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CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley
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April 8, 2018 10:48 am

CBS Sunday Morning

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley

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April 8, 2018 10:48 am

Is there a better way to file taxes?

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Our CBS Sunday morning podcast is sponsored by Edward Jones. College tours with your oldest daughter. Updating the kitchen to the appropriate decade.

Retiring on the coast. Life is full of moments that matter, and Edward Jones helps you make the most of them. That's why every Edward Jones financial advisor works with you to build personalized strategies for now and down the road. So when your next moment arrives, big or small, you're ready for it. Life is for living.

Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning. Jane Pauley is off today.

I'm Lee Cowan, and this is Sunday morning. Not to start out on a sour note, but on the off chance you forgot, taxes are due a week from Tuesday. Every year we struggle with those mind-boggling forms and regulations, and who among us doesn't wonder, couldn't there be a better way? To which one college professor says, yep, there is, as Chip Reid will report in our cover story. Stanford professor Joseph Bankman wants to make filing your taxes easier, but he's run into opposition from, among others, the companies behind tax preparation software. They can't be one company can block something that would make life better for 150 million American filers. And you found out that? I was wrong.

Now it's not just one company, of course, it's other companies in the industry. Later on Sunday morning, filing our taxes. Is there a better way? Connor Knighton is island hopping again this morning, this time to the Faroe Islands, way out in the North Atlantic. The Faroe Islands are remote and rugged, not much in the way of food grows here, which forced chef Paul Ziska to get creative. This doesn't necessarily look like fine dining when you look at it at first, but it really is. Ziska has turned seaweeds and grasses into high-end cuisine, winning the Faroe Islands first ever Michelin star.

A taste of the Faroe Islands, later on Sunday morning. Actor Antonio Banderas is going home. He's returned to Spain to portray his hometown's great 20th century artist, Pablo Picasso. Our Seth Doan tagged along. I know you. I know you too. When it comes to seeing Málaga, it turns out Antonio Banderas gives a pretty good tour. I shaved my head, I shaved my eyebrows. Now in his latest on screen role, the actor is playing another famous Spaniard who shared the same hometown.

Antonio Banderas as Picasso ahead on Sunday morning. Michelle Miller brings us a love story told in pictures. Gail King sits down with Congressman Joseph Kennedy III and more. All coming up when our Sunday morning podcast continues. Is there a better way to file our tax returns than wrestling with all those confusing forms that we have to deal with now? Well, there just might be.

Our cover story is reported by Chip Reid. For the average American, what is it like doing their taxes? It's impossible. Think of your credit card bill. What if Visa sent you a blank piece of paper each month and said, figure out all your purchases, keep track of them and write them so you had to save the receipts.

They don't do that. The government shouldn't. Well, I want to welcome everybody to Stanford law professor Joseph Bankman wants to make doing your taxes a lot easier. This year, Americans will spend on average $100 and eight hours to make sense of our 1099s and W2s for our 1040s. And if just thinking about that makes your head hurt, well, that's why Bankman wants a tax return that many Americans would only have to read, review, and sign. The government takes all the information that's already collected from your bank, your employer, your mortgage lender, and it takes those numbers and it puts that on the right line of a tax return that you could download or get an hard copy. That would save the average taxpayer time and money.

Time and money and anxiety. Known as a pre-filled tax return, it's a system already used in many other countries, including Sweden and Australia. And it's an idea here with a history of bipartisan support. We envision a system where more than half of us would not even have to fill out a return.

Sounds good, right? But consider our complex tax code and an already overstretched IRS. There's a significant cost to doing something like this and the IRS does not currently have the funding to do this.

Jared Walczak of the Nonpartisan Tax Foundation says getting the details right for every filer is a lot to ask. It's something that superficially makes a lot of sense, but unfortunately it potentially loses taxpayers a lot of the deductions they might be able to take. Is this a tax increase in disguise? I don't think that anyone intends it as one, but when you conflate the tax preparer and the tax collector, there are different incentive structures.

You as a taxpayer have every incentive to reduce your tax liability. The IRS does not have the same obligation. The major criticism of this is do you really trust the IRS to do something like this? Do you really trust the IRS to tell you how much money you owe? Yeah, well if you don't trust the IRS, you really want this.

It's telling you here's what's in our file and here's what we're going to use. If it's wrong, you can then fight the IRS. If it's right, you can accept it. The problem of filing your taxes is to figure out what to put in each line. The government already has all of those numbers. If they started off with all of those numbers in the right place, filing taxes would be no big deal. Enter your social security number. It's not a pipe dream. Back in 2005, Bankman tested the idea in a California pilot program known as Ready Return.

Look it over, make sure it's right, and if it's not, Ready Return makes it very easy to make changes. 97 percent of filers said they'd use it again, but the next year when Bankman went to the state house to expand the program, he ran into opposition he didn't see coming. There are 120 legislators, so I didn't see all of them, but I saw a lot of them. All of them had previously met the lobbyists from industry. The lobbying efforts were led by Intuit, the company behind the popular tax preparation software TurboTax. Public records show that Intuit spent around two hundred thousand dollars in 2006 lobbying on this and other issues in California alone. Intuit also donated one million dollars to a group backing a Ready Return opponent for state controller.

So Bankman fought back. You actually hired a lobbyist. That's right. With your own money.

That's right. How much did you spend? I think the lobbyist was thirty thousand.

Thirty thousand. The bill to expand Ready Return never passed, though some of the program's features are still available in California today. CalFile also imports some of your general information we already have on record like your name. So why isn't a pre-filled tax program available to all Americans? Well for one thing, Congress is split on the issue. As for the IRS, in 2002 Intuit along with H&R Block and other online tax preparation companies made a deal with the agency.

So give FreeFile a try. The companies agreed to provide free services to taxpayers who qualify under the deal. About three and a half million filers use it each year and in exchange the IRS agreed not to develop its own free tax preparation website. In other words, for now the IRS has pledged not to put its own pre-filled returns online. These are the companies that make big bucks by making tax filing hard.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has twice unsuccessfully sponsored bills that would help develop a pre-filled return system. They have persuaded most of America and most of the United States Congress that they are a necessary part of getting taxes paid. But for millions and millions of Americans figuring out your taxes ought to be easy and the IRS ought to put it online. The companies, if that happened, would lose a lot of money. And in repeated filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission Intuit acknowledges that government efforts to offer free tax preparation could cause us to lose customers and revenue.

Intuit and H&R Block both declined our requests for on-camera interviews. In statements available in full on our website they assert that they are advocates for millions of taxpayers taking into account their unique circumstances. Intuit says it supports making the tax filing process easier through a simpler tax code but argues a pre-filled system doesn't advance that goal. The company also writes, self-determination powered by an individual's active participation in the tax preparation process is the backbone of the American tax system.

It's a point Jared Walczak agrees with. It is a civic virtue to have a sense of the cost of government. Whether you think taxes should be higher or they should be lower. We should have a sense of what our obligations are so that we can participate in this process. But Stanford's Joseph Bankman just sees the frustration of tax day and believes it's a matter of when, not if, doing our taxes becomes much easier.

Our present system is so much worse than it has to be. I think sooner or later something will change politically and people will be amazed at how much better their April 15th is. And now a page from our Sunday morning almanac. April 8th, 1947.

71 years ago today. A notable sun day even though the calendar actually said it was Tuesday. For that was the day of the biggest array of sunspots ever recorded. Relatively speaking these cooler surface areas we all call sunspots can be huge. 330 times the size of the earth in this particular case.

Big enough to have been seen from the earth without a telescope with the right protective goggles of course. Nor are sunspots the only solar phenomenon to watch out for. Solar flares can send intense bursts of high energy particles straight toward the earth potentially disrupting communications and power grids. And as summertime approaches let's not forget the sun's UVA and UVB radiation creating the risk of skin cancer for all us earthlings.

You've heard it before and you're going to hear it again right now. Wear sunscreen. The sun brings us life-giving light and heat and ably serves as our beloved Sunday morning mascot. By all means enjoy it but treat it with respect. Respect. Sharing photographic memories of the husband she lost far too early has had a healing effect on the young widow Michelle Miller has been talking to. Photographer Jacob Johnson dreamed of a photo exhibit like this. Everything framed was taken by Jacob. Who was the better photographer? That's not fair. His wife Anjali Pinto also a photographer made it happen.

Originally my thought was like it'll be a wall of his work and a wall of my work. But her husband isn't here to see it. What happened? Essentially the walls of his aorta weakened from the inside and um eventually it burst. With no warning at age 30 he died New Year's Eve 2016 just 16 months after getting married. They met through following each other on Instagram so she had an idea. I turned to Instagram after Jacob's death because I had so many beautiful portraits of him. Every day last year she posted a new image of him.

Of them. A glimpse of the life they shared. I never imagined Jacob would die first. It is so much less painful to imagine dying than losing the person you love. Each an insight into her daily grief. I couldn't then and still now can't fathom how so much can happen in one day. The loving moments and the horrifying reality divided by a few minutes of chaos.

Her Instagram following grew to more than 51,000. Many inspired to write their own stories like this one. I could never really come to terms with the fact that my dear father had left me one wrote.

No point in one's life is ripe for the loss of an immensely loved one. Was there a reaction or a comment that stood out to you? One day I got a very long comment from a woman. She was diagnosed with a terminal illness and had two small children and she wrote me that seeing my way of surviving and trying to find joy brought her comfort because she hoped that her daughters and her husband would have the same experience.

Did that surprise you? Absolutely. I've received support and encouragement and also really heartbreaking stories from people all over the world. What has it taught you about grieving publicly the way you have? I've always believed that telling a true story about yourself can bring strangers closer to you.

Even when the story is about love and loss. In his latest round of island hopping, Connor Knighton has leapt across much of the North Atlantic for a taste of the Faroe Islands. The Faroe Islands build themselves as Europe's best kept secret. So secret in fact that many people don't know they're in Europe. In some cases they think we're close to Egypt somewhere so it's really warm and exotic.

It's not Pharaoh like King Tut. It's F-A-R-O-E. 18 tiny islands in between Iceland and Norway officially part of the kingdom of Denmark and yet not quite Danish. We have our own language which is another thing that surprises people. Levi Hansen works for the Faroese Tourism Bureau in the small capital city of Torsion. The rugged remote Faroe Islands have just 50,000 citizens total spread out among a patchwork of tiny picturesque towns and villages. They're connected by an impressive network of roads and tunnels and ferries far removed from the rest of the world. We realize that we live in a very remote place.

We sometimes have this this feeling of being like you know David against Goliath. In the world of restaurant reviews, the Goliath, the 800 pound gorilla, is a giant inflatable man made out of tires. Every year the Michelin Guide hands out its prize stars to the best restaurants in the world. It's the first restaurant from the Faroe Islands. Congratulations! And last year for the first time ever a Faroese restaurant brought one home to a small house in a small village on the side of a hill.

It was so unexpected I did not think that they will come here this early on. Paul Ziska is the head chef at Cox, a 23-seat restaurant with one heck of a view. Right now we're just going to grab this seaweed here and use it for a sauce. Many of the ingredients Ziska cooks with are found on the rocky shores down below his dining room. Ziska grew up in the Faroe Islands and he knows which weeds and grasses are the most delicious. Whoa that's citrus basically.

The limpets he scrapes off the rocks one by one are washed and transformed into one of 19 courses served as part of a typical meal at Cox. In the Faroe Islands where most of the food is imported, Ziska was determined to stay as local as possible. You become much more aware of your surroundings when you have to kind of source the ingredients from around. The volcanic treeless landscape and the harsh weather makes it difficult for much to grow here. Outside of the sheep, which are everywhere, there isn't much livestock.

But there also isn't a place in the Faroe Islands that's more than three miles away from the ocean. So Ziska relies heavily on the sea. Each day, Ziska's team collects urchins and clams. Fresh ingredients turned into beautiful creations. We do a lot of effort in plating it so that it looks like where it's from.

So we might serve like a mahogany clam on rocks with seaweed around so you really get the full expression of where this special product comes from. Around the Faroe Islands, Ziska's team collects a variety of ingredients from all over the world. After the Michelin announcement, foodies have started coming from all across the world just to taste Ziska's cuisine. There are people that will book a table at Cox before they actually book their flight to the Faroe Islands. So it's definitely been something that's had a great effect on tourism in the Faroe Islands.

The Faroe Islands may not stay secret for much longer. And where the scenery is still the biggest selling point, it would be hard to imagine a better ambassador than Ziska's food. It reflects the land he loves.

Each dish a little postcard on a plate. That was a young Antonio Banderas playing opposite Madonna in Evita back in 1996. Fast forward to today and we find him going home back to Spain for a new role as the controversial artist Pablo Picasso.

Seth Doan has been watching him in action. Malaga becomes a little village. To see Antonio Banderas's hometown with Antonio Banderas. I know you. I know you too. Well you've got to keep moving. Ciao. You create quite a fuss when you go someplace. Yeah somebody's the mother of the son of the daughter of the cousin so everybody knows everybody over here so it's normal. Dodging the perils of nearly constant requests for photos, Banderas took us on a whirlwind tour of his Malaga.

This ancient city of half a million on the Spanish coast. He wanted us to see the church where he was baptized and where he returns each year to help carry a massive float in holy week processions. Don't forget who you are and where are your roots. A man without a roots is a nobody.

A nobody. His roots in Malaga growing up with his brother Javier were humble. Far from the life of a celebrity who'd need to don a hat and sunglasses to avoid detection. Your dad was a policeman. Your mom was a school teacher. What did they think about you becoming an actor? Oh they didn't like it at all. The beginning. In the beginning was very bad.

But of course it turned out to be very good. Banderas went on to star opposite Madonna in Evita and Brad Pitt in Interview with a Vampire. The much debated Zorro.

No. The legendary Zorro. He played a suave swordsman in The Mask of Zorro.

On my honor, I am obliged to accompany you until you have saved your life and you have spared me mine. And was the big voice of the tiny cat Puss in Boots in the Shrek sequels. I hate Mondays. Your career is hard to characterize. I love that.

Have you heard from my children lately? His latest role hits a little closer to home. Banderas plays another famous Malagueno, Pablo Picasso. I really had the opportunity here to discover a man who was born in my town to whom I feel linked.

He's the woman that lived the most. He showed us around the Picasso Museum in Malaga, but it was in a makeup trailer in Budapest, Hungary where we saw him become Picasso. I shaved my head.

I shaved my eyebrows. And over that we start creating the character in two and a half hours. Makeup artists transformed the youthful 57 year old into a much older looking Picasso for the National Geographic series genius. How is it to play him? Hard playing the dark side of him. It's hard because he's my idol.

Picasso, of course, was a legendary painter and philanderer. His life is chronicle. In the 10 episode series premiering later this month. I'm not ready to die. Excellent. One last time. This takes endurance.

Take after take after take. Yeah, I'm happy that you're watching it because this is the life of actors. People sometimes believe that we live in a red carpet or something like that.

I'm not ready to die. Acting, acting in movies or in theater is hard work. Banderas has been a fixture on that red carpet. His 19 year marriage with fellow A-lister actress Melanie Griffith plunged him into the spotlight. It was a long way from the small stage in Spain, where he was once arrested for doing politically sensitive theater and where he was discovered by groundbreaking Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. He stepped into territories that were totally forbidden before homosexuality. There was a number of things that never were seen in the Spanish cinematography.

Banderas's work with Almodovar, specifically the Oscar-nominated Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, led to a meeting with a Hollywood producer. There was only one problem. This guy said to me, I told him that you speak English. But how can you say that? I don't speak at all. So I sit down and I fake the whole entire dinner that I was a very shy guy. I didn't want to say very much. It was just yes and no. But it worked and you got the part in Mambo Kings?

I believed it. I know it's been very hard for you. So for his first Hollywood film, The Mambo Kings, Banderas, who still could not speak English, learned the lines, phonetically.

That was 1992. I have loved you. So I came back to Spain and I said, okay, I can tell that to my grandson. You know, I did a movie in America. And then Philadelphia came. Give it a fever, baby.

In Philadelphia, Banderas played the lover of Tom Hanks' character, a lawyer with HIV. It was like fresh air. It was like saying, you know, I'm going to go to the movie. It was like fresh air. It was like saying, yes, it's about time.

It's about time that Hollywood comes out of the closet. The only way to be a true artist is to work day and night. He's hyper critical of himself and his performances. I think I will die. Not to me. Thinking, ah, I didn't get the thing that I would be remembered for.

And it was a real life brush with death, a heart attack he suffered in January 2017 that made him more reflective of the roles he plays, a dad being the most important one. That's my daughter. Photos of Stella Del Carmen, his daughter with Melanie Griffith, are up at El Pimpi, the restaurant he adores and co-owns. My daughter always have here a place.

He keeps a room for Stella in his sprawling Malaga apartment, which is filled with awards and art, some of it quite recognizable. I had another one, but I gave it to Melanie. After the divorce, she kept one and I kept the other one.

This is a sketch by Picasso. How was it to go through a divorce with someone? It's always painful. And to just start discovering that not everything is over, that we can keep our friendship, we can keep our memories, we can be proud of them.

I think we have done it very well. She's part of my life. She's my family.

And she will be until the day I die. Upstairs on the roof terrace, wow, it's amazing. Where Moorish walls and a Roman amphitheater provide a breathtaking backdrop, he pointed out where he was raised and where Picasso was born. You grew up surrounded by Picasso, knowing about Picasso, being proud of Picasso and finally being Picasso. Still, he's always searching. He wants to direct again and has gone back to school for fashion design.

Antonio Banderas relishes playing many roles, not only those on camera. I do a lot of things. There's only one life. You have to do it. Yeah. And there is time. Absolutely.

There is time for everything. A remarkable case of lost and found is what Steve Hartman found in a seemingly unlikely place. Generally speaking, bars are not bastions of grace and kindness. But here at Jimmy's in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, owner Jimmy Galise believes there's a lot more to serving customers than a good pour. I mean, just wait till you hear what he did for one patron, a total stranger who lost her wallet here last month with her wedding ring inside. And she was frantic, really upset about it.

So it just became my mission. His mission to find her ring began with a thorough screening of the security footage. He had to watch three hours before finally finding her wallet on a bench outside the bar, the one at the far left with the shady character approaching. Eventually, Jimmy figured out who that was and got him to confess to taking the cash and dumping the wallet in this ocean channel. It was long gone.

But you still won't let this go. After I invested all that time, I'm going to find the ring. So I hired divers to come out the next day. You hired divers?

Yeah, divers. Two divers who scoured the seabed and eventually surfaced with a soggy wallet and an irreplaceable treasure. Jimmy went so far beyond what most of us would do for a stranger. And yet even after solving the mystery, he still felt the need to do more. Not for the woman who lost the wallet, but for the thief who took it.

He was living in the woods and this was one of his 30 degrees outside and he hadn't eaten in two days. I could tell he wasn't a criminal. He's just somebody needed a little help.

17 year old Rivers Prather is estranged from his mother. He's been trying to make it on his own, but was homeless the day he stumbled into Jimmy's life. I couldn't have been luckier.

Most other people would have just, you know, gave the footage to police and he chose to help me. He's made me part of his family. Literally part of his family.

Rivers is now staying in Jimmy's house with Jimmy's fiance and kids. He's got two jobs and a bright future. How do you say thank you to a guy like that? I mean, I say thank you to him every day.

I'd do anything for him. When that wallet got stolen by a homeless kid, Jimmy Galise could have called on police, courts or social services, but instead he called on the best problem solver of all, the compassion within. A big name star's controversial decision regarding her pets really got the fur flying among animal lovers and rightly so, at least in the opinion of our Luke Burbank. Barbara Streisand made news recently, not for her acting or her singing, but because it came to light that two of her dogs, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett, were actually cloned from the cells of another one of her dogs, Samantha, who'd passed away at age 14. Like they say in the song, people who clone puppies are the luckiest people in the world.

Or something like that. Anyway, these dogs are actually Coton de Toulières and Babs didn't really need luck to make it happen. Just $100,000 and some help from South Korean researchers who specialize in the practice. Pet adoption advocates were aghast. After all, there are plenty of non-GMO dogs looking for a good home, but the whole thing got me wondering, should I start saving now to clone my beloved yellow lab, Rudy?

My wife and I couldn't imagine life without her. And yet, after careful consideration, I've decided she should not be cloned. For one thing, there's no guarantee that the clone would have her exact personality. Also, there's the shedding, which I'm not in any hurry to genetically replicate. Rudy sheds her entire coat roughly once per hour, and it's a constant battle involving expensive vacuums and an army of lint rollers for me and my wife to avoid being those weird dog hair people. You know the ones. They show up at a party and you think they're wearing a beautiful mohair sweater, only to realize it's actually a t-shirt covered in golden retriever. Mostly, though, I don't want to clone her because it turns out that death is actually a pretty important part of life.

The reason we humans love so hard is because we know instinctively on some level that it's a limited time offer, and I don't want to mess with that. Not to mention that even after she's gone, Rudy will still be with me in a way, because I'll be picking her fur out of my clothes until the day I die. Congressman Joseph Kennedy III is the latest in his storied clan to be carrying the torch President John F. Kennedy spoke of in his 1961 inaugural address. It's a family legacy very much on his mind, as he recently told CBS This Morning's Gayle King. Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy III's home is filled with family photos and keepsakes. That's Bobby Kennedy, clearly. It is, and my dad.

Keepsakes that also happen to be national treasures. It's one of the, you know, handful of photos that I know of that still is a round of my dad and my grandfather. His grandfather, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1968. At the time, Joe Kennedy's father was just 15.

Both of them in a very casual moment, but an authentic one. At 37, Congressman Kennedy is the latest of the legendary Democratic clan to pick up the political mantle. He's well aware of all that implies. Every time you give a speech, any time you go somewhere, don't you think you're being compared to all the Kennedys that came before you? So on the one hand, yes, I am. On the other hand, how the heck do you compare yourself to President Kennedy on every speech, right?

You're not going to be as good. It's just not going to happen. He's not letting that stop him from speaking his mind. Last year, it was Kennedy's stand against cuts to the healthcare law that first put the three-term congressman in the national spotlight. Chairman, I was struck last night by a comment that I heard made by Speaker Ryan. He responded to Paul Ryan because he had called for a plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, an act of mercy. With all due respect to our speaker, he and I must have read different scripture. I have a hard time understanding how cutting the program in our country that provides healthcare to working families by $800 billion can be classified as mercy. Now, he says, he wants Congress to take...
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-01-26 13:22:31 / 2023-01-26 13:34:55 / 12

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