Spring Time

I have never lived in a country that has actual winter until we came here. Here was the first time that I saw snow and experienced real cold temperatures (though not as cold as the Northern areas experience). Here is also the first time that I see and understand the meaning of a real spring. Back home, the winter is a sort of autumn, autumn and spring are mild versions of summer, and summer is unbearable version of it. What I see here now explains why so many holidays are related to the spring, and why spring is a symbol of life. During the winter, all the trees were without leaves. It took the first days of precipitation in a liquid form (i.e. rain) instead of snow to convince them that the worst is over and that they should get back to life. All of a sudden the world, that used to be colored by shades of gray and brown has been recolored with all sorts of colors: green for grass and shrubs, white, pink, red, and purple for the flowers on the trees and on the ground. On a nice day, like the one we had on Saturday, everything looks so beautiful, and then the true meaning of the word spring emerges: the world springs to life.

Naturally, not everything in life can be perfect. Thus, the American taxes season is upon us, and all the tax return forms are due April 15. Taxes here are much different than the ones we had in Israel. Firstly, there is an income tax at any level: federal, state, and local (city). Each one of them requires a different set of forms to be filled. Not only that, there are several variations for each form, and it is almost impossible to know which form to fill. For example, on the federal level the same form has the following types: for citizens, for resident aliens, and for non-resident aliens. To make it even more confusing, the residency of an alien is defined differently by the Internal Revenue Service (the IRS) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the INS). It turns out that you can be a non-resident in the eyes of the INS while still being deemed a resident alien by the IRS (I think that the other way around is impossible, but not sure of that). Furthermore, since there is a huge variety of non-resident visas, and the IRS considers each one differently for residency purposes, it is even more confusing. And if that is not enough, there are other forms that need to be filled out if you didn't have any income or if you changed status during the year.

On the state level it is approximately the same thing, only that here you have an even more complicated task: if you moved from state to another you are considered part-time resident. Since we came here in September we are part-time residents. However, we arrived from out of the country, and this is a completely different story, which I don't know how the local officials treat.
Then you have the locality tax. In Israel the locality gets its money from the tax on your property (Arnona). Here it's another form of income tax (perhaps there is a tax on your property too, I don't know).

I have had my taxes withheld during the year. It means that I receive a salary after some of the money is put aside by the university as part of the taxes I owe to the federal government, state and city. Apparently, this is not like in Israel where the payments are accurate and usually you don't need to do anything at the end of the year. Here they take a "rough" amount and in the end of the year you fill out the tax return and learn how much you still owe the government, or how much the government owes you. It turns out that the government owes me quite a large amount of money, almost half my withheld taxes. Strange.

Thinking about all the forms and paperwork sent by April 15 to the federal and state services just makes me shiver. Let's assume that there are about 200 million tax payers in America, and each one prepares a single federal tax return, a single state tax return and a single locality tax return. That's already 600 million forms, each with multiple pages. There goes some forests...
Then, someone has to read these forms and make sure that no one tried to pay too little or get too much money back. Assuming that it takes 10 minutes per form per person, 6 forms are processed each hour, making it 100 million work hours. The checks from the government(s) usually come back within 5-7 weeks, according to their site. This means that between 15-20 million hours are done each week, or 3-4 million hours a day, or between 300-400 thousand people are paid to do it. That's not including hierarchy and supporting personnel (IT, HR, administration). It is a safe idea to believe that for every official that checks a form there is at least one that is either above in the hierarchy or support this person's work. Thus, 600-800 thousand people, not including the 10% of hidden unemployment, redundancies and undesired bureaucracy.
These people are paid, their offices have electricity, heating and cooling, plumbing, and other necessary working conditions. The offices themselves are in buildings, taking up place and real estate value, usually within the downtown of some major city. I guess that the costs of these services are about $100K per person (at the very least, probably as much as twice that amount). So, it must cost about 50-100 billion dollars just to collect, process and return all the tax forms.

Perhaps collecting taxes as it is done in Israel would be much more efficient. Everything is collected upfront. There is little need for additional tax returns at the end of the year, and those who venture it usually are turned away with nothing, which deters people from actually trying to do it. This could save dozens of billions of dollars to the American tax payer. Come to think of it: this could save money to me!