Happy Taxation-Is-Theft Day!
Let us count the ways taxes distort our lives.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is engaging in some mildly awkward conversations about being a millionaire while constantly seeking to soak the rich. Which on this Tax Day, is kind of hilarious, so it's how we start this week's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch.
The gang talks this year's tax-refund confusions, Democrats' fuzzy tax math, Uncle Milty's greatest #fail, presidential-candidate tax disclosures, the gruesomely intrusive Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), and much more. Also under discussion: the forthcoming Mueller Report drop, Julian Assange's beard, Raymond Chandler's vocabulary, Reason's schmancy new website, and how all the nerds in Washington were watching Game of Thrones last night.
Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Mozart - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik allegro' by Advent Chamber Orchestra is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
Relevant links from the show:
"Nobody Thinks They've Gotten a Recent Tax Cut, but a Majority Have," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Happy Tax Day! Here Are 6 Infuriating Ways the Government Spends Your Money," by Joe Setyon
"I Got Stoned and Did My Taxes," by Liz Wolfe
"Starve the Tax Man," by J.D. Tuccille
"The Rise of the Low-Tax Socialists," by Peter Suderman
"Democrats Hate Wealthy Candidates…When They're Not Democrats," by Matt Welch
"Milton Friedman Helped Invent Income Tax Withholding," by Katherine Mangu-Ward
"Americans Keep Setting New Records for Renouncing Citizenship, and Tax Reform Threatens to Make it Worse," by Matt Welch
"The Coming Transparency Battle Over the Mueller Report," by C.J. Ciaramella
"MoveOn, Maddow Can't Move on From Mueller Worship," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Julian Assange and WikiLeaks Deserve Our Thanks for Making Governments More Transparent," by Nick Gillespie
"Julian Assange Is a Better Journalist Than Many of His Media Critics," by J.D. Tuccille
"Punishing Assange Isn't Worth Killing a Free Press," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"The Washington Establishment Seems Pretty Happy About Julian Assange's Arrest," by Joe Setyon
"What Game of Thrones Can Teach Us About Political Power," by Katherine Mangu-Ward
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Every year doing my taxes gets more complex. I'm sure I'm not claiming stuff I could be claiming, but I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars for a professional to do my taxes.
And I know one of these years I'll be audited for something tiny and inconsequential like forgetting to fill out a particular form for something. Sigh.
Where is Steve Forbes when you need him?
Well it certainly got more complicated this year.
They screwed around with the 1040 form so that politicians could claim it was "simplified" but all they did was move a bunch of the lines off of that form and created a bunch of new numbered schedules to move them to.
So now instead of using one form to fill out all the lines you need, you have to determine which one (or more) of the numbered schedules those lines were moved to and fill out those schedules as well.
Let's thank the Democrat Progressive Socialist party for giving America taxes.
Taxes fund a modern, successful, prosperous society.
"Taxation is theft" is a marker for an on-the-spectrum malcontent.
How much do you pay Rev?
I
I don't know this Keyser guy, but I'm pretty confident that Welch has whined about cutting taxes in the last year
Yes it was tax cuts don't pay for themselves. They are bad.
Yet taxes are theft...hummm
I'm still waiting to see my piece of the "tax cut" pie that some snake oil salesprick said was coming to me!
Taxation is extortion.
Government is the prime example of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It should be petty theft but the left wants it to be grand theft.