IRS

TGIF — No Rush

Fandango12 Comments

Paula Light, at Light Motifs II, has this prompt she calls TGIF. She encourages us to take this opportunity to openly chat or jabber about anything we want.

Every year around this time I start stressing about filing my income taxes, both federal and state. They are normally due on April 15th, but this year that falls on a Saturday, so the tax filing date this year is now on April 18.

Usually I’m on top of this. I’m well organized, have all of my tax forms from my retirement accounts, social security, investments, etc. together, and I sit in front of my laptop using TurboTax and get it done in a few days. And by this time in past years, I’ve already sent in my forms electronically.

But this year, with my busted hip and arm, my surgery, my physical therapy, and all that shit, I haven’t had any time at all to focus on getting my shit together for filing my tax returns. So my stress levels were starting to reach new heights.

But lo and behold, earlier this month, the federal Internet Revenue Service (IRS) announced that Californians in 44 counties — including the one I live in — that were part of the Federal Emergency Management Agencies emergency declaration due to severe winter storms between Dec. 27 and Jan. 31, are getting a filing extension. The deadline for filing returns for those who owe taxes to the federal or the state government has been pushed by six months to October 16!

So now I can continue to focus on my recovery and not fret about a fast approaching tax filing deadline. Woohoo!

And on that note, happy TGIF, everyone.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — June 24th

Fandango17 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 24th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on June 24, 2014 on my old blog.

Nothing to Write About

I don’t know what to write about today. I’ve been posting daily for a while now, and something always seems to pop into my head just in time for me to write about it.

Or a WordPress Daily Prompt comes to my rescue. But today’s prompt doesn’t do anything for me.

I’m not in the mood to rant about anything today and I don’t have any inspirational ideas for a piece of flash fiction, either.

It’s not as if there’s nothing going on the world that’s blogworthy. There’s all that crap still going on in Iraq, which, according to Dick Cheney, is all Obama’s fault.

The Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that anti-abortion protesters at abortion clinics are civil, respectful people who just wish to inform and educate women who are seeking an abortion about their alternatives. They really are sweethearts, those anti-abortion protesters.

Oh, there’s the World Cup (yawn). And baseball’s All-Star game is coming up in mid-July (double yawn).

Strange weather patterns are all around us, with severe droughts in some parts of the country and heavy rains and flooding in others. I’m sure it has nothing to do with climate change, though.

Have you heard about poor Hillary Clinton? I mean that literally. Poor Hillary. Just ask her. She says she’s dead broke.

The Pope has excommunicated all Mafia mobsters. That will teach ‘em. No doubt they’ll change their evil ways.

The IRS lost a bunch of emails due to a computer crash. I’m going to use that line the next time I’m called in for a tax audit. They should be able to relate to “I don’t have any of my tax records because my hard drive died.”

An ex-Goldman Sachs trader who told his mother he was going to get a $13 million bonus is suing his former employer because he only got a discretionary bonus of $8.25 million. Maybe he can float a loan to poor Hillary.

And then there was the American exchange student in Germany who climbed inside a giant stone sculpture of a vagina, got stuck, and had to be pulled out of the vagina by 22 firefighters.

So please accept my sincerest apology. I don’t know what to write about today. I seem to be at a loss for words. Maybe something will come to me by tomorrow.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — February 26

Fandango27 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 26th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on February 26, 2006 on my very first blog. Can you believe that this post is 15 years old?

College Tuition, Ice Cream Cones, and Sneakers

In a recent issue of BusinessWeek there was a brief article entitled, “Tuition: it’s not like an ice cream cone.” As a payer of tuitions and a fan of ice cream, that tagline grabbed my attention.

The article opened with a reference to a family with two kids who are attending Middlebury College in Vermont. The father commented that he spends virtually all of his family’s discretionary income on his kids’ college educations. He went on to say, “We look at it as an investment in their lives.”

That’s the issue raised in the BusinessWeek article. It noted that “government number crunchers” don’t see education expenses as an investment. Even though households in this country shelled out $224 billion last year for education, the wizards in the government view that outlay as “consumption, no different than buying an ice cream cone or a pair of sneakers,” rather than as “investment.”

The article goes on to say that, “if the money socked away by households to be spent on education was counted as savings, then the U.S. personal savings rate for 2005 would have been 2.0%, not the -0.5% the official numbers show.”

I can relate to the plight of the couple with the two kids at Middlebury. I just started the onerous process of doing my taxes for 2005 and saw that I shelled out close to $85,000 last year in after tax dollars to pay for my daughter’s graduate school and my son’s law school. Essentially, I’ve been paying college tuitions (and related expenses such as room and board, books, and incidentals) continuously since 1997. Yet, because my adjusted gross income is deemed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to be “too high” to deduct even a penny of that from my tax liability, I’m shit out of luck.

I am delighted that I can afford to fund my kids’ educations and not burden them with huge student loans they’d otherwise have hanging over their heads as they start out their professional lives. Like the father in the article, I consider that money to be an investment in my kids’ futures (and in my retirement planning).

But my Uncle Sam sees it as ice cream cones and sneakers. Go figure

The Audit

Fandango9 Comments

“I can’t believe how you are persecuting me,” Jonathan said. “I’ve dedicated my entire life to selflessly caring for others, and yet here I am, faced with a flood of criticism and accusations. I’m a man of the cloth.”

“Yes, Reverend Jamison, I understand that,” the IRS auditor said, “but in reviewing your personal income tax filings, we have found a number of irregularities.”

“What did you say your name is?” Jonathan asked the auditor.

“Charles Bancroft,” the auditor responded.

“Let me ask you, Mr. Bancroft — Charles — are you married?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, God bless you and your marriage, Charles. And since you are married, you surely understand how this works,” Jonathan said. “My wife loves to go shopping. She loves leather jackets, purses, and, of course, shoes. She likes jewelry that has some glitter to it. She has to get her hair done once a week to look her very best for the cameras. You know how it is. Happy wife, happy life.”

“But Mr. Jamison,” the auditor said, “you claimed all of that spending as business expenses for your ministry.”

“Charles, you have to understand that I’m a spiritual leader and my wife is an important aspect in attracting new members to my megachurch,” Jonathan said. “She’s a beautiful woman who could have been in the movies, and I’m lucky to have her by my side. She helps with bringing in the lovely jingle jangle of coins, if you get my drift.”

“Be that as it may, Reverend Jamison,” the auditor said, “You can’t claim your trophy wife’s extravagant clothing and accessories as legitimate church business expenses. I’m disallowing them. You’ll be receiving a notification from the Internal Revenue Service within a few weeks that will itemize the penalty and interest due. Failure to comply will result in your arrest and imprisonment.”

Written for these daily prompts: Your Daily Word Prompt (dedicated), Ragtag Daily Prompt (caring/glitter), The Daily Spur (flood/hair), MMA Storytime (shopping/movies), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (leather/lucky), and Word of the Day Challenge (jingle).

Not a Shocker

Fandango17 Comments

Nope, not a shocker. Not a surprise. No wonder Trump has been so insistent on not releasing his taxes.

According to the New York Times, which has obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades:

“The tax returns that Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the IRS portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes.

Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.”

The Times reported that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.” I bet most of you who are reading this post typically pay way more in federal taxes each year than $750. I know I do.

And Trump paid no income taxes whatsoever in 10 of the past 15 years, beginning in 2000, because he reported losing significantly more than he made.

Of course, Trump has denied that he paid only $750 in personal federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, but did not provide evidence and again refused to release his tax returns.

Will these revelations have any bearing on the upcoming presidential election? Probably not. His supporters already know that he’s a liar, a conman, and a crook and they just don’t care.

As to the rest of us, we will just sit and stew and wring our hands and it will be business as usual.

What the fuck, America? How did we let this happen to us?