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Things I Do Not Get II

Something's telling me that there will be a lot of posts with this name, that's why I made up a special label for them. This post's issue is taxes, and the thing I don't get is: why if I dutifully put in all my dependents in my W-2 form, and then repeat the process in my 1040 form, I end up owing taxes? And I am not saying hundreds of dollars. I am saying THOUSANDS. The time for taxes is, of course, passed, and all I owed is paid, but why? I was naive enough to actually expect a refund this year, and that refund would help A LOT. Darn it, I am still not over.
In addition to that my daughter's taxes, which I prepared with TurboTax, are proved to be wrong at least on the state level (the state of New York apparently disagrees with TurboTax on the matter of who can claim child care expenses as a deduction—long story short: my daughter and her son were both my dependents for the year of 2007, but she paid for the child care institution, Cassian goes to, and according to TurboTax, was eligible to claim a deduction, regardless of the fact that her son is technically my dependent), so now she also owes money, instead of getting a refund.
If I understood anything in tax law, I wouldn't need software to prepare my taxes in a first place. Now I need to decide if I want to file an amended tax return, and claim those child care expenses for myself and hope that I get some of my taxes back.
Why can't all this be simple?
A little trivia fact: the total amount of taxes my wife and I paid for the year of 2007 is just a couple of hundred dollars short of being equal to my very first salary in the US back in 1993 (very crappy job, but professional nevertheless)... I guess we are doing better now. It also is just over the total amount of my credit card debt, which I still have and paying off little by little, 0% APR, of course, my math is still OK for that...
Whatever.

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