I love taxes.
I relish doing my own taxes; I wake up every New Year’s like Ned Flanders, eager to fill out my 1040 as soon as possible and impatient that I don’t have my W-2 yet. But it’s more than that. I cut my teeth as a reporter on the budget battles of Obama’s first term, much of which hinged on the fate of Bush’s tax cuts, set to expire in 2010 and then again in 2012.
Even earlier, when I was in middle school, I remember my mom ordering me to go to bed when I was staying up late on my lime green iBook trying to draft a new tax code; the problem wasn’t that I was up too late but that I was getting too angry at the state of the tax code and she thought I could use some rest.
So it’s probably unsurprising that I wound up volunteering for VITA: the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, an IRS-led endeavor in which local nonprofits provide tax preparation services free of charge. The services are aimed at people with limited English, disabilities, and/or income below $60,000. That’s obviously a lot of people, and the office gets busy, particularly as the mid-April deadline approaches.
I’ve volunteered for four years now; some of my VITA colleagues have been at this for decades. It’s immensely rewarding, but it’s also changed the way I think about, and write about, the tax code.
Reporting on congressional fights about taxes gives you an excellent view of why the code is the way it is from policymakers’ point of view. That’s a good vantage point for understanding how the code came to be, but a bad one for understanding how well the code is working.
If a 23-year-old office cleaner were to ask me to explain why she can’t get the earned income tax credit (EITC), the main tax provision meant to help working people near the poverty line, I could recall my old reporting and say that it’s because she’s too young and has no kids; childless people didn’t get the EITC at all until 1993 — and then only because Rep. Charles Rangel…
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