Love, not tax forms

Matt Yglesias posts the following on his blog:

Germany’s Free Democrats have a lot of pro-business tax cutting views, much like our Republicans. But they’re also liberal on cultural questions. Thus things like these t-shirts people were wearing at their election party last night:

The slogan says something in German that roughly means “make love, not tax forms.”

Meanwhile commenter Paula writes:

I think everyone is misunderstanding the joke on the tee-shirt.

This is not a libertarian issue. We lived in Germany for many years. German tax forms are virtually impossible to fill out. Almost no one does their taxes themselves. There is a whole tax-preparer industry, unionized I believe, and these unionized tax-preparers are the reason it takes so long to do taxes in Germany. Every time they try to simplify the tax code, the tax preparers use whatever political clout they have to stop it. Having such complex tax forms becomes a kind of surtax of about $500 per taxpayer. If the forms were easier, or if no forms were necessary at all, that money might be put to better use, and the tax preparers could do something more rewarding.

I guess we're not the only ones with an abysmal tax code. Germany's Free Democrats, by the way, featured tax simplification as a centerpiece of its campaign platform that earned them a record 14.6 percent of the vote.