Ask your congress person who passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 that requires it (section 41106). Do most Congress acts make sense?
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1892/text
SEC. 41106. <<NOTE: 26 USC 7805 note.>> FORM 1040SR FOR SENIORS.
(a) In General.--The Secretary of the Treasury (or the Secretary's
delegate) shall make available a form, to be known as ``Form 1040SR'',
for use by individuals to file the return of tax imposed by chapter 1 of
the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. Such form shall be as similar as
practicable to Form 1040EZ, except that--
(1) the form shall be available only to individuals who have
attained age 65 as of the close of the taxable year,
(2) the form may be used even if income for the taxable year
includes--
(A) social security benefits (as defined in section
86(d) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986),
(B) distributions from qualified retirement plans
(as defined in section 4974(c) of such Code), annuities
or other such deferred payment arrangements,
(C) interest and dividends, or
(D) capital gains and losses taken into account in
determining adjusted net capital gain (as defined in
section 1(h)(3) of such Code), and
(3) the form shall be available without regard to the amount
of any item of taxable income or the total amount of taxable
income for the taxable year.
While that law says nothing about larger type, the IRS decided to revise the 1040 form for everyone to a "simple" one page form with new schedules. But the law required that the 1040SR could ONLY be available to seniors so to make the form unique to seniors they increased the type size for the 1040SR only, otherwise the 1040 and 1040SR are exactally the same now. AFAIK it was an IRS workaround to comply with the law after they revised the form to be the same for everyone - the SR had to be different.
**Disclaimer: This post is for discussion purposes only and is NOT tax advice. The author takes no responsibility for the accuracy of any information in this post.**
