Leonard’s Tax-Time Meltdown
- Leonard Wibberley
- Mar 31
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
By Leonard Wibberley
First Published in The Daily Breeze on March 23, 1980
4/12/2025
Like you, I have been going through the maze of my income tax forms and have retired to bed for the day with a supply of tea and aspirin and instructions to all hands to turn off the radio and the television and close all doors softly.
I have a growing belief that IRS forms are designed each year in a secret consultation with the Department of Health Education and Welfare (HEW) not only to extract the needed taxes from the public but also to provide a test of mental stamina or emotional balance for every taxpayer in the nation.
The names and Social Security numbers of those who flub the test—whose forms are, for instance, marked by tear stains or besmirched by blood, or smell heavily of tobacco smoke or pot, are plainly emotionally unstable.
It is not hard to spot these tests of stamina on the IRS forms. Take Schedule D, Part V, Line 33, for example—and it is an example I have picked at random. Line 33 says, “Enter loss shown on line 8; if none, enter zero and skip lines 34 through 38—then go to line 39.
I went happily to line 39. It read, “Subtract line 37 from line 36” - but added quickly, “Note: If you skipped lines 34 through 38, enter amount from line 23b.”
Line 23b was divided into three sections, the first of which said: “Enter here and enter as a loss on Form 1040, line 14, the smallest of: I) The amount on 23a, II) $3,000 ($1,500 if married and filing a separate return) or III) Taxable income as adjusted.”
That threw me because it was to find out what was my taxable income as adjusted that I was going carefully through these forms. The amount of 23a is impossible for me to determine.
One of its requirements reads, “If line 8 is zero or a net gain, enter 50 percent of line 21.”
It was about this point that I remembered having done all this before in my childhood. We used to play a game called “Snakes and Ladders.” Each player took turns at rolling one of a pair of dice.
He then moved his counter the number of squares indicated. If his counter came to the foot of the ladder, he zoomed to the top of it. If the counter came to the mouth of a snake, he went all the way down to the bottom of the board again.
The same thing happened to me with my income tax, which I now realize was designed not only in cooperation with HEW but also with the gentleman who invented “Snakes and Ladders.”
When I had filled in all the parts of all the forms, there was that great big red serpent with the gaping jaws awaiting and·I went all the way down to the bottom with a penalty of $5,176.43 for making that last throw of the dice.
I know that it’s all necessary and you can’t run governments without taxes and you can’t make up tax forms which are so simple that anyone can understand them because that means that anyone can cheat and that’s naughty naughty.
But after I had mailed off my check and was lying shivering in bed with the hot beef tea and the television turned off, I wondered whether the whole thing wouldn’t be more pleasant if we each of us got a nice letter each year from the president about how our particular tax check would be spent.
Something like “Dear Len: Thank you so much for your check, which I notice is a little less than last year. Are you quite sure you are working hard enough? Some of us, as we get older, tend to slack off a bit but that only accelerates the aging process, so I hope you’ll really put your shoulder to the wheel next year and send us a larger check as a result.
“Now, as to how we intend to spend your $5,176.43, you realize, of course, that over $1,000 of that will have disappeared by the time we process the check due to what is called inflation. I’ll be quite honest with you and admit that none of us here understands what inflation is, but we have several theories about it nonetheless and you may be sure we will hire the highest paid economists in the nation in an attempt to find a solution to this pressing problem.
“We look forward to a great number of interesting reports on the subject. The payment of the experts and the printing and distribution of the reports, including cost of ink, paper, gasoline and so on will, I suspect, take $523.12 out of the amount you have so generously sent us…’’
(Image by Grok.)
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Great column! Too funny.