I'm 40 and have never had to do a tax return, I get a summary at the end of the year and a breakdown on each pay slip and that's pretty much it.

It's one of those silent services that government does so well it pretty much disappears into the background.

Only in exceptional circumstances does a normal waged employee have to have anything to do with taxes.

Until I was self-employed in my 30s I never filled out a tax form. Some people never do.

You're being swindled in the US.

Norway just asks upfront. Yes, I have to try to predict what I'm going to make that year, but yes, I can update it if I change jobs. Marriage, children, etc all gets factored in. If I don't change things, I think it stays the same. The vast majority of folks don't have to self-assess like Americans do, and thinking that we need to do it more seems to be more leaning towards an attitude of Exceptionalism - which seems to be just as much an excuse as it is something folks have pride in.

We're being swindled in the US by a lot of things. Tax prep as you mentioned, but also health care guaranteed sick pay, fair minimum wages, etc...

But half the country is actually in favor of maintaining all this.

This is by design, in the US the anti-tax crowd wants filing taxes to be harder and more inefficient. It serves their purposes. And they are a powerful lobbying group.

Not including sales tax actually demonstrates more clearly the result of anti-tax sentiment, though I'm still not convinced it is lobbying itself that does this. Instead, the same sort of folks go into politics and directly get involved in making laws about this sort of thing. Of course, this is built on a long-standing anti-tax sentiment in the US that folks tie into an "origin story" of sorts (taxation from England minimally helped spur the revolution).

And they do have a point: The more of a pain a tax is for the taxpaper, the more they think about disliking taxes. But it doesn't realistically go that far: We do all sorts of things to make paying taxes easier for folks. Gasoline prices include all taxes (from federal down to sales tax). Payroll taxes are deducted from your paycheck. Stores collect sales tax instead of you sending it to the government. Prepaid phone plans still have taxes included and renters don't pay for property tax directly.And so on.

> Doing taxes keeps citizens aware of the tax burden imposed upon them by the government.

https://theweek.com/articles/825902/how-republicans-trapped-...