One year, I had to spend a good deal of time working around a cycle in my taxes--VA wanted me to do my CA taxes first and CA wanted me to do my VA taxes first, and the instructions that explained how to handle this situation were only one on the one form that needed to be used to solve it, with nothing telling you maybe you should look for that form instead.
Furthermore, there's quite a few cases where the instructions basically tell you "fill in the number that belongs here" without giving a good idea of what numbers actually belong there. Here is an example of such an instruction in its entirety:
> Enter in line 5 the amount of pension, annuities, IRA/Keogh distributions not taxed on your Massachusetts Form 1.
The hard part of taxes isn't knowing whether or not to add or subtract two lines. It's knowing which lines shouldn't be 0!
It's not about knowing the income sources. It's about knowing how those income sources fit into the tax rules. Put differently, for the purposes of taxes, your money has a kaleidoscope of colors, with different colors incurring different tax rules, and most people are to a degree colorblind when it comes to their money's colors. Not completely colorblind, but trying to work out if your color is mauve or magenta, for example.
The solution to this of course is to simplify the tax code so that you don't have so many colors to your money. I very much would love to see this happen, but it will produce howls of protests from every special interest group who benefits from special tax advantage to their interests.
One year, I had to spend a good deal of time working around a cycle in my taxes--VA wanted me to do my CA taxes first and CA wanted me to do my VA taxes first, and the instructions that explained how to handle this situation were only one on the one form that needed to be used to solve it, with nothing telling you maybe you should look for that form instead.
Furthermore, there's quite a few cases where the instructions basically tell you "fill in the number that belongs here" without giving a good idea of what numbers actually belong there. Here is an example of such an instruction in its entirety:
> Enter in line 5 the amount of pension, annuities, IRA/Keogh distributions not taxed on your Massachusetts Form 1.
The hard part of taxes isn't knowing whether or not to add or subtract two lines. It's knowing which lines shouldn't be 0!