Stupid Taxes
 

I'm doing taxes early this year rather than waiting until the last 2 hrs. Usually I delay until the last possible moment hoping I might die before having to do them.

One of the questions on the IRS form is if my dependent is legally disabled. The IRS defines a legal disability as:

My daughter is 0 years old, so that means she cannot engage in any substantial gainful activity because of her physical and mental condition. That condition is expected to last at least a year.

This is why "doing taxes" is retarded. There's so many loopholes and things open to interpretation. It's a waste of everyone's time.

Our presidential candidates talk about stuff that hardly matters and means practically nothing to people in their day to day lives, but tax reform is never mentioned, as if stupid taxes are just an act of God that nobody can do anything about.

Taxes should have been a flat sales tax from day 1. The way you make it progressive is to not tax staple food items, and to make the first $800 in rent/mortgage expenses tax free. No other exceptions. Simple and effective. Let's make CPAs look for a different job, and make TurboTax go the way of AfterDark screensavers.

https://i.imgur.com/INZkyuF.gif

Yeah, I thought doing mine on Saturday was plenty early, but I owe, and know that I have enough.

Is the offspring cute and stuff?

Trump wanted to do flat tax and got shut down.
So he did the next best thing for most of us, he doubled the standard deductible.

I don't really care about my own taxes, because my life is pretty simple. So any time a politician says his new tax proposal is going to help me, the voter, I wonder who it's actually going to help, and I know it's not who he says it will. Whatever I'm being offered, I know it's a smokescreen because I don't have a lobbyist, I'm just the end user being fed these sound bites.

Lots of people owe, or have reduced refunds this year because of last year's "guidance" from the IRS to employers on payroll deductions. The guidance wasn't with the John Q. Public's interest in mind, it was meant to inflate the apparent size of tax cuts by giving people bigger paychecks immediately.

This month the IRS is pointing out that the average refund is down only $20 this year, but they're not pointing out that more people owe this year. It adds up: at the end of March 2019, $6 billion less had been paid out in refunds than at the end of March 2018.

We do gas mileage math here, so we don't like using fake numbers or ignoring inconvenient ones. In reporting only the average refund this year while ignoring the people who got refunds last year but now owe, isn't the government putting out fake numbers, albeit phrased truthfully? We like ABA testing here, let's apply it here: List everyone who got a refund last year, and post the average. Now take those same taxpayers this year (including the ones who owe) and do the same, reporting the people who owe as negative numbers for the refund size. Feel free to not count people who had other changes than the new tax law. The number of the average refund would be much more than $20 lower, but we would at least be comparing apples to apples. I'm supposing that people who owe this year were at the lower end of the refunds last year, so that's a double benefit to the average size this year- we're not counting a negative and also got rid of their low sized refunds.

The Fuel Shark claims 50% to 75% fuel savings. I wouldn't simply tack its claimed savings onto my calculations, I'd actually measure miles travelled and fuel pumped. Let's not claim that a "simple" proposed plan would be best and actually look at what it does.

Redpoint, claim your daughter as disabled. Go ahead. IANAL, you're on your own.

Xist, I really hope for the year where your income helps you. You jump through enough hoops as it is, it seems tax time only adds insult to injury.

Oil Pan- I'm hugely in favor of raising the standard deductible, but again, I wonder about the huge deductibles it's hiding. The system is rigged against people who take it- for every dollar "given away" by the standard deductible, how many more are given away by harder to find deductibles that get hidden by issuing debt? I own that government debt that's being issued to cover the fat cats' bigger deductions. Hardly a selling point to me.

Good point about A-B-A math.

At what point did Turnip talk about a flat tax? He has said all kinds of things and has contradicted himself in the same sentence.

I tried to find a source for that and encountered this: https://www.investopedia.com/taxes/h...s-under-trump/

All companies are supposedly taxed at 15%, but I cannot find any confirmation. This says that up to 20% of LLC income can be designated non-salary income and is exempt from self-employment tax: https://www.thestreet.com/personal-f...s-llc-14821236

I finally figured out my password, but now I cannot get into TurboTax.

My income is steady but I paid more this year than last, go figure

At what point do you stop calling the President 'Turnip'?

The tax code is four million words long. It's about three hundred ninety nine thousand words beyond useful. Not a single living person knows the tax code in it's entirety, or even a substantial portion of it. Some parts will contradict other parts. Nearly all of it is to benefit special interests.

It makes me want to secede the Union every year.

Secede? :)

When will you tolerate people capitalizing proper nouns? :)

Here employers and banks have to report your income so the forms come pre-filled.
If you don't need to make any changes you can just sign them by SMS.

I needed to declare some income from a foreign P2P-lending site so i needed to go to the tax authority's web-site and fill in a few numbers, then sign it digitally.

I think it was the knowing better channel on YouTube that pointed out that for everything else, the government automatically decides how much we owe. He thought it would be cheaper for the IRS to just figure this out on their own instead of randomly checking us.

How many other instances does someone send you a bill, tell you to figure out if it's right, and then threaten you if you've done it wrong?

Using strikethrough instead of flat-out editing the post preserves the flow of the conversation.

Insisting on the affectation of capitalizing proper nouns is, however, bonkers. :)
Businesses pay tax on their net income, people pay taxes on their gross income. Reconcile that.

Bonkers was a good cartoon.

Good point on net versus gross.

When he demonstrates that he's more intelligent than the average turnip? *

As far as taxes go, I had mine finished back in February. I think the total wound up about the same as other years, but being self-employed with varying income, it's hard to compare. For me, the process was more difficult: instead of one long 1040 to fill out, there was a shorter one with a lot of things moved to new schedules, so more work overall for me, though maybe not for someone with just W2 income and standard deduction.

*PS: Not long after posting this, I saw news reports of his suggestion of water bombers for the Notre Dame Cathedral fire. Turnips are still ahead :-(

I did not get that cultural reference.

Consider for a moment the masterful troll — shipping border jumpers to the sanctuary cities. That's not brilliant? Win-win? All you get right now is sputtering and fuming, but as soon as the various cities state how many they are willing to accept we'll see how it goes.

What I like about it is that people plucked out of the jungles of Hondoras are probably better equipped than the natives to survive in the [failed] cities like San Francisco and Chicago.

Keeping red states red is just a bonus.

We pay less in federal taxes this year than last with a slightly higher income. No other changes that would effect it except the change in federal tax laws. It also was much easier to file as we just took the standard deduction where we used to have to itemize. It took literally 10 mins and was free to do on H&R block including electronic refund switch came about 5 days later. I'm very happy with the new tax law. My state on the other hand stinks. I now pay more state income tax than federal. Add in property taxes and vehicle taxes, and on a local and state level I pay probably 1.5 times more total even after adding payroll taxes to the federal side.

All in all about 20% total of my earnings go to taxes directly from me. I read here the national average is more like 24% so I guess it could be worse. I just wonder why I'm so high on the state side considering I'm probaly $4000 under the average federal income tax payment. Now add in the added cost of goods because those who supply me have to pay, and how much less I make because what employers have to pay and it gets baffling how some think we should all pay more.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...o14IA1&ampcf=1

Sign me up for the Fair Tax.

The not having to itemize Federal is a good first step, state need to do the same for the majority of us.

I owe $2,800 this year in federal for a grand total of $22,400. Taxes done... countdown to extreme aggravation reset for another 365 days.

Flat tax is not a new idea. For example Reagan said the tax form should fit on a 3x5 index card.

It will never ever fly though because then where would investment bankers hide their carry forward loophole. And so on.

People always say bad things about loopholes. People always say good things about transparency, but I do not believe that either will change because the people they benefit are powerful.

Brilliant? When the idea is to get people not to come here? So instead of shipping the ones you catch home, you're going to let them stay in the US, and give them free transportation to places that might welcome them? Seems pretty stupid to me - not to mention actually illegal.

To get them to not come takes an adequate barrier. The President is doing it to get Congress to come back from the hiatus and (do their job and) fix the laws.

Tim Pool thinks it's a good idea because the sanctuary cities are more prepared for the onslaught. The Democrat objection is that you are taking people from some established routine and relocating, when they should be new arrivals.

As for legal, search on 'Eisenhower Little Rock 1957'.

There's some of that, perhaps even a substantial amount of that, but nearly everyone is represented by some form of tax silliness. Our tax code is progressive, and then that's balanced out by giving wealthy people $7,500 to buy an expensive EV, or a home buyer $8,000 to purchase a house.

There's no political advantage to fixing the tax code because it's uninteresting to propose something that benefits absolutely everyone. In a polarized political climate, we've got to only think of solutions that benefit a select group of people at the expense of some other despicable group.

Well, it's bad policy if it benefits people I don't like. Even if it benefits me more.

Yes, well, I really want X for a given group of people, so they should have it, even if they do not want it--yet.

There is no political energy to simplify the taxes because that is the biggest way politicians of all kinds make themselves important. If it was just a simple fair number everybody paid you take away 1/2 the power. It leaves them the power on how to then spend the money but I would argue there is more power in how they get the money.

No, to get them not to come takes changing things in their homes so that they don't want to come. "Adequate barriers" really don't apply when you have e.g. thousands of miles of coastline, not to mention airplanes.

And you have to remember that this "adequate barrier" idea comes from a person who thinks that water bombers are an appropriate way of fighting a building fire, that forest fires can be prevented by raking up pine needles, or that women won't talk about having sex with you if you pay them.

That's your opinion. IMHO, it's more likely that he's perfectly serious.

Politics is all about sticking it to the other guy. That's the only way to improve society. ;)

A little late for this year, but if you make less than $66k a year, you can file for free. https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/ I used H&R Block and it was exactly the same as the paid version.

Why not both? You have a fair point, but that's why the qualifier is 'adequate'. It doesn't have to be impermeable, but just channel movement toward the legal points of entry. The 'big beautiful door'.
No. The idea comes from his predecessor[s]. Like those cages for children.

Thanks for mentioning the building fire. I'm in awe of the 500 firefighters who ran toward that pyre.

This morning I was thinking again about subsonic drones to kill brush fires with sound. It occurred to me that the main rotors of a quadcopter could flutter at ~20-100hz and it wouldn't affect the lift, it would just require fast pitch control. Add tanks of foaming flame retardant for weight so the rotors have something to work against.

I have found it invaluable to understand people's motivations, but despite my dating experience, I do not feel that I have enough of an abnormal psychology background to fully understand why certain root vegetables do what they do. It appears that El Don collects attention, money, and power for the purpose of Making America Greater [for the rich].

Adam, he who Ruins Everything, taught us that the wall would work 0% of the time because people immigrate illegally by plane 40% of the time.

I saw a post with three real ways to improve immigration, first, hire more judges because detainees wait up to two years to see a judge. According to ICE’s fiscal year 2018 budget, on average it costs $133.99 a day to maintain one adult detention bed, $97,812.70 for 730 days. For how many days could an immigration court run on almost $100,000? How many cases could they see in that time?

"Currently, there are approximately 350 immigration judges." "There are currently 733,365 pending immigration cases which means that the average immigration judge would have a backlog of over 2,000 cases."

https://immigrationforum.org/article...ration-courts/

Weird, that original source quoted four sources, ICE, "Immigration groups," say an adult bed costs closer to $200 a night (and $146,000 for two years), DHS, which says it costs $319 to keep a mother and children together, and Health and Human Services, which says it costs $775 per night for children separated from their parents.

Second, they recommend expanding U.S. Refugee Resettlement program to also provide services to asylum-seekers. The third recommendation was to provide humanitarian aid for food, education, and health care, instead of security, and they pointed out that Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in the area, but has fewer people fleeing.

Nicaragua has a lower murder rate than its neighbors.

At about $8000 a month I am sure there are folks who could take care of a kid or two for less

The aerial fire attack would have worked great with helicopters which is the main way aerial firefighting is done. Everyone just acted like the planes are the only way to bomb a fire and of course that may not have gone so well. Helicopters bagging right out of the nearby river would have done much better than fireman standing by for hours waiting to even attempt a direct attack. Still would have been terrible.

Personally if my house gets that involved I'd rather it just fully burn to the ground to ease in cleanup, but I don't live in a 900 year old stone and timber cathedral. It's a 70+ year old log cabin at heart built by a sheephearder so nobody would be sad but me.

There's your problem, not dating persons who are weird enough.

Maths don't work that way. Seek other opinion.

I do my taxes the first week of February. If I've screwed up and we are due a refund I file immediately. If I have done my calculations correctly and owe a few hundred I schedule my filing for 1-April.

For 2018 we paid 10.2% in federal taxes. That is up from 9.4% in 2017. That increase is due to the cap on SALT deductions so we moved from itemizing to taking the standard deduction.

We also own $1315 due to the IRS reducing withholding to make the tax "cut" look bigger than it was. Time to change my withholding AGAIN to try to fix things.

BTW, the IRS doesn't calculate your taxes and send you a completed tax return due to lobbying from Intuit and H&R Block. The idea comes up repeatedly and then dies after those two companies spend millions lobbying against it. The House just passed a bill that will ban the IRS from creating their own free tax prep software. (A bipartisan bill called ironically the "Taxpayer First Act" that just passed on a voice vote)

Taxpayers first... Tomorrow, the world!

Typical.

Have you ever been close to a water drop from a helicopter? It comes down hard. Would have collapsed the roof and pushed the fire into lower parts of the structure.

Smart way to do it all. This is the first year I've owed, and I owed a lot. The higher standard deduction certainly makes it less valuable to itemize deductions, but I get a little more back by itemization mostly due to charitable giving (which shouldn't be a deduction) and mortgage interest (which certainly shouldn't be a deduction).

We should fire all the politicians that block a federal online tax system. Actually, we should fire all politicians that get in the way of cleaning up the filthy tax code. Anyone putting up resistance is clearly corrupt, and should not ever get another public service job again (politician).

Have you been to a hospital lately?