but they just won’t go away. I learned of a fiendish new wrinkle on the tax thing recently: city income taxes. I’d never heard of such a thing before. Why would a city do this to its inhabitants? This in itself is a good reason to move away, or not move to the city in the first place.
Also, the Michigan tax return is the most complex and irritating of the 3 state returns I’ve filled out over the years. It was more complex than the federal return. We had to include 3 supplementary schedules with the return, for the same information that Illinois managed to cope with in one short return plus a reasonably comprehensible partial-year resident schedule.
Somewhat disturbing is that many questionable points about taxes don’t have very clear-cut instructions–it seems to be open to interpretation, so no matter what you decide to do the IRS could potentially take exception to it. Very subtle.
Complaining aside, ours are almost done. At least it gave me something to do while I wait to find out where this school thing is going.
At least the city of Grand Rapids spends that tax money on worthwhile projects. You can tell by the pristine quality of city road syst–er, never mind.
Yeah, city taxes are dumb. And the roads down in the vicinity of Hall street are so unbelievably bad, I’m scared to drive my car anywhere near there.
Can I tell you how much I miss the Illinois state tax forms? They were simple perfection – you take your taxable income and multiply it by a small percentage to find out how much you owe the state – one page, front and back, end of story. Those were the days.
Here in “Taxachusetts,” the booklet for the state taxes is as large as the federal one, there are tons of schedules (included in some mysterious order that is anything but alphabetical), and we actually get to take deductions for things like student loan interest and rent. Of course, we haven’t even started on the state taxes for this year since I’ve been pulling my hair out over the federal taxes for weeks…
Finally, something that is unequivocally better about Illinois than about other states! Grand Rapids has definitely lost points with its terrible roads and city taxes. I wonder to whose attention I should bring my sense of dissatisfaction?