

I mean, have you ever tried doing a tax return by hand? It’s bad enough for me just doing it online and trying to figure out whether my education expenses count as deductible or not, or how the info on my IRA’s 1099 corresponds to the fields on freetaxusa.com. For some reason, Schwab put all the info in one PDF instead of splitting it out by form.
Now multiply that by however many other accounts they have and whatever money or assets are moving around, and every movement means taxes. It’s definitely orders of magnitude more complicated.
It’s not “don’t kill people” law, it’s “does this count as a wash sale” law.
They saw how effective it was and thought they could do better. Remember, Israel was created almost immediately after WWII.