Taxes

I spent the majority of the weekend doing my taxes. If my wife and I were just two average wage earners, I could have done my taxes in an hour. But no. My wife has been running a licensed daycare out of our house for the past 8 years, and for about $10,000 in earnings per year from this business, I get to spend about 45 hours doing paperwork for expenses and such.

Fortunately, we are getting money back. This year it seems to be close to $5000. That bad news is that it's almost $5000. If I was smart, I would be able to figure out my deductions on my W-4 so that my W-2 wouldn't show as much money in taxes being taken out. I basically gave the American government an interest-free loan for $5000, which they used to pay the interest on loans to the Chinese. I should have been earning the interest on that money, not giving it to the Chinese.

What am I talking about? Oh, yeah. Remember that the United States government sells bonds to raise money to pay for wars, bail-outs of companies that made bad mortgage loans, and social programs to help the people that just don't want to work (God bless them)? Well, the Chinese buy most of those bonds, so all the interest that we pay on them goes to the Chinese, who invest it in government owned-factories that sell cheap lead-based crap to Americans, which we buy using our tax refunds, money returned to us from the government that we overpaid and let the government borrow tax free. It's a vicious cycle. And we're the chumps.

I did notice, however, some changes on the tax forms this year. At the top of the form there was a line that said:

Would you like to give $5,000 to the Presidential Election campaign so that public can elect Presidents that they don't like? Of course, I checked 'No'.

I also saw this on my Maryland form:

Are you in the computer industry? If no, please just sign your tax form and do not bother calculating your deductions. You have no organized lobbying group and the Maryland General Assembly wants all of your money. We dare you to move to another state.

Fortunately this did not apply to me.

Oh, yeah. Another question on the 1040 asked if I was a mortgage lender who made risky loans to unqualified home buyers. If so, I could apply for a free loan to wipe out my expenses. I'm glad they are rewarding shikesters for taking risks.

The risk-free rate of doing business is getting higher and higher as people know the government will come to the rescue when they make bad decisions. People who practically ruin the economy will get rewarded with government bailouts, while towns who display festive plastic manger scenes at Christmas are deemed right-wing religious hate-mongers by the government. Hmmm.....