The other day while I stayed home with a nearly fatal head cold, I decided: If I have to feel this lousy, I might as well work on taxes. It can't get any worse.
How wrong can you get.
By the time I got to Line 4, Schedule A, Itemized Deductions, I was starting to wish I had some incredibly costly, incurable disease. Otherwise, I realized, I would never make the cutoff for a Medical and Dental Expenses deduction: 7.5 percent of income.
Leave it to the IRS to make taxpayers ponder the up-side of slow, lingering death and catastrophic medical expenses. Leave it to the IRS to make you wish you had malignant mavrogitis instead of a common, non-deductible cold.
Most taxpayers don't even know what major disease deductions they are missing by staying healthy and spending only 7.4 percent of their income on doctors' bills, pills and braces for the kids. Most taxpayers are too squeamish to lift the IRS-1040 rock and see what is slithering around under there. Most taxpayers know that doing your own taxes is like do-it-yourself surgery to donate a kidney. So two out of three taxpayers gather up shoeboxes of receipts, W-2's and those sinister envelopes that say ''Tax Document Enclosed,'' dump them on the first tax ''expert'' they see, then burn their rubber gloves and make a ritual sacrifice of dead presidents to appease the Almighty Tax Gods. About $200, on average.
Not me. I'm among the few, the cheap, the suicidally stupid, who actually figure out their own taxes.
This year, I even abandoned my computer training wheels and did it the Stone Age way: hand-to-hand combat, armed with nothing but three sharp pencils and a discouragingly honest calculator.
It wasn't by choice. Turbotax quit making programs for my model of PC because they no longer design software for computers that add and subtract on a notched stick and have color graphics that resemble cave paintings.
Never mind. I figured I'd have to wade at least eyebrow-deep into the tax-code swamp just to find out if I could claim a new computer as a deductible ''tax-preparation expense'' - so I might was well wade on through to the other side and wrestle all of the alligators that are eating my income alive.
It was ugly, but I survived. And I discovered some amazing things. Such as:
Those helpful charts of ''Estimated Preparation Time'' in the front of the tax booklets can be misleading. For example, it may say: ''Form 1936849(a.35): Home Computers as Tax Filing Expense - Preparation time, 1 hr., 18 min.''
What a joke. It actually takes more than 48 hours just to find a local library that has one last copy of Form 1936849(a.35) that has not been shoplifted by some dimwit who won't spend a dime to make his own copy because he has already discovered that library copying costs are not deductible (Form 1098634c.8236 - which is missing too).
Then it takes about four hours to wade through all the fine print, do the work sheets and follow instructions like this:
''Subtract line 832 from 1040-b3f04, add your age in dog years, divide by your weight (before New Year's resolutions) and add a splash of vermouth (see pub. 1499, 'Alcohol Fuels Tax') - if the result is greater than zero the answer is NO. If less than zero, it's still NO. If zero, what part of NO do you not understand?''
So, preparation time is relative. It may take 7 hrs. and 28 minutes to figure out that a form does not apply to any Americans born before or after the tax code revision of last week. But if you don't qualify, preparation time is the same as your deduction for a new computer: zero.
And once you figure out that the answer is always no, filling out the IRS-1040 is as quick and easy as being mugged: ''Whaddya got? Hand it over.''
Another thing I found out: WE PAY A LOT OF TAXES. By the time I subtract property taxes, city taxes, state taxes, federal taxes, Medicare and Social Security contributions, I get to keep 69 cents of every dollar I earn. And I have to spend another nickel of that on sales taxes and fees.
I would have paid all that with a smile, just to see the O.J. verdict crawl across the bottom of my TV screen during President Clinton's State of the Union address - flashing ''Guilty'' while he preached about campaign finance reform.
But no. My taxes probably covered one coffee break for the IRS boss who installed $4 billion worth of new computers that are as useless as my relic from the Smithsonian Computer Museum.
And I figured that out with a pencil.
The way I see it, doing your own taxes is a lot like some of those medical tests you have to take after age 40: painful, scary, puzzling and humiliating - but better than not knowing the truth.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
