 Income Tax 2021-2022. Why and how to learn tax law? Get ready because we're setting refunds to the max with Income Tax 2021-2022. Why learn tax law? For most people the answer would be that they want to save money and they want to be in compliance with the tax law. So we want to make sure that we're doing what we need to do meeting our obligations under the law for filing requirements as well as paying our taxes but not paying more taxes than we're required to pay under the law therefore the objective will be to meet our obligations for filing and pay the minimum amount of taxes that were legally required to pay. These are going to be the objectives for most people in the United States. If you work in the industry of taxation either in a CPA firm or tax firm or you have your own business and it's related to possibly taxation and or some type of consulting then you are generally getting revenue or trying to generate revenue by helping people meet the objectives above of complying with the tax code and paying the minimum amount of tax that they're legally required to pay. So this is the most common type of objectives that we would be coming up with with regards to the tax law and while those are important and practical reasons for learning tax laws they're not as intrinsically motivating of reasons in other words most people think of taxes as kind of like a hurdle that they need to go around they want to think about it as little as possible as they go around it and then continue on their path towards whatever they're doing even if we're working in the field of taxation many people think of it as just a series of steps that they need to mechanically do in order to just generate revenue and especially if you're working in the field of taxation it could be a lot more enjoyable if you look at some more kind of intrinsic reasons for learning the tax laws one way to do that is to think about tax law as government policy made manifest these are the actual steps the end products of the government and when judging a government like when judging an individual you really want to look at the actions and put a lot of emphasis on the actions what they're actually doing as opposed to what they're actually saying and the tax law is a huge component of what the government does not just to generate revenue to do what they need to do such as defense and so on but also to influence us in certain ways so whenever the tax law goes into place we can ask the question well why did that tax law go into place what are they trying to do with that type of tax law what is this action that they actually did mean and how did it get put into place and when you're thinking about other types of areas and you're trying to compare and contrast say one country to another country or one state to another state you can tell a whole lot about those places by following the money and with the government the money is followed through the tax code so for example in a democratic republic we often ask questions to ourselves and compare ourselves to other countries asking questions such as how should we judge our government what is the purpose of government what should government do what is justice what is fair these are questions that we often see raised in things like news outlets news outlets being a form of entertainment forms of entertainment that are used to generate revenue just like any other form like a Netflix or anything else the fact that we see these kind of questions on news outlets is a reflection that people are interested in them that's why they're there and so and that's good that we're interested in them but obviously when you see them in an entertainment type of platform we don't really get a step back or a nuanced view we get the view that is going to basically generate ratings typically so you're often not going to get a view of the actual policy oftentimes or say something as mundane to most people as the tax code but the tax code is a huge component of the way governments influence people so when we ask these types of questions if we were to take a step back and think of them in a more objective way we would be looking at things like the tax code if we were comparing state to state which state is doing better well let's look at the money let's look at the tax code from this state to another state that was the purpose of the United States so that we can have different states run their own tax system as almost a testing ground to see which states are doing better and worse and a lot of that can be looked at as following the money how how are the taxes being affected what's the influence on the economy as the taxes are affected in that way if you want to see if something is a a tyrannical type of place versus more of a free type of place oftentimes you can tell a lot about that but by looking at the money and how the money is going to be collected so and and when you look at these topics down here these two words are kind of catch words that we have to often be careful of when someone says something that's fair the term fair is often a catch phrase that basically carries all the weight so you'll often see say politicians talking about the tax code with no nuance whatsoever just saying I want a tax code that it's fair and the problem of course is that of course you do everybody does no one's going to disagree with a tax code that is fair the problem is what is fair the word fair is covering all of all of the all of the weight carrying all the heavy load there because fair could be anything to any different person it's a very vague form of language what you really want to do is dive into the actual tax law see what is being done why it is being done and then define your terms what does fair mean and then dig into some of these kind of topics so if so the tax law can be a huge a huge way to look at that in in recent years here we've had of course the pandemic and the response to the pandemic a huge component of the response to the pandemic has been with the tax law changes to the to the tax code even before the pandemic we had changes to the tax code so as you can see the tax law changes that is a huge indication of basically what the current what the current system is generating in terms of what's manifesting through the through the policy that the policy and having a more nuanced look of it is can be quite you know interesting in answering some of these questions that people often see as more internally interesting how do we learn tax law then I would say the best way is to question it to engage with it if you're just thinking about the tax law as a passive observer of the tax law and just going through a series of steps that doesn't mean anything to you it's going to be more difficult to kind of internalize make it interesting and when you have questions say from clients if you're working in the field of taxation the client wants to know more than just basically this is what you do because that's the way they said what to do obviously when we're just filling out the tax code that's enough to fill out the tax code but really when you hear these kind of questions people are asking the types of questions we looked at above is that fair why is the tax code put together that way that's the stuff that's more intrinsically interesting it's the stuff that kind of sticks into your mind a little bit more so we want to question it we want to reason with it we want to debate the law we want to argue with the law why because it's going to help us to understand the law a little bit more it'll help that law to stick in our mind it'll help us to talk to clients and other people about the tax law it'll help us to understand what the end result of government policy is a large part of that being following the money which of course is going to be the tax law and the tax law is used for more than just revenue generation it's also used to try to influence our behavior and so on so it's a huge component we should be questioning those types of things because it's applicable it makes it easier to remember and because it's more fun