It is tax time. Millions of innocent Americans are filling in their 1040. Don't we all just love the IRS. If efficiency was the main concern a simpler tax code would look like this: A person is repeatedly prompted to enter either an amount of income (a positive value) or an amount of deduction (a negative value). This continues until a zero value is entered. The positive values are summed to form the income, and the negative values are summed to form the deduction. The taxable income is computed as the income less the deduction, except in the case that the deduction is greater than the income in which case the taxable income is zero. A tax group is calculated from the taxable income: Greater or equal to $500000 = Very rich Greater or equal to $200000 = Quite rich Greater or equal to $100000 = Seattle poor Greater or equal to $50000 = Average Greater or equal to $20000 = Realistic Less than $20000 = Poor The tax group is saved as an uppercase letter, one of V, Q, S, A, R, P. The tax is computed using one of three rates: The very rich and quite rich get taxed at the high rate of 25%. The Seattle poor get taxed at the medium rate of 10%. The average and realistic get taxed at the low rate of 3%. The poor pay no tax. The tax information is displayed. Here what a sample run should look like (with the keyboard input shown in italics) ... Enter next amount : 123000 Enter next amount : -500 Enter next amount : -4000 Enter next amount : 16000 Enter next amount : 100000 Enter next amount : -200 Enter next amount : 0 Income = $239000.0 Deductions = $4700.0 Taxable income = $234300.0 Tax group = Q Tax owed = $58575.0