It is kind of strange that the IRS has almost all he information it needs to assess whether we owe or they owe us and yet they require you to fill out a bunch of forms by a deadline or charge fines.
They should just assume on the info they have unless offered more info by deadline... then issue you a check or a bill. It would save the average 1040-taxpayer a lot of time and money... and possibly cut a big chunk out of the bureaucracy.

What's even stranger to me is why people seem to go along with the assumption that tweeking the taxes on labor is somehow the way to get taxes to be fair. These days no one brings up the old arguments about the ownership of land and natural resources- something that came from no one's labor.
So while we argue amongst ourselves about income tax or maybe a sales tax, the upper 1% controls a high concentration of the land and natural resources while the banks own much of the rest (though we pretend this is owned by "homeowners") and barely pay anything in income tax due to most of their income being from capital gains and assets...

But we'll continue to attack the poor saps who are dependent (for worthy reasons or unworthy ones) on a small amount of the total budget while we use most of the "entitlements" to pay for middle class people that are trapped in a consumerist overspending mindset and to subsidize the industries of the wealthy while upholding the system that allows them to own a majority of the property in the country... including things which no human had any part in creating.

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"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside