How does the Swiss tax system work? How are taxes added and/or removed? Do you have tax deductions or other incentives?

The truly weird thing about the American tax system is the way it handles deductions and other incentives. You can't take advantage of them unless you know they're available and request them specifically. This gives the government a real incentive to make the tax code as complicated as possible. If you don't know what deductions are available to you, then you'll probably miss some or all of them and end up paying a lot more money than you would have if the process was more straight forward.