The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

I ended–gave up– a 30-some-year-long engagement with the IRS some time ago. I gave up. I hate to say it: Up to that point, I never thought I would ever concede them the tiniest bit of superiority. But I did.

Government by the people, for the people–all that stuff led me astray. It kept me struggling with tax terms and the government gibberish and all the misleading “See line 42” way past the point at which George Washington and Thomas Jefferson intended me to go.

The end of the line had come.  You can’t call the IRS for help. I’m sure that the phone-answerers there are a select group culled from the ranks of the American disenfranchised, the newly-out-of-work, and the generally unemployable at anything else.

Their number one talent is: Dither, mumble, dodge, be intentionally elusive and vague.

I do admit to my own conflict: Tax-wise, I want to conveniently forget “truth” and lie, cheat, and steal wherever and whatever I can from the IRS. But my German-Methodist middle-class upbringing doesn’t want me to go to prison either.

That’s a tough spot to be in, this time of the year. For example, I cannot just call those toll-free tax terrorists at the IRS and say: “I  bought my kids a four-wheeler; how do I claim that as a tax deduction on my farm?”

So you cannot say “four-wheeler” and you cannot say your kids are going to drive it. You say instead: Your kids are hired hands and the four-wheeler is a motorized gopher controller.

Don’t feel bad if you didn’t get that wording quite right the first time, and they audited you. Unless you’re a farmer, in which case if you cannot adlib and confuse the IRS, you’re in the wrong line of work. If you’re a farmer, what to plant is secondary to survival. It’s what you get back from the IRS that may dictate your survival.

I grew up on a farm, the last bastion of good old income-tax evasion. No farmer worth his harrow since Caesar’s time has accurately trotted forth his full crop at the King’s beck and call. Back when Caesar did it, he took it all. When the tax collectors showed up wearing armor and carrying polished swords, that’s when farmers first polished up their evasive behavior, and kept enough back to get through the winter.

So. It’s clear to you at this point, right, that farmers have been crafting their income-tax evasion since time began. Since even early governments seemed unconcerned with whether farmers had enough left to live another year, farmers had to be.

Thus I grew up with a them-or-me attitude at tax time. I grew up believing in some great pot-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow deduction, some foggily-worded cobwebby phrase in the income tax form that would allow the farmer to live another year, with some cash to boot.

Somewhere in that IRS form, somewhere in that fine print, I know there’s a line much like some old magic incantation in some old dusty Book of Black Magic that will say the IRS owes me a million dollar-refund, if I could just find the right line.

In the meantime, since my tax preparer doesn’t seem to think I should deduct my trip to Florida as “farming exploration,” I guess I’ll file an extension and keep looking for that pot of gold at the end of a government rainbow. I know it’s in there. “Take Line 42, add Line 33, move Line 12 to Line 100, mix in the magic words and BINGO!

A big refund.

I know it’s there. I just cannot find it.