E-Z 4 who?

The other day I was trying to get a bunch of State and Federal tax returns to birng to the building where I work and distribute them to my tenants at a Tax Information Session. Like all good citizens, I knew that you could pick up 1040s at the Post Office. I went to two post offices to no avail and was informed, "The Post Office doesn't give out the forms anymore. If you have a computer you can print them off the website."

The advantages of e-filing are numerous: it's more environmentally friendly, it cuts down on the time you have to wait for your refund to be sent to you. Clearly, the government is trying to encourage everyone to switch to this new method. But I was viewing this process through the prism of my tenants' experiences. Where can a low-income person, who doesn't have an internet connection, e-file? There are free Internet connections at many public libraries but signup lists are long, time is limited and one is not usually allowed to print off large numbers of pages. People who have filed taxes in the past have a paper copy of the forms mailed to their most recent address, but how does that help transient people, like the chronically homeless, who move from one address to another?

It turns out that (at least in New York City) there's a pretty extensive network of sites where free tax preparation occurs, where volunteer tax preparers help people to access the Internet, teach them about the Earned Income Tax Credit and make the whole process easier. But the situation got me thinking about a larger cultural phenomenon.

In even the past couple of years, use of the Internet has expanded rapidly. The hot new businesses in New York these days are Netflix and FreshDirect, which deliver DVDs and groceries right to your door. The Internet is revolutionizing the way you make purchases, file your taxes, conduct your banking -- but the revolution is a bourgeois phenomenon. Internet commerce is based entirely on the use of a credit card and there are not many tenants in my building who have one.

As this Interet revolution continues, as it becomes less and less of an elective luxury and more of a way in which all business, including civic business, is conducted, who will be looking out for the people left behind: the poor, the elderly, the mentally ill? Remember the flap last year about the new Medicare bill, about how all the information about the different plans was available on websites that few senior citizens had the skills to access? As we become a cyber-culture, what programs exist to give everyone access to the Net and the skills to navigate it?

Thinking about all of this, and about the proposed Social Security reform package, makes me realize just how many people will inevitably be excluded from President Bush's "ownership society." As we march ever faster towards a future of individualism, the title of the "Left Behind" book series takes on a whole new connotation.