This just might turn into a rant. We'll see. I mailed off our corporate income tax forms this morning. Raven Aviation, Inc. is our little Subchapter S corporation that we have had for ten years or so. I have to fill out a form 1120-S and K-1 forms for Ginny and myself. This doesn't take me very long because our accounting is simple and over the years I have developed a spread sheet where I plug in the numbers we get from our Quickbooks accounting software. The first year I did this it took a long time. The tax code sucks. I could never do our personal income taxes without TurboTax. So anyway, I was paging through the instructions that come with the 1120-S form and found the above bit at the end of it.

Now bear with me on this. The first line in the table is the relevant one. First of all, the record keeping you would have to do anyway, so it doesn't count. The next three columns are the interesting ones. If you add them up you get 93 hours and 13 minutes. This is the estimated average time required to fill out the forms. Remember, the government lies, they really don't have a damn clue, but lets just assume they are right. Most Subchapter S corporations are a lot bigger than ours so they would have more complicated returns. They would probably pay an accounting professional to do this for them or have somebody on their staff they pay to do it. Let's assume that the cost of this support is $50 dollars per hour. That's probably low. Anyway, the makes the average cost of compliance $4660. So, I went to Wikipedia and looked up how many Subchapter S corporations there are. They estimate three million. That makes the cost of compliance for the industry $14 billion (BILLION!!!). That is non-productive work. All it does is feed money to the bastards in Washington who squander it on green energy and subsidizing GE. Remember that while Obama is busy vilifying the oil companies, his pet company, GE, pays NO TAXES! Remember that GE's CEO, Jeffrey Immelt is the head of Obama's jobs council. Coincidence, I am sure.

So here is why the tax code will never be simplified. The estimated man hours involved in compliance is 279 million man hours. Divide by an average work year of 2000 hours and you get 139,800 jobs being currently filled. That is a jobs program, by golly. The tax code will never be simplified because of all the lawyers and accountants that depend upon its complexity to keep them employed. No politican is going to pass legislation that puts these useless jobs out of business. They will put coal miners, pipeline construction workers and rocket scientists out of work, but certainly not bureaucratic non-contributors to the GDP. Remember, this is just one stupid form out of thousands of them. I'm getting a headache. I need another beer.

One more thing. Until this year there was a Schedule A on the 1120-S form where you did an inventory and cost of goods reconciliation. It was eight lines. This year they instituted a new form, 1125, to take care of that. It is the same damn eight lines that were on the old 1120-S form, but now it is its own form, just another damn thing you gotta go get to properly fill out your corporate tax returns. Who the hell comes up with this crap? Simple, bureaucrats! People who have no earthly idea about what it takes to make a buck. Out of touch is too kind, outer space is more accurate. Those silly ass politicans on both sides, and especially our President, talk about all this crap, but they keep driving the manure spreader to work every day. I thought about hiring some employees at one time, but when I looked into what it would take I said screw it. It is expensive and it is a bureaucratic nightmare.

While we are on the subject, let me tell you another thing. In his zeal to screw millionaires, Obama is fixing to start screwing retirees. If you have looked into it, you will know that you can move your rollover IRA money into Roth IRAs. Roth IRAs grow tax free and you pay no taxes on whatever you take out. The rollover is a different beast. All the money you take out is taxed as ordinary income. So if you take money out is is taxed at your marginal rate. Obama says nobody over $250,000 will see a tax increase. There are a lot of people who will wind up there just to take money out of their rollovers. And keep this in mind, taxes go up for everybody when the so called Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year. Don't bet the politicians are going to extend them. They are so deep in the shit right now that they have a great excuse to screw everybody. That is the half of us who actually pay income taxes at all. I don't know where Warren Buffet is coming from. It is easy for bazillionaires to be so glib about their money that they want higher taxes. Just remember that Warren Buffet has a whole regiment of tax accountants employed right now to minimize his tax bill. You will also notice that he is not going to voluntarily send in some extra money.

I was going to say I am sorry for the rant, but I am not. Washington is full of slime balls, every one of them and their damn staffers who actually write the legislation. The glorious 535 do not even read the stuff they vote on. Is this a great country or what.