Tax harmony in China: A lesson for the US

Nothing is certain in life except death and taxes. But in the United States, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference - which is why I like paying taxes in China much better. Exactly the right amount is withheld from my pay every month, and that's the end of it.

In the US I have to make sure that taxes paid match income earned, and then beg for a refund if I've given the government too much. This requires a mind-bending slog through a complex jungle of government forms that can take days to complete.

In China, by contrast, there's no annual mountain of documents to file, no bureaucratic codes to decipher, no math to mess up, no complex syllogisms written in a foreign language to misunderstand. And I'm not talking about the Chinese language. I mean the Internal Revenue Service's own arcane language that seems designed to frustrate as one navigates the byzantine US tax code - a total of more than 13,000 pages in 20 volumes.