If line 18 is larger than the difference between line 4 and line 34 ...

 

I just mailed in my 2022 tax return.  

To many of you, that sounds like announcing that I've just re-whitewashed the privy, or plucked the chicken for dinner tonight.  Do people still mail in tax returns?  In this day of on-line, electronic filing?  In this day of commercial services who do it all for you? 

Yes, a few of us still do.  And the government humors us by making all the forms and instructions available on-line, where they can be consulted and printed.  What the government will not do anymore is mail out a package to each taxpayer in January with all the necessary forms and instructions included.  You have to hunt them out on-line, and have a workable printer attached to your computer.

The feds are willing to humor me, but not do anything that might encourage me in my folly.

I should assure you that I'm not really a luddite.  I pay bills on-line.  I bank on-line.  I carry event tickets and boarding passes on my iPhone.  I even blog, for god's sake.

But I've always enjoyed preparing my own tax returns.  It offers me an opportunity once a year to review my gains and losses in some detail, and to evaluate my present financial status.  It also offers me an opportunity to prove to myself, annually, that I can still work my way through the ever-increasing complexity of the IRS's instructions and forms -- to prove to  myself that, despite what family members may suspect, I'm not yet a prey to Alzheimer's, or even common dementia.  

Unless a desire to fill out your own tax returns is itself prima facie proof of dementia.

One innovation I do like is the ability to fill in the forms on my computer, and thus compile a neat, highly readable return.  Archival research reveals that my first computer-typed return, as opposed to hand-scrawled, was 2010.  I certainly wasn't the first to adopt this innovation, but hardly the last.  That fact has to count in my favor to some extent, I argue.

I pull two copies of each form off my computer, once it's filled in.  One gets filed, and the other goes into my financial records.  The IRS recommends, I believe, that the taxpayer keep a copy of his return for seven years.  More is better, I say.  I have every return back to 1972.  Not out of fear that an audit of a return I submitted when I was still wet behind my ears will reveal errors, I hasten to assure you.  Just because it's fun to collect them.  Yes, as a boy I was a stamp collector.  There's some relationship between the two compulsions. 

Well, that's all.  I make no attempt to persuade all you good, modern folks to emulate my filing by mail of your tax returns.  It's a personal quirk, one of which I'm neither proud nor ashamed.  I just thought I'd come clean, and let you all know the facts.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I want to spend some quality time running my fingers through all 52 years of paper tax returns -- admiring my increasing income over the decades, even though it resulted primarily from inflation -- before moving on to other subjects for another year.