The Rock and Roll Years are Over

I'm in a better mood today, mainly due to the psychotherapy, which has been embarassingly simple so far. We've discussed things that have been worrying me, then agreed a time and a way to solve them. So far I have found my income tax card and told my health insurance, the German Physics Society, my bank, and Amnesty International my new (since February) address.

The only beaurocratic thing I'm really scared of is my tax declaration. I so far refused to fill one out, thinking that it wasn't Rock and Roll. I thought of it as being the saddest and squarest part of German life: all those people running around reclaiming tax. The German tax system is so complicated that people buy computer programs to help fill in their tax declaration. These programs used to be (and maybe still are) tax deductible.

I was going to try to find a citation to back up that last claim, but failed. I can't even write income tax in German. Neither can the Germans. The word for income is Einkommen, and the word for tax is Steuer. If you put them together you get Einkommensteuer, but if you like you can add an extra 's' in the middle to get Einkommenssteuer. I just bought a book which tries to explain this kind of thing, but usually ends up by giving a seemingly arbitrary rule

The middle 's' is added if the first word to be joined contains an even number of Umlauts or the second word begins with three consonants in alphabetical order.

and then includes a table of 200 exceptions.

As the figure below shows (red with one 's', blue with two), the german speaking world is as confused as I am in this matter.


Anyway, I dislike the tax system (I don't mind people taking money off me; I just dislike filling in forms), but I'll try to fill out a form this year. May seems to be a popular date according to the graph. I have a cast-iron tax deductible donation to Amnesty International. Now the clever bit is this: I'll give the tax that I get back this year as a donation next year, in addition to the regular sum. I did a calculation on the back of an envelope, and found that by continually giving the original sum plus all tax returned from the previous year to a charitable organisation I would be able to achieve roughly 30% year-on-year growth in donations until I pay no tax at all. Rock and Roll! I'm not quite sure that this will work, but I'm going to give it a try.

p.s.

It's interesting to see the way the world searches for "income tax". The British seem to have no massive peaks, because most people don't declare taxes. The average employee has tax taken at source and never sees the money. The Americans, in contrast, go income-tax crazy once a year. Still, at least they can fucking spell the word!

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