[Fat Charlie]

I don't really care about my own taxes, because my life is pretty simple. So any time a politician says his new tax proposal is going to help me, the voter, I wonder who it's actually going to help, and I know it's not who he says it will. Whatever I'm being offered, I know it's a smokescreen because I don't have a lobbyist, I'm just the end user being fed these sound bites.

Lots of people owe, or have reduced refunds this year because of last year's "guidance" from the IRS to employers on payroll deductions. The guidance wasn't with the John Q. Public's interest in mind, it was meant to inflate the apparent size of tax cuts by giving people bigger paychecks immediately.

This month the IRS is pointing out that the average refund is down only $20 this year, but they're not pointing out that more people owe this year. It adds up: at the end of March 2019, $6 billion less had been paid out in refunds than at the end of March 2018.

We do gas mileage math here, so we don't like using fake numbers or ignoring inconvenient ones. In reporting only the average refund this year while ignoring the people who got refunds last year but now owe, isn't the government putting out fake numbers, albeit phrased truthfully? We like ABA testing here, let's apply it here: List everyone who got a refund last year, and post the average. Now take those same taxpayers this year (including the ones who owe) and do the same, reporting the people who owe as negative numbers for the refund size. Feel free to not count people who had other changes than the new tax law. The number of the average refund would be much more than $20 lower, but we would at least be comparing apples to apples. I'm supposing that people who owe this year were at the lower end of the refunds last year, so that's a double benefit to the average size this year- we're not counting a negative and also got rid of their low sized refunds.

The Fuel Shark claims 50% to 75% fuel savings. I wouldn't simply tack its claimed savings onto my calculations, I'd actually measure miles travelled and fuel pumped. Let's not claim that a "simple" proposed plan would be best and actually look at what it does.

Redpoint, claim your daughter as disabled. Go ahead. IANAL, you're on your own.

Xist, I really hope for the year where your income helps you. You jump through enough hoops as it is, it seems tax time only adds insult to injury.

Oil Pan- I'm hugely in favor of raising the standard deductible, but again, I wonder about the huge deductibles it's hiding. The system is rigged against people who take it- for every dollar "given away" by the standard deductible, how many more are given away by harder to find deductibles that get hidden by issuing debt? I own that government debt that's being issued to cover the fat cats' bigger deductions. Hardly a selling point to me.