are fairly straight-forward - I make an income, I have some deductions, and I get a refund. Not this year - I guess there are some rules about Roth IRAs that I never knew about, and now I'm going to get hit with a bunch of penalties. Whenever stuff like this happens, I wonder why again we have this complicated, vague, convoluted tax system instead of a flat tax or just a national sales tax. In my heart I probably know WHY we don't change it - politicians have a large amount of financial control in this system, with exceptions, loopholes, etc. and then there is the IRS and accountants which I guess needs to keep their jobs (?) But it sure seems like it would be a lot fairer to everyone, and save the government a whole lot of money (and everyone else a whole lot of time and headache) if we were simply flatly taxed on what we make or, better yet, IMHO, what we SPEND. That way people who spend more money get taxed more. Period. I'm sure that's just way too simple for some reason or another, but it would be a whole lot more efficient.