The Behavioral Psychology of Why Taxes Suck

Income taxes in the US are due today. The mind-bending complexity of the tax code combined with the all-too-human tendency to seek exemptions by every sort of interest group, no matter how obscure, has created a system from which the bulk of the population believes every undeserving cause but their own is deriving illicit and immoral benefit. This has resulted in a population filled with anger, frustration, anxiety and depression. Which makes you wonder what lobbying group figured out they'd benefit from this state of affairs. JL

Danielle Venton reports in Wired:

It’s too much information; people can’t make a rational decision - created by citizens’ psychological tendency to mis-evaluate their own economic self-interest. With a population this big and a tax code so massive, it gets thorny to balance the economic push-and-pull with the massive difficulty of predicting—and controlling—human behavior. For behavioral scientists this  is a no brainer: Make something harder for people, and they are less likely to do it.
You’re finished, right? Totally painless?
It could have been so much easier. The US tax code is oversized, under-efficient and an all-around pain in the neck. And it’s your fault. Mine, too, to be honest.
Here’s the thing: The people who build careers out of thinking about how to improve tax policy generally agree on what would make the system better—behavioral economists, that is, not partisan politicians. The government should close loopholes in the tax code and use the boost in revenue to lower overall tax rates.
But Americans throw a fit when anyone tries to close their favorite loopholes. So instead we have a kludge, a political perversion, created by citizens’ psychological tendency to mis-evaluate their own economic self-interest. That’s how it seems, anyway, to the mind of an economist. (It might be dismal, but it’s still a science.)
The government uses the tax code to covertly adjust societal priorities. But with a population this big and a tax code so massive, it gets thorny to balance the (relatively) simple science of economic push-and-pull with the massive difficulty of predicting—and controlling—human behavior.
The result? “People make economic decisions based on the tax code, not the economics of the situation,” says Thomas Hungerford, senior economist and director of tax and budget policy at the Economic Policy Institute. His particular pet peeve is the mortgage interest deduction, which lets new home buyers deduct mortgage interest from their taxable income. It’s supposed to encourage home ownership—a priority that, in itself, one could argue with, but one that has gotten tied up in notions of American Dreams and whatnot.
Either way, in practice the mortgage interest deduction “has the bizarre incentive of encouraging people to buy bigger homes than they probably really need,” Hungerford says, while having no impact on homeownership rates. That drives up housing prices whether you own a home or rent, subsidizes the real estate industry, contributes to the national debt, and disproportionately benefits the wealthy. Which, come to think of it, all sounds sort of familiar.
Tax policy director Ryan Ellis at Americans for Tax Reform (a conservative taxpayer advocacy group) has a problem with the wide array of retirement products—IRAs, Roth IRAs, SEP IRAs, SIMPLE IRA and 401(k)s.
“It’s too much information; people can’t make a rational decision,” Ellis says. “So what happens predictably is that people don’t save it. It burns a hole in their pocket and they go out to dinner with their wife instead of saving it in a 529 plan for their kid.” For behavioral scientists this sort of reaction is a no brainer: Make something harder for people, and they are less likely to do it.
Here’s another example. “Right down at the bottom end, the sole group that the tax system actually taxes deeper and deeper into poverty is childless workers,” says Chye-Ching Huang, a senior tax policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Although they pay significant payroll taxes, this group is eligible for only a very small earned income tax credit, a provision designed to help offset payroll taxes for other families with children. It’s a pro-work wage subsidy for low- and moderate-income families, but for 7 million workers without kids, it’s hardly any help at all.
Now, it’s tempting here to consider burning the whole house down. “The goal would be to make the tax code neutral, to let the markets behave the way the way they should,” says Hungerford. Overvalue assets like housing and you’re messing with the basic forces of supply and demand that (under ideal conditions) drive the economy. That’s the motif for most tax loopholes.
But…one person’s unconscionable loophole is another person’s brilliant social policy. Government moves money and priorities around with taxes because it works. Advocating to eliminate loopholes and exemptions is a political nonstarter. Economics is clearly against the mortgage interest deduction, for instance, “but boy, if any member of Congress tried to get rid of it, that member of Congress would soon be an ex-member of Congress,” says Hungerford.
If we, the American public, said tax reform was important to us, then maybe we’d have some luck. But the last time meaningful reform passed through Congress, Americans were watching original Kirk and Spock hang out with humpbacks in San Francisco Bay. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 (same year that Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home came out) remains a model for reform efforts: It broadened the tax base and lowered rates.
So Congress un-reformed it, allowing a bunch of gunk to accumulate in the tax code in the meantime.
Possibly it’s time to dive back in with an eye toward more fair and equitable economic decisions. And then maybe after that we can talk about those forms. Come on, IRS: Surely some UX designers out there would be willing to help out? Maybe offer to shave a few points off their payroll tax?
(Please don’t audit me.)