Tax Time

As it write this it is April 15. Whoever said that April is the cruelest month was correct because that is when my taxes are due.

Every year at this time, Neal Boortz, our local Libertarian talk show host asks his listeners to ask two questions of their friends and/or co-workers:

1. How much tax did you pay?

2. How much money do you make?

The most common answer to question 1 is, "I didn't pay anything. I got money back." The most common answer to question 2 is, "I take home xxx amount of dollars." And so goes the success of gummint education in this country.

I'm going off on a tangent here. Have y'all been watching the Centcom briefing done by Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks? Since he''s black, I'm sure the liberals think he is an Uncle Tom or is the result of affirmative action. From the Q & A from Tuesday's Atlanta Urinal and Constipation.

Brooks, 44, was born to an Army family in Anchorage, Alaska, and led an itinerant Army life.

After retiring from the Army, his father, Maj. Gen. Leo Brooks Sr., was city manager in Philadelphia. His brother, Leo Jr., 45, is commandant of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Like Leo Jr., young Vincent attended Jesuit High School in the Sacramento, Calif., area.

Vincent graduated from West Point in 1980, first in his class. He received a master's degree from the School of Advanced Military Studies at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and was a national security fellow at Harvard.

As a career soldier, he has been posted in Panama, Europe, Korea, the Middle East and Kosovo. Promoted to brigadier general in 2002, he was handpicked by Gen. Tommy Franks to be the face of the U.S. military in Iraq.

Jesuit High School huh? I'll tell ya, even though I'm an atheist, if I had children I would want them educated by Jesuits.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Take a close look at your tax form. Rachel Lucas was bitching about the tax forms yesterday and blaming the IRS. As much as I hate the IRS, and I have my own horror story about that, the state of the tax form is not the fault of the IRS. It is the fault of the Congress and our insane tax code. Our politicians keep promising to reform our tax system and all they ever do is make it worse and shovel more money off to West Virginia in the ongoing project of naming every bridge, road, building, and parking lot after
Robert Byrd. Even the IRS doesn't understand the tax code. How bad is that?

Now, how much tax did you actually pay? OK. Take your state and federal tax returns. Don't look at how much you owe or get back, look at the actual amount that you paid. That is line 61 on the 1040 tax form. Now look at your state tax return. Look at the total amount of your state tax. For those of you from Georgia, it's line 18 on the 500 form. Now, look at your W2 form and see how much FICA Medicare tax you paid. If you are unlucky enough to work in city that has a city earnings tax (I lived in St. Louis where it was 1 per cent) note that tax as well. Now add them all up. Next, look at your FICA OASDI tax on your W2 form. Double it. What? Why? Because, your employer has to match whatever you pay. The dirty dark secret that socialists Dimocrats do not want you to know is that business does not actually pay any taxes. All the taxes they pay are passed on to the consumer or worker. It's actually worse in Europe where they have sumpin' called the Value Added Tax. Ask someone like Rachel Lucas who is self-employed how much she has to pay for FICA OASDI. It ain't 7.15%, it's 15.3%. That extra 7.15% that business pays is actually money they could be paying you.

So, I just performed this exercise, and it turns out that I have to work one more month to earn enough income to pay last year's taxes.

Now, let's talk about withholding. It was started during WWII to increase tax revenue flow for the duration of the war. As with many gummint programs, once started it never ended. Once again, take a good look at your paycheck every month. Look at what you are paid and look at what you take home. It really is disgusting as to how much is withheld. Let's go back to Rachel Lucas. She is self employed. That means she actually gets paid everything that she earns. Then, she has to write checks to the gummint for her income taxes and FICA taxes. The gummint makes people in her situation pay estimated taxes quarterly. If you choose to write one check every year, as she does, you have to pay a fucking penalty! See, it's all right for the gummint to borrow money tax free from you via withholding, but you have to pay estimated taxes quarterly or they come after you. And, by the way, if there is a dispute, there is no due process. The gummint does not have to prove your guilt. You have to prove your innocence. They can seize your property and you have to go to court to get it back. Is this right?

I haven't even talked about sales taxes, gas taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, ad valorem taxes, or any of the other sneaky ways gummint has of getting their hands on our money. I guess it could be worse. France and Germany both have even higher taxes than we have. Of course, that's one of the reasons their economies are in far worse shape than ours.

Hey Matthew, how's the unnemployment rate in France? I guess if we had higher taxes, we wouldn't have 10% of our population starving. I just wish those immaciated bastards wouldn't pass out in front of my house. I've complained to the Homeowners' Association about that, but they said they would have to raise the fees to cart off the dead bodies.

Bastards!

Posted by denny at April 15, 2003 10:30 PM