Last night I finally got down to doing my taxes. Over­all, it wasn’t too painful for me. Then again, I’m not going to mess around trying to nit­pick at every deduc­tion I can find.

I used Turbo Taxes for the second year. It’s pretty easy to go through and in the end I feel at least like I’m not get­ting totally screwed, or worse, in danger of being audited. I’d hate to have to sit in front of an IRS agent and explain that actu­ally I have no idea why Turbo Tax gave me that deduc­tion. I might feel silly then.

One thing about the whole process really both­ered me though. I filed fed­eral and state taxes (Mass­a­chu­setts in my case). My basic process goes like this: Turbo Tax asks me some bizarre ques­tion and I answer yes or no to it. In most cases the answer is either no, or “I don’t know what that is” (which also means no). Over­all, it makes things pretty simple.

I was amazed about how many ques­tions I got asked regard­ing homes and cars:

• Did I pur­chase a fuel effi­cient car last year?
• Did I pur­chase an elec­tric car last year?
• Did I pur­chase a hybrid car last year?
• Did I com­mute (reg­u­larly) to work last year and have proof of the tolls I paid?
• Did I spend money making my home more energy effi­cient last year?

These things are great. If giving a tax break to people who buy fuel effi­cient cars actu­ally makes Amer­i­cans buy them, then I am all for this. I sup­port hybrid, elec­tric, or oth­er­wise effi­cient cars 100%. If I bought a car, it would be a hybrid.

But that’s the prob­lem: if I bought a car.

You see, I live in Boston. I don’t own a car. I don’t need one. I could buy one. But, I actively choose not to own car. I ride the T. I love the idea that I’m not con­tribut­ing to the traf­fic jams, park­ing prob­lems and other gen­eral crappy sit­u­a­tions of the city.

The T really stinks a lot of the time. It’s usu­ally not very con­ve­nient. I think that I’ve gotten frost­bit­ten many times while wait­ing for the bus. Gro­cery shop­ping is mis­er­able. And oh yeah, I can’t actu­ally leave the city.

I grew up in the some­what rural sub­urbs of south­ern Maine. Owning a car was not an option. If you wanted to work or live, you needed a car (unless you were train­ing for the Tour de France or a marathon). Now that I live in the city, I love that this is actu­ally a choice. I can go any­where in Boston I want for under $2. I can go out (any­where in Boston), and I never have to worry about how I’m going to get home.

Back to the point. Where’s my tax deduc­tion for choos­ing not to own a car at all? Where’s my tax deduc­tion for using public trans­porta­tion 365 days a year? It’s not exactly cheap any more to ride the T.

Shouldn’t I get some sort of tax break for rent­ing a house that my land­lord refuses to make more energy effi­cient? I paid an awful lot of money on heat­ing last year.

Enough of this self-​absorbed rant. Doing this tax stuff just reminds me how truly broken the entire system is. ‘Til next year…