1 week Ago
The only country with this absurd tax filing system In Episode 4 of the Netflix series “What’s Next?” Bill Gates is tasked with demonstrating how to complete a federal income tax return for a fictional low-income person. Bill fails to do it correctly. Bill Gates is not stupid.
But the system that the U.S. uses for income tax filing is.
We are the only country on earth that has our absurd, backward tax return filing system. There is nothing on God’s Earth that I despise more than the tedious, inane, non-productive waste of human capital that is filing an income tax return. To be clear, my complaint is not about paying taxes.
It’s about how damned hard it is to do the IRS’s accounting for them and then having them check it to see if I did it right. This seems backward. Why doesn’t the IRS fill out my tax return, and then have ME check THEM ? The amount of time I spend on assembling the various documents for preparing my personal income tax return is ridiculous.
Multiply this by 160 million returns. Time is money. So .
.. Elon Musk, how much money could we save by making tax filing way less burdensome? Hell, I’d gladly pay more tax if that meant I didn’t have to go through the miserable tax return filing process.
Kinda blackmail, but it’d be worth the ransom. I realize that you can pay somebody to fill out the forms for you and send them in — that’s the easy part. But an ordinary person can’t pay somebody to collect and organize the information required to fill out the forms.
It’s like paying somebody to poop for you. They might be able to help some, but ultimately, it’s up to you to get the job done. Tom Chapin, Lyons Downtown doesn’t need a new hotel.
It needs parking. We understand the Boulder City Council will be considering what happens to the surface parking lot on the NW corner of Spruce Street and Broadway, possibly selling it to a developer to permit the construction of a hotel on the site. We are strenuously opposed to that action for several reasons.
First, it’s a very popular parking lot as it is. It is usually fully filled seven days per week with shoppers and tourists. Its availability is important for the nightlife on the Pearl Street Mall as well.
Two churches within one block of that parking lot were built over 100 years ago, before everyone had cars, so the churches have only small parking lots of their own, and most members of those churches park in that lot. The fact that the lot is more fully utilized than the parking ramp directly across the street to the south should indicate how Boulderites feel about parking structures. A hotel built on the site will obscure the historic 1908 sanctuary building of First Congregational Church, which can be viewed from the Pearl Street Mall and when driving north down from Uni Hill on Broadway as the north anchor of downtown Boulder.
Do we really want to obscure our historic buildings? Finally, how many downtown hotels does Boulder need? We already have the Boulderado and St. Julien, plus the new Moxie just up the hill on Broadway. A “boutique” hotel built where that parking lot now exists will not significantly add to the number of hotel rooms needed for the Sundance Film Festival.
As great an asset as the Pearl Street Mall is, it eliminated a lot of downtown parking. We don’t need to eliminate more parking! That’s one of the few convenient lots to the Mall. We hope the City Council does not approve the sale of the Spruce/Broadway parking lot to allow construction of another hotel.
Bob and Louisa Matthias, Boulder.
