A Cry for Help

I asked a friend for a topic to post on, she chose taxes. She was getting pissed that, as a pretty smart person, she was having trouble managing two state filing. I am poor, so my taxes were pretty easy, but for most people April means a maddening trudge through line 8A minus the greater of lines 9 and 10, but if you have a deduction on line 32b then subtract your gross adjusted earnings from… and so on.

Anyway, a while back I was thinking about why some things that are so prevalent in our lives are so obtuse and hard to deal with without other professionals. I think it's a matter of control. Back in the dark ages, the populace couldn't read, and depended on elites for information. In the modern western world, with widespread literacy, average people could do without the people telling them what was going on. What's a power whore to do? Create a new type of illiteracy. Legalese, legislature rules, tax codes. If you can't read it, how can you challenge it? So the majority of people just accept defeat, hire someone to do their taxes, pay ridiculous fees to lawyers, drop out of the political process. Americans are the most well educated illiterates in the world. And our leaders like that just fine.

For more along those lines, and if you want to get really pissed, check out this book. (The author was on Air America the other day, and it was nuts. James talks about it too.)

Want to get more pissed? When the IRS requested $12 million to add 80 investigators to help disrupt the finances or Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, President Bush said no. This guy is not serious about fighting terrorism. He's just not. He says he is, but he's just not.

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