HUMOR

How to Make Paying Your Taxes Fun

You Can Take the Pain Outta Payin’!

Photo by Olga DeLawrence on Unsplash

Paying your taxes is like taking a laxative — you get cleaned out and wind up crying in the bathroom. But it doesn’t need to be this way. After all, you’re doing your own small part to keep our country running (into the ground). With a few simple tricks, you can make tax day feel as good as pay day would feel if you got a fair wage.

• Fill out a fake 1040 with a really high income to impress the NSA agents watching you through your webcam.
• Pretend your wealthy cousin is paying a higher effective tax rate than you.
• Try to decipher the bank account numbers of well-connected tax cheats that an embittered IRS agent encoded in the instructions for Schedule C.
• Remind yourself that it’s good to not get a refund, because that means you withheld correctly, and that you have less to lose in the next Ponzi scheme you fall for.
• Try not to remind yourself that the government has yet to put your tax dollars to work prosecuting your wealthy cousin for running the last Ponzi scheme you fell for.
• Use any scrap paper you generate to burn your wealthy cousin in effigy.
• Reassure the NSA agents that your burning of your cousin in effigy was entirely due to personal issues with your cousin and in no way reflects how you feel about your capitalist overlords in general.
• Enter ‘666’ on line 11 of Schedule A to summon the Dark Lord Deducteron, Defiler of Taxes, then pretend it was an accident and you really did donate $666 to charity (make sure to say it was a sham charity that kicked some of the money back to you, though, or Deducteron will suck out your soul).
• Be glad you don’t have any foreign sourced income, because that form looks terrible and you’re already on thin ice with the NSA.
• Re-summon Lord Deducteron and beg him to fly you back to his lair beneath the Cayman Islands. Sure, it smells of decaying souls and fish sauce, but at least Deducteron won’t siphon your tax dollars into the military-industrial complex (no promises about your rent dollars).