 This is the story of both parties working together against us. The way Americans pay taxes is profoundly stupid and absurd. It is so flagrantly dumb, both parties are forced to agree here, from Reagan and Trump on the right to Obama and Bernie on the left. Everyone's on the same page, yet this problem keeps getting worse. Here's what happened. It's the 90s. The internet is created. Suddenly we can all file our taxes online, which could save the IRS millions of dollars because paper returns are a nightmare. So Congress decides it's time to modernize the IRS, and there are two ways to do this. Two ideas so exceedingly simple and obvious, we're going to pretend that this goat came up with them. That's right. It's just like TurboTax, only without TurboTax. You file directly on the IRS website. If you don't like the service they offer, you can still use TurboTax if you want Very simple, or idea number two. Reagan had this idea all the way back in 1985, so I'll let him explain. We envision a system where more than half of us would not even have to fill out a return. You would automatically receive your refund or a letter explaining any additional tax you owe. Should you disagree with this figure, you would be free to fill out your taxes using the regular form. What Reagan is saying is the IRS already does our taxes, so when we do them they're just making us play guess what number I'm thinking of. It's an unnecessary redundancy, like the phrase shrimp scampi. Why not have the IRS just send us our taxes? Scampi means shrimp. You're just saying shrimp, shrimp. Thirty-six other countries already have systems like this in place. It would save us and the government time and money, but we'll never get it. And this is where TurboTax and H&R Block come in. At first glance, these companies seem like Ben Affleck from the accountant. Super smart, math wizard, you kickass. But after a closer look, you'll see they're a bit more like Ben Affleck. TurboTax and H&R Block need taxes to stay stupid and complicated. Anything that saves us money costs them money, so they had to kill those policies. And in order to do so, they pulled a real Ben Affleck. They assembled Earth's mightiest embarrassments, 12 tax prep companies who call themselves the Free File Alliance, and they waged an all out war on common sense. Over the past two decades, they have spent millions upon millions of dollars lobbying Congress to great effect and to keep these movie references rolling, it was almost an Ocean's 11-style heist. They snuck into our legislation, repealed the stuff we liked, replaced it with policies that scam us, and snuck out without anyone realizing Ben Affleck was never in that movie. It's called Free File. It's supposed to let 70% of us file online for free. Only 3% of us use it. Here's how this epic scam works. When you go to a tax prep website, for example TurboTax, you will see TurboTax free edition. You could be forgiven for thinking the free edition is free, because it's called free, and it says free, guaranteed, and it all seems very, very free. It's not. The free version of TurboTax is called TurboTax Freedom. It's really hard to find on their website because it's not there. In fact, it's nearly impossible to find. You'd have to Google it by name, but how would you know what it's called? It's not mentioned on their website, so you'd probably Google something like TurboTax free, which will return you to the non-free version. Fun fact, if you Google free TurboTax, you'll turn up all kinds of results about how TurboTax actually hides its free version from Google searches. TurboTax is funneling people into their paid services. For example, say you made $30,000 last year, but you didn't have health insurance. Well you have to pay to submit that form. Or say you were a private contractor, like a house cleaner, you'd have to pay for that. Or say you wanted to itemize your deductions, like a teacher does, you'd have to pay for that. All of these people are eligible to file their taxes for free, but they end up paying because TurboTax hides that service from them. It all amounts to taxes that are more expensive and time-consuming for the people who can afford at least. Meanwhile, TurboTax's billionaire addition just wires your money directly into a suitcase handcuffed to this guy in the Cayman Islands. This free file system has failed us for 20 years. Yet every few years, Congress has to renew the agreement. So every few years, Congress has a chance to get it right, but they never do. This issue is a perfect example of something we'll call the stupidity paradox. It's a catch-22 that traps our policies in a cycle of utility and corruption. And the way it went down in tax land is just so dumb. One, legislators craft bad policies like tax policy that, two, cost us time and money. So we, three, spend our money on places like TurboTax. And those companies, then, four, use our money to lobby Congress so that, one, these are dumb and stupid that, two, cost us money, et cetera. It's just a, you know, you get it. It's a cycle. Yeah, sure, tax prep is not the most important issue we face as a country. But the stupidity paradox is, in a broken system, every policy is trapped in that cycle of utility, whether it's education, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, debt, the environment, you name it. The cumulative effect of that is devastating. Our political system has been completely overpowered by special interests. Money is more powerful than common sense. It's more powerful than public support or bipartisan consensus. It's more powerful than three ex-presidents who all vowed to fix this problem. It's more powerful than the very ideals our nation was founded on that our government should be of, by, and for the people. We have to fix this problem for Republicans, for Democrats, for everyone's sake.