"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

As if he needed to work harder to solidify the perception that he trusts the government to know everything in your life better than you do, John Edwards wants people to trust the IRS to do their taxes for them:

John Edwards is suggesting that the Internal Revenue Service prepare tax returns for 50 million Americans who have simple tax circumstances.

The former North Carolina senator laid out the idea in an audio podcast posted on his Web site April 7. For Americans whose employers and financial institutions send all of their relevant tax data to the government, the IRS would calculate their bills and mail them completed returns, which he called "Form 1." Filers could sign the form and return it, or reject it and file their own return if they disagreed with anything in the IRS's calculations.

First of all, start with a mental picture of how exactly a federal agency produces an additional 50 million forms in just a few months, and if you form in your mind an image of smooth, flawless execution by white-lab-coated experts running superintelligent supercomputers, well, you haven't spent much time with bureaucracies.

Of course, the taxpayer will do one of two things with the IRS-prepared form: either check its accuracy, in which case it saves little or no time, or sign it unchecked and return it. Either way, the idea is pointless at best, unduly trusting of the competence and disinterest of the bureaucracy at worst - to say nothing of the infantilizing assumption that people should have yet another thing done for them at public expense.

As Jim Geraghty notes, Edwards is imitating a California program, but there are reasons to believe that this program, ReadyReturn, is not trusted by a lot of taxpayers: only 22% of respondents used it:

At the delightfully unsubtle URL taxthreat.com, the ReadyReturn opponents touted a poll that found that 67% of respondents opposed the program, that 7% of respondents trusted a state agency to prepare their taxes, and that 81% preferred "an independent tax preparer."

The tax code is indeed too complicated, but the answer is less complexity and offering people at least the option to use a simplified flat-tax* form, not having the government pass the rules and then interpret them for its own benefit.

* - By which I mean "flat" as in "without deductions/exemptions" - flattening out the tax rates being a separate issue that goes more to the growth vs. progressivity debate than to tax simplification.