I find it surreal you even need to file taxes.

I mean, companies already tell the government how much they pay you and how much tax they withheld. Unless you need to claim back taxes because of, say, medical expenses or charitable donations, there should be no need for us to even be concerned with such things.

And even for the deduction case, the standard deduction is now large enough that I'd be surprised if the percentage of those itemizing deductions vs. taking the standard deduction to be quite low double digits. In fact, I wouldn't be shocked if it were single digits.

IOW, send me my Norwegian-style postcard with the amount I owe, and quit catering to corner cases. (Oh, wait, Intuit's profits probably aren't a corner case, eh?)

Yeah, but that would unfairly punish the citizens who are better able to optimize our intentionally byzantine code of deductions and write offs!

Yup. Having to take the time to manually file the taxes is itself a tax.

A system where you have to guess how much tax you have to pay so the government who already knows how much tax you have to pay tells you if you paid the right amount of tax

And if you get the answer wrong, you potentially pay penalties (another tax)

Quite a bit of US economic activity is middleman busywork. Tax prep, private insurers, excessive financialization of various forms, etc.

That means USA has a worker surplus.

Surplus of useless roles but a shortage of workers for useful roles (healthcare workers, teachers, trades, rail and truck transportation, etc). Labor ain’t fungible.