Tax Day Could Be a Breeze: I hate, hate, hate filing taxes. There is a better way.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/2026/04/15/tax-day-could-be-a-breeze/


Credit: Aaron M. Sprecher via AP

Today is tax day, and like many readers, I have spent much of my free time over the last several weeks figuring out my various returns. Because both my wife and I have more than one source of income, our federal and state returns are quite complicated, and because we live in Pennsylvania—which apparently never learned the lesson of Antoine Lavoisier and therefore relies on private tax farmers to collect local taxes—I had to file an entirely additional return at the city level.

I find the whole experience almost indescribably unpleasant. It’s tedious, hyper-complicated, easy to make a costly error, and tends to reinforce the false Reaganite notion that “wealth is privately produced and then appropriated by a quasi-illegitimate state, through taxation,” to quote the economist Yanis Varoufakis. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Paying taxes can and should be easy, not least because Americans are going to have to do a lot more of it in the near future.

Some years ago, I traveled to the Faroe Islands, an autonomous territory of Denmark, to report on their tax authority, which is arguably the best in the world. There, all normal wages are routed through a central government database, which automatically keeps track of how much you are making, and what benefit programs you are eligible for. While this computerized system is quite sophisticated and required a lot of initial investment, it is incredibly easy to operate. For an ordinary worker, what you owe automatically comes out of the paycheck, and any benefit payments automatically go right into your bank account.

Ordinary employees don’t have to file their taxes or any enrollment paperwork (if they have a child and become eligible for the Faroese child allowance, for instance, the money just starts showing up), while employers don’t have to hire a payroll processor to handle their tax payments. In America, by contrast, we have to file our taxes ourselves (or hire an accountant), and it’s a huge pain in the neck for individuals, businesses, and the IRS itself. And while taxes are much lower than in Nordic countries, that is more than counterbalanced by all the necessary expenses we have to fund out of pocket. I pay taxes for Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and so on, and then many thousands of dollars on top of that for my own insurance, thousands more for day care, and so on.

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