However, it is surprising that its excellence is actually appreciated.

> This is obviously some strange usage of the word inert that I wasn't previously aware of. The inert thing may cause injuries, while the non-inert thing will cause you to rest in pieces.

Why? Because you don't want to deal with the equivalent of a few bathtubs of spilled gasoline.

Spilled diesel fuel is a mess. Spilled gasoline is dangerous.

Pssst....guess what the IRS dealt with before electronic filing existed.

Yes, back then they had the (trained, experienced) workforce to deal with this amount of paper. I am pretty sure they fired most it when the work was no longer necessary due to electronic filing.

However, the power of 2 seems arbitrary to me,

It is not arbitrary!. Using the power of two allows a simple, possible even trivial analytical solution of the problem (Matlab and similar have it built-in and can do it in a single line).

Of course you could use other norms to minimize the regression error - l1 norm, linf norm or any other norm in between, or even any other norm you can come up with. But in these cases, you end up with optimization problems that do not have analytical solutions and require iterative approximation of the real solution (unless the problem is simple enough that it can be solved by inspection).

Reference: "Convex optimization" by Stephen Boyd and Lieven Vandenberghe.

The book covers regression problems with other norms than the l2 norm.

When you've gone so far left that everybody looks right wing, maybe the problem is you.

Compared to the political landscape in most other countries, the US has two major right-wing parties. And zero parties of importance that are left wing. Most people in the US (including most democrats) would probably get a heart attack if they talked to left-wing (or worse, extreme left-wing) people from other countries.

Just get a significant portion of the filers to file everything in paper. Preferably using forms printed with a broken printer and filled in so that they are human- but not machine readable.

Let them deal with 20 million returns on paper.

Taxation is Theft.

I can live with that, especially considering that a little bit of civilization is provided in return.

What I object to are mind-bogglingly complex, time-devouring, unreasonably expensive bureaucratic nightmares from hell that seem to be purposefully designed to create as much misery as possible.

So anyone that can't afford the commercial alternatives will have to resort to paper forms?

That's the plan. I mean, if you can show people more clearly that is sucks to be poor, maybe more of them will stop being poor? SCNR.

Sorry. This:

Oh, and none of the securities the money is invested in are registered with the local financial authorities, but not the SEC.

should be

Oh, and all of the securities the money is invested in are registered with the local financial authorities, but not the SEC.

Typically, prior years kids were $165/yr to file their little returns.

Now picture yourself living on a different continent, with the nearest accessible H&R block office being thousands of miles away, and all the correspondence with the local banks is in the local (non-English) language. Oh, and none of the securities the money is invested in are registered with the local financial authorities, but not the SEC.

Oh, and official translations of the correspondence are on the order of $0.20 per word.

In many countries there's no need to file taxes at all. My payroll deductions are withheld and paid to government by my employer. As I make no other taxable income, I have no paperwork to do at all.

You don't have any expenses that are tax deductible?

They may only exist in US military bases, depending on the country. If you are not affiliated with the US military, you will be shot, beaten, pepper sprayed and arrested (not necessarily in this order) if you try to go there.

More fuel for the dumpster fire that is known as "the US tax system".

It's already a version of hell for expats; this change means that you'll be paying hundreds or thousands of dollars just to prove that you don't owe any taxes. And this will be necessary even if you only make $15k a year.

The skies were less crowded back in the 1960s.

That alone simplifies traffic and scheduling significantly.