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Happy April 15, Everyone Most world religions tell us that upon death, we are forced to review our entire lives. On tax day, we are forced to review our entire year. I’ll take death, any day. At least at death, we can throw out our receipts. Our country’s tax system is a lot like casino gambling. In a casino, you deal with chips instead of cash, because if you had to keep shelling out five, ten, and twenty dollar bills, you would soon begin to realize a week’s pay for an hour of blackjack may not be the world’s best entertainment value. Similarly, if you had to put a few hundred dollars into an envelope every week and mail it to the IRS, you might not make it to Ground Hog Day. This fundamental truth is what started the greatest of all American traditions—withholding. If you never see it, you never miss it. Withholding is like a Christmas club where Uncle Sam keeps all the presents. Withholding is the government and your employer’s not-so-subtle way of telling you they don’t trust you to go the store to buy a dozen eggs and bring back all the change. Considering the results of your last trip to Bon-Ton, can you blame them? However, some of us are self-employed. You can tell who we are just by looking at our checkbooks. We pay a lot of bills on December 31 and make a bunch of deposits on January 2. We have found perfectly legitimate reasons to write off Ray-Bans, corn chips, and Green Day CDs. We complain that our boss is a money-hungry, slave-driving SOB who makes us take work home with us. All too often, we are right. Sure, we’ve threatened to quit a thousand times, but we always come crawling back. We self-employed are different. We withhold from withholding. We write the government a big, fat check on April 15. We start on the 14th, because it takes a whole day just to psyche ourselves up. As we do it, we try to recall happier times—root canal, traffic court, paper cuts. Some of us even get a little patriotic. I like to watch CNN and tell myself I paid for one-eighth of the nose of that GBU 28 Bunker Buster that just killed six members of Al-Qaeda. Then there’s the marriage penalty. No, I don’t mean the paltry sum you sometimes lose by filing jointly. I mean the Catch-22 of how to convince your wife you had a good year and the government you had a bad year. Next year, it’s Arthur Andersen to the rescue. When you step back from your own personal hell to see the big picture, one thing is clear—a trillion dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to. For that sum of money, you can’t help but ask: Why are there so many terrorist cells left? Why are so many people homeless? Why is Felicity still on the air? But it’s really all about perspective. And considering that there are over 100 million taxpayers among us, what really is a billion dollar expenditure but a single missed lunch at Chi-Chi’s? On the other hand, without withholding and the implicit threat of force, how many people would pack a PB&J so the Office of Management and Budget could do original research on the effect of hip-hop music on the cross-pollination of Chrysanthemums? The big, bad world is not like the end of It’s A Wonderful Life, where everyone from Bedford Falls smiles and throws a few bucks in George Bailey’s basket. Throw a bailout party for Enron and see how many folks show up to sing Auld Lang Syne. Click here to rant back. |