Stupid Taxes

[redpoint5]

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:

The IRS considers someone to be permanently and totally disabled if both of the following apply:
He or she cannot engage in any substantial gainful activity because of a physical or mental condition.
A doctor determines the condition has lasted or can be expected to last at least a year or can lead to death.

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.

[Xist]

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?

[oil pan 4]

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.

[Fat Charlie]

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.

[Xist]

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.

[rmay635703]

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

[freebeard]

At what point did Turnip talk about a flat tax?

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

[redpoint5]

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.

[Xist]

Secede?

When will you tolerate people capitalizing proper nouns?

[jakobnev]

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.