 Income tax 2023-2024. Why and how to learn tax law. Get ready and some coffee because we're going to stop the tax man in his tracks with income tax preparation 2023-2024. Whenever learning a new topic, the first question that comes to mind is why? Why learn tax preparation? Why learn tax law? And the response which gushes out of every American heart every American soul is to save money from the dumpster fire that is government spending pulling her into the promised land of the private sector where she can grow, where she can flourish rather than being burnt as a sacrificial offering to the gods of big government boondoggles. Alright I might have got a little bit dramatic there but that's probably the first thing that comes to mind saving some money. Our next objective to be in compliance with the law. When we're talking about tax law that of course means paying the taxes that were legally required to pay and being in compliance with filing requirements were legally required to do. You might think that these first two objectives are contradictory to each other but they're not really because our objective in tax preparation will often be to pay the least amount of taxes that we are legally required to pay. Because of the complexity of the income tax system it's quite easy to accidentally pay more taxes than you're legally required to pay which means that you've sacrificed more of that money to the dumpster fire of government spending and government boondoggles and is it likely that you're going to be getting that money back? Probably not. So our objective is to get it right the first time. Now you might argue about whether or not you agree with particular tax laws and we'll talk a little bit more about this in a second. But if you know the tax system and you know the tax law and tax preparation you'll be better informed to have discussions with people about what the best kind of tax system would be and the rationale for it and you can make those types of arguments once again within the compliance of the law. You might also be learning taxes because you want to be in business doing tax preparation in some way shape or form. If that is the case then I would think that you would want to narrow down your focus to think about what that exactly looks like. Oftentimes I find that when we think about goals we have a very broad type of idea of the goal which we really need to narrow down into particular steps so that we can go onto an objective that we can actually achieve. So for example are we thinking about doing tax preparation at another firm or are we thinking about having our own business where we can do tax preparation. Is there an area that we can specialize in? Taxation itself is huge so generally you're going to want some kind of specialization. You might specialize for example in lower income tax returns in which case the business model will typically be you're going to be charging less for the preparation but you're going to be doing a lot more of them so you're going to make less money per return but you're going to have to do more returns in that case or you do tax preparation for larger or more wealthy individuals in that instance then they have more complex returns generally. You're going to make more per return and possibly do more work in planning and tax preparation as well as tax planning type of services in that instance. You can also specialize in certain areas. Do you want to specialize in for example one location where you don't have a bunch of different state tax returns or possibly you want to specialize where you have multiple state tax returns and possibly income in different areas for an income are different types of areas you can specialize. You also might be more interested on the business side of things versus the personal side of things. Doing business tax returns, tax returns that have a schedule C for sole proprietorship or an S corporation flow through entities like an LLC or corporate type return partnership type of returns. Oftentimes people with accounting backgrounds like myself tend to enjoy that side of things because you get to use more of the double entry accounting system. So in any case highly recommend that if you're looking to start working in some area of taxation that you start breaking down the goals to particular steps and I think that'll make it easier to move forward. Now some other questions that come up with relation to tax law that might not be as obvious are what is the purpose of government? Who should pay for government services? So what is just? What is fair? What are these terms even mean? Oftentimes people think of these kind of questions as possibly more interesting than tax law, than tax preparation, than tax code. What is the government for? What's the best kind of system? Should we be more capitalistic or should we be more communistic or socialistic type of business? Should the government be running more of the private sector? Should the government be distributing money in some type way, shape or form? Those are kind of interesting questions that come up all the time, but again they seem to come up in some kind of an abstract type of format. When you get down to the nitty gritty of it, when you get down to what does that actually work, taxes are going to play a crucial role in that as we've seen all the way through the founding of the United States for example, which was primarily based on tax arguments was one of the big topics as a colony. So when we get into the questions of how is a government taxing, it's going to touch in on a lot of these questions that people seem to think of as more interesting than taxation. So for example, in politics you will often hear people using words such as just or fair to describe many different things and oftentimes to describe the tax system. They will say things like we need to have a just tax system. We need to have a fair tax system and learning more about tax law I think will get us better at basically being able to pick out those key words and trying to hone down on them and ask critical questions rather than having these broad blanket statements that are in essence meaningless. In other words, no one argues that you should not have a just tax system. No one argues that you should not have a fair tax system.