Robert Reich
lemgandi@rbreich People from actual first-world countries are always puzzled and amazed by the US system. In most places filing your taxes means looking at a postcard and signing it.
The US tax prep industry is a massive dead-weight drag on the economy.
Bill Zaumen@lemgandi @rbreich It is actually worse than you would imagine. Besides the absurdly complicated federal stuff, most states do more or less the same thing, sometimes with subtly different rules, so you have to go though the mess twice, doubling the cost.
As I recall, Albert Einstein called the U.S tax system the hardest thing in the world to understand.
@lemgandi @rbreich To help pay my taxes this year, I used an open-source program I wrote named qrl. The stuff I got back from an accountant included a PDF file with a "how to pay" QR code. So I dragged the image into qrl, which then opened a browser to the link the QR code provided. qrl can ask before opening a link, so you can see the URL first, and can also just show the HTTP headers, including redirects. If redirects send you to "spies are us" before the final page, you'll know about it.