Pay Your Taxes and Win!

Americans are a very duty-conscious people. We see paying taxes as “doing our share,” yet we see little or no direct improvement in our own lives. The money seems to disappear, rather like what happened with America’s tech-boom dotcoms, many of which had no business substance beyond a mission statement and a smile for the investors. We all saw how that worked out, as billions of dollars worth of stock value and investor capital vanished, and people wondered what happened to all that money.  This is the root of many folks’ general discontent with income tax.

Congress, perceptive people that they are, took note of Americans’ negative feelings about the tax collection process in the late 1990s. They determined the problem was that taxpayers felt the IRS was not helpful. Worse, taxpayers felt the IRS was mean to them. Congress could not stand for this situation, and passed the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998. The intended result was to remake the IRS into a “kinder, gentler” tax collection agency.

Indeed. The IRS changed its rhetoric to reflect its new persona, and its publications now include all types of warm, fuzzy sentiments and exclamation points in sentences that did not end with the words “pay immediately.” Never before had anyone seen the phrase “What a deal!” appear in an IRS document. It was a step in the right direction, but I’m pretty safe in assuming that the American taxpayer doesn’t buy this ham-handed attempt to inspire a higher degree of “voluntary compliance” with the tax code. All the IRS has really done is dress an 800-pound gorilla in a pink tutu. A vicious beast remains so, regardless of how it’s dressed. The result is an unhappy group of IRS agents, seething behind the “customer service” front they have been forced to adopt, and a taxpaying public whose intelligence is being insulted.