taxes – Gentle Humor

Oh my gosh – I’ve got a public! Someone emailed me missing my blog post last night!!!! How truly exciting.

I have no excuses except for taxes. I’ve put them off as long as I can, and my husband tied me to my desk last night and said I couldn’t move until they were done. At 2:00 a.m. I remembered I had a switchblade hidden in my shoe (never go anywhere without it), so I was able to get my shoe up to my mouth, untie the laces with my teeth, scrape the shoe off on the desk leg, contort my hand down to the switchblade, saw through the ropes and free myself. After all that struggle, I was in no mood to blog.

Oh, and before I forget, I have some nice swampland in Florida I’ll sell to you at a very good price – a steal really. Please respond directly to this post for more information.

The reason the tax stuff is so daunting (and sucks) is because I own a very small yet very unlucrative business doing anything anyone will pay me to do, which apparently isn’t much, and I do my own bookkeeping. I hate accounting with a passion. More than a passion, even, with a vengeance, and even more than that if I could come up with a more loathsome word. I hate it because I lose receipts, forget to make entries in my checkbook, and make business purchases with the wrong credit cards. I have a business credit card, American Express, that isn’t taken everywhere, so I use one of my own. How do I account for this? Plus if it’s only a buck or two, I pay cash. Am I supposed to keep that receipt somewhere and if so, why and where? Because I can’t even keep the AmEx ones that I know belong with the business.

I have folders, and I’m very well organized with everything but accounting. I can retrieve a picture I took six years ago of a random squirrel on my computer in 3.7 seconds. But there is no way I can find yesterday’s receipt for photocopying.

It’s a combination of dislikes that causes it. Keeping up with accounting means typing in numbers – and there’s the origin of my mental block. My fingers protest at having to reach that far. They never liked it in high school typing class, and they don’t like it now. To show their disapproval, they go to y instead of 6 and o (oh) instead of 0 (zero). Here’s what one of my number’s looks like: y3r.o5. If I’m typing a whole column in Excel and hit Sum without looking at the typing, it just doesn’t add up.

The second reason I hate accounting is because it has to do with the IRS. I despise tax code as much as I fear tax men (and women). I know I’m going to get something wrong, even with the best intentions. Besides, tax code is designed by the wealthy for the wealthy. You know the system is screwed up when Warren Buffet pays less in taxes than his secretary. I advocate an across the board 10% flat rate for everyone above poverty level, but would that ever fly? Not no but hell no. H & R Block, millions of tax attorneys and accountants, and nearly all the IRS men and women would lose their jobs. It’s a self-perpetuating infestation eating away at the core of the American dream.

If I had my druthers, here’s what my tax return would look like:

Annual income: $ r,43y.uq

Tax Rate %: x .1o

Total tax due: $ r43.yu

Now that’s the kind of taxes I can live with.

Oh, must sign off now. My husband’s coming, and he’s got a rubber hose…*

*(My public – and I love you all – will get this inside joke, or see the Score Some Gore blog).

I wrote about perpetual elections yesterday. Today they had an article in the paper explaining Measures 66 and 67. Basically, if you’re making $120,000 as a single person or $250,000 as a family, you’re pretty darned lucky, in my book.

However, if Measure 66 passes, you’ll end up paying – up to – a few hundred dollars more in taxes each year. In other words, you won’t be able to get your Lexus detailed as often.

That’s the heartbreak of taxes. And just what are you going to get for those extra hundreds you have to cough up? The promise of better schools and health care for the lowly. Ho-hum.

People in this income bracket generally have plenty of health insurance and their kids are in private schools. There’s nothing in it for them. No wonder they fight upper crust tax increases like cornered badgers.

Every wealthy person I’ve ever talked to is totally against taxes aimed at them, and they say it’s for one reason. They don’t like giving their hard earned money to pond scum who will just milk the system.

Now there’s something we all agree on. Don’t you just despise those people you hear about all the time who take total advantage of our government? You know the ones I’m talking about. The low lifes who hide money in overseas accounts, who know the tax codes and every trick to get deductions, people who entertain and travel lavishly and write it all off as business expenses – these are the kinds of people who sponge off the government without a care about how it affects honest, hard-working Americas like you and me. Oh wait, that’s the rich folks doing all that. I get so confused sometimes.

If we could put all the money the rich finagle the country out of because of the tax structure in one pile, and all the money the poor get in food stamps and welfare and subsidized health care, I wonder which would be bigger?

I’m preoccupied by these measures because of the phone calls I continue to receive trying to coerce me into voting against them. The callers, who all sound well educated and refined, are getting desperate. Today a perky lady called and wanted to speak to my husband. When I said he was at work, she wanted to know if he’d voted yet. I didn’t know. Is he going to vote against the measure, she wondered. I didn’t know that, either. Well, would I be so kind as to remind him? I told her he doesn’t ever listen to me. She chortled and complimented me on how funny I am, then asked my permission to call back when he might be home.

I was exhausted by the time I got off the phone. And then it rang again.

This robbing from the rich to help the poor is no new thing. Remember Robin Hood? I’ve seen the movie and those poor people remind me of the poor today. Sure, they’d waste some of the money if they had it, but maybe that’s because they don’t know any better. The wealthy sure waste a ton of money that could benefit us all on the silliest things.

All I know is that if you call me tomorrow, I’m not answering. Some day we’ll all look back on this and ram into a parked car.

Suzanne Olsen's Humor Blog - I don't offend some of the people most of the time

Tag: taxes

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