While I don’t feel bad for the busted IRS employees, this is still more reason to drop the income tax model completely.
Those rules are ridiculous. The arbitrary notion that one year should have this kind of impact on a taxpayer is just stupid, arbitrary, and (IMO) capricious.
Dump the income tax in favor of a consumption tax, and a whole lot of things get better, very quickly.
An income tax is immoral in concept. It taxes the measure of your productivity.
A consumption tax is just that - a tax on what you take OUT of the system, not what you provide INTO the system.
Inherently more moral.
Of course, the biblical model for fair taxation is a simple head tax.