I hate the Income Tax system

I still promise a good blog on my trip last week, and I want to post pictures and have time to do that.

But today...I have to vent my frustration concerning the tax system - both the IRS end and the "preparation" end. Particularly this year, I have run into a lot of hurdles. I won't go into too many details, but there are all sorts of limits and strange rules concerning IRA and investments that I ran into head-on this year. In past years, I have used both TurboTax and TaxCut (last year the online version) with great success. After running into a particularly complicated IRA situation, I was advised by my financial advisor to use a tax professional this year. So I scheduled an appointment at H&R block, which I went to today. I was somewhat disappointed - the person more/less was using the same program I was using, and I don't believe was more knowledgeable about anything than I was (but probably had access to other professionals or documentation that I hadn't made an effort to go find). It's going to get done correctly, but I think with another hour or 2 of looking I could have done it myself.

The other frustration though is that a person can get to this point in the first place. The IRS system is overly complicated for one thing. But it also seems to penalize people like me, who have a good job, stay out of debt besides my house and car, and want to save money to pay for things and for retirement. The "rich" people who have or make a lot of money or investments have a lot of loopholes and tax shelters they can take advantage of. The people who make smaller incomes or are married/have kids have lower percentages and more deductions. That leaves the people like me, who percentage-wise, pay the most tax. I am not at all opposed to paying taxes - I personally believe it is beneficial to society for some things to be publicly funded, and that some amount of wealth redistribution is a fair and good thing for a society (although in some cases I'd rather give money to charity than pay taxes) . I just believe the system should be fairer across the board, and should not penalize people for being single and for wanting to save money. And I believe the system does NOT need to be so complicated - so much money is wasted on the sheer complexity of the IRS, not to mention tax "professionals" who have to deal with the complexity.

I could go on for hours but I'll leave it at that :)