Tag Archives: taxes

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Pay their fair share. I hate the phrase “pay their fair share” when politicians, particularly Democrats, talk about tax policy. What the fuck exactly is a “fair share?” In 2021 the top 1% of income earners paid almost 46% of federal income taxes while earning 26% of total income. Sticking your hand in someone’s pocket “because he can afford it” smacks of confiscatory do good-ism at best and undisguised socialism at worst. Maybe the actual issue is the government simply has too many irons in the fire and is spending entirely too much money in areas where it has no business operating. God knows I’ve seen enough cash poured directly down the toilet in my 20+ years driven entirely by a general officer who was visited overnight by a series of good idea faeries and decided some new project or program was his one big chance to leave a mark in the history books. 

2. Training. I sat through what I expect was the 20th iteration of “threat awareness” training this week. Look, being aware of terrorists and insider threats is a good thing. But the material hasn’t changed in as long as I can remember. Some of the case studies they discuss are now 30 years old… as if we haven’t had a bevy of fresh new insider threats crop up since then.  Do the bosses really expect I forgot everything from fiscal year 2024 already? If the training is going to be mandatory – and worse yet – in person year after year, the minimum I feel like the audience could reasonably expect is to change up the delivery a bit. Unless the objective is to check a box on some form somewhere. In that case, mission accomplished. Carry on.

3. Florida. People who live there seem to love it, but watching storm after storm slam into Florida I’m trying to imagine any situation that would ever make me want to live there. Sure, Maryland gets a little too humid in August and maybe a little too cold in January. We get tapped by a hurricane maybe once in a generation and even then, it’s mostly a glancing blow from a storm that expended most of its fury by the time it clawed its way to the middle and upper reaches of the Chesapeake. Unless you live on perilously low ground, it’s an inconvenience. Compared with living in a location where I’d have to be prepared, for a good part of the year, to load the car with my most irreplaceable belongings and flee for higher ground. From the looks of things, plenty of people think it’s worth it, but I’ll never be one of them.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Metrics. One of the things the medicos have had me doing for the last six months is a much more frequent bit of at home tracking. Blood sugar, heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen, everything gets tracked. It’s a fine bit of trivia and something that could theoretically be helpful for them, but all it seems to have done for me is generate a new obsession and a lot of fresh anxiety when a rogue value pops up or I see an unanticipated trend develop. While I don’t dispute the value of knowing a more granular level of detail, I can tell you with certainty that even though I was certainly less healthy six months ago than I am now, I absolutely felt better before I knew any of the specifics.

2. Time. By my calculation, it should be December 29th. Somehow, though, the calendar says it’s February 2nd. That can’t possibly be right, can it? I don’t know exactly the age I was when time started to speed up, but I seem to be noticing it speed by at an almost alarming pace these days. Oddly, it doesn’t make the work days seem any shorter, but the pace of moving from one week to the next is getting quite out of hand. I have no idea how one cuts back on the throttle there, but something must be done.

3. Taxes. I switched my Roth IRA from one institution to another this year. During the transition, I managed to add in about $50 more than is allowable by law. The penalty, if left uncorrected, is something like a 6% fine for every year the extra money remains in the account. It was easy enough to fix with a call to the company who holds the account, but the real absurdity is how little our common Uncle Sam will allow you to put away to grow for untaxed future withdrawals. There are articles posted regularly decrying how the Average American will be woefully unprepared for retirement. It seems to me that one way to get after that issue would be to dramatically increase the amount that people can legally shelter from the long arm of the tax man.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. “Don’t Say Gay” Bill. Ah, Florida. How is it not surprising that it’s Florida? Let me be blunt here: Some guys like dick. Some girls don’t. Pretending that simple fact goes away because legislation prevents people from mentioning it is ludicrous. Not “agreeing” with someone else’s lifestyle isn’t sufficient reason for the state to censor them. Your flavor of religion calling something sin isn’t sufficient reason for the state to censor them. Getting up in your feelings because someone says words that make you sad isn’t sufficient reason for the state to censor them. I wish to hell these right-wing snowflakes would try reading the Constitution instead of just wrapping themselves up in it like day old fish. 

2. Intellectual inconsistency. A year ago, there was a group Black Lives Matter activists who, on several occasions, blocked up traffic in North East, Maryland. The local Facebook groups raged about them hindering commerce, being a danger to public safety, and generally being a pain in the ass to anyone just trying to get home from work while they filled the crosswalk. Now that same Facebook group is cheering wildly for the Canadian truckers blocking off whole interstates and downtowns. The truckers, of course, are heroic freedom fighters. Intellectual consistency is far too big an ask in our dumb 21st century. Personally, I think the worst way to convince people of the rightness of your cause is by making a general nuisance of yourself. It’s a stupid way of trying to win over people who largely don’t give a single shit about what you want them to care about. It doesn’t make a bit of difference to me if you’re BLM, a bunch of Canadian truck drivers, or the inevitable Americans who decide we need our own road closing protests. If I had my way, we’d read out the Riot Act and clear the rabble so the rest of us could continue on with our business. On that position, I’m absolutely consistent.

3. Taxes. I’m beginning to assemble the sea of paperwork required each year to file my taxes. The sheer complexity of it, even while filing single, is probably more rage inducing than annoying if I’m honest. This is just the grievance before I even find out the total butcher’s bill for 2021. I’m not one of the oddball “taxation is theft” types. I like living in a country whose military has more bits and bobs than the next ten countries on the list… combined. For now, it’s just the fact that I have 20 or more bits of paper (with more yet to come in), that all need to be coordinated before I can even send the whole mess off to the guy who actually understands how it’s all supposed to fit together and save me from handing over one more thin dime than is legally required.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. I missed out on the mortgage and rent relief in 2008 and 2020 because I pay my bills and don’t over extend my line of credit. I missed out on stimulus because I spent a decade from age 23-33 moving around the country following jobs that increased my take home pay. I missed Maryland’s vaccine incentive lottery because I got my jab from the first available source – directly from the feds. Now, the Biden Administration wants to give a fresh new hundred-dollar bill to any of the holdouts that show up to get their shot. My question is: At what point, if ever, will doing the right things and making good decisions be specially rewarded? I only ask because the underlying message I’m seeing pretty consistently is “You’ve made good choices and done the right stuff… so sit down, shut the fuck up, and cheerfully fork over those tax dollars so we can pay out and reward people that didn’t.”

2. Personal liberty. I’m a big believer in personal liberty. My position is often best explained in the notion that my rights are inviolate right up to the point where they violate the rights of someone else. Put more colloquially, my right to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose. I suppose that’s why I’m confused by so many Republicans and Libertarians who are intent on decrying vaccinations, particularly mandated vaccination, as some kind of violation of their personal liberty. My understanding, and I’m quite sure the logic of the Constitution will bear me out on this, is that we have no protected individual right to spread communicable disease while there is a compelling government interest in reducing the spread of an illness that has proven to be a clear and present threat to public health, the overall economy, and body politic at large. To argue that we do have such a right makes you sound like a goddamned idiot.

3. The World Health Organization. The WHO has decided that America shouldn’t even consider giving anyone COVID-19 booster shots; demanding instead that all doses be funneled out of the country. I don’t mean to put too fine a point on this, but since the WHO dropped the ball back in the early days of the Great Plague by not demanding full disclosure from Communist China, I don’t feel like we need to put all that much stock in what the choose to demand now. Americans are a generous people for the most part. We’re exporting hundreds of millions of doses of the various vaccines – every one of which the American taxpayer footed the bill to research, develop, and produce. We rented the hall and engaged the band, so I have no earthly idea what gives the people from the WHO the absolute stones to think they should be calling the tunes.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Pennsylvania roads. With a tax base that includes two of America’s biggest cities and metric shit tons of New York City commuters, I’m never entirely sure why the roads throughout the commonwealth are so utterly appalling. Maryland is a tax happy, liberal paradise, and as annoying as the endless road work throughout the state is, at least the worst of the pot holes get filled. I mean a bit of decent infrastructure feels like the minimum one should expect from a state government with their hands so deeply into everyone’s pocket… but not Pennsylvania, though. They seem determined to let even their biggest highways turn back into dirt tracks and cow paths.

2. Bait and switch. You lured us into accepting a meeting request with promises that “lunch will be provided,” but suddenly the day of the meeting it ends up moving to 9 AM and there is no food. In any other context that’s plainly a bait and switch tactic and illegal in many contexts. I’m not saying you should never trust management, but a bit of good, healthy skepticism is always in order.

3. In recognition of a newly annointed federal holiday scheduled for tomorrow and noting the 14 working days that the creation of this lawful public holiday slashes from the number of days I’ll be in the office during the balance of my career, there is no third thing that annoys me this week.

What Annoys Jeff this week?

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1. The US Postal Service. I probably shouldn’t say this out loud while my taxes are in transit, but they should have arrived at their destination by now. Emphasis on the “should have.” In any case, I’ve just received a Christmas card. It was postmarked on the 20-somethingth of December and delivered to me here on the homestead just in time for Valentine’s Day. Maybe I should award points for it getting here at all based on some of my other recent experiences. Increasingly the expectation that products and services should work as advertised feels like something that’s just too much to hope for.

2. Baltimore. One of the perennial joys of living in the State of Maryland is the unending shitshow that is Baltimore City. In a state with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, we somehow are home to one of the world’s largest live action shooting ranges. Year after year the legislature pours ever increasing amounts of money into the city, because surely that will fix all the problems. Let’s not get hung up on the fact that when asked, the city government generally doesn’t seem able to tell anyone where the money they’ve already been given went or what improvements were made as a result. For my entire adult life, Baltimore has been governed by increasingly feckless “leaders” whose sole purpose in life seems to be finding new and more ridiculous ways to convince Annapolis to give them mountains of cash. The city government either needs to get its house in order or the state should step in and get the city into line. Allowing it to continue to swallow prodigious amounts of tax dollars without showing even the most marginal of improvements feels downright criminal.

3. Mind reading. It’s worth repeating from time to time that mind reading is not among my many varied talents. If you tell me you want something, I’m going to proceed from the assumption that you know what you want. I’m going to do my best to give it to you – not some version of what you requested, not something with the flavor of your request, but the honest to God thing you asked for to the best of my abilities and within the time allotted. If it turns out what you end up with isn’t what you want, I can promise you that the issue is almost always with the description of the requirements, not with my being way out off the edge of the map somewhere.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Deficit spending. If reports are to be believed, in the first four months of FY 2020, the US government took in a single quarter record amount of tax dollars – some $1.18 Trillion. It also had record quarterly expenses of $1.57 Trillion. In the first four months of this fiscal year, the government ran a deficit of approximately $444 Billion. In a budget where millions of dollars are effectively rounding errors, I’m left to wonder if the problem isn’t so much that taxes are too low as it is that we collectively just spend too damned much money. Once upon a time there was a subset of Republicans called deficit hawks who raged against borrowing money to finance the operation of the government. They’re long gone, of course. No one in the elected levels of government has any interest in slowing down the gravy train. Having seen the inner workings of government, I find it absolutely laughable to think that in the last 90 days we’ve put $1.57 Trillion to its best and highest use. The percentage of it that’s been wasted would be staggering to behold if anyone was able to do the accounting. The first order of business should be slaughtering the sacred cows. Until that happens, I’ll stand firmly on my platform of not one more penny in new taxes.

2. The pall of ambivalence. I’m kicking off a 4-day weekend and the last couple of weeks have cast such a gloom on the proceedings that I’m, at best, mostly indifferent. Maybe my mood will improve a bit after a string of days allocated to hanging out with the animals and reading. It usually does… but I’m not optimistic about how long the restorative effects of that brief interlude will last.

3. Out of office messages. As a “professional” I understand that out of office messages are supposed to contain brief, helpful information such as the date you should return or an alternative point of contact people can reach in your absence. As such, I can’t shake the feeling that they really don’t convey the more subtle message that the sender is conveying. For instance, instead of saying something trite and derivative like “I will respond to email and voice messages as quickly as possible when I return,” I feel that the more frank and honest out of office message might read something like “I’m burning off a day of vacation time in an effort to hold on to the one small shred of sanity I have left. I’m not checking my office email or voicemail. If you call me at home or send me a Facebook message asking about work stuff, I’ll ignore you and do whatever I can, whenever I can to make your life less pleasant. Whatever the issue is, as far as I’m concerned it’s more of a “next week” problem and not something I’ll be spending any time thinking about between now and then.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Getting in through the back door. Every time I hear one of the Democratic primary candidates wax philosophical about one of their wealth redistribution schemes by confiding to the camera that “it’s a tax on Wall Street,” I look around and wonder how many people really believe that. My reading on their collective plans is that this chimera of making the “big banks and hedge fund managers” pay is ultimately a tax on every working person who has a retirement account. Your 401k, 403b, IRA, or TSP can’t help but be taxed under these plans, because at heart these accounts are nothing more than fractional shares that get traded on a regular basis to keep the fund balanced… and these funds are the definition of big players in the financial market. The Democratic candidates know they’re going to have to tap into huge sources of capital for their plans. I just wish they had the stones to admit that getting it done is going to require levying this backdoor tax on every man and woman in America who’s bothered to make an effort to save for retirement and not just the guy in charge of running the fund.

2. When you can’t even half ass the work. I worked on three things today. Simultaneously. All were a priority of effort… at least to someone. What that really means, of course, is each of them got exactly the level of effort and attention you’d think they got. Instead of half assed efforts, the very best they could hope for was being third assed. It’s a hell of a way to run a railroad. You’d think after 17 years I’d have started to get use to the idea that most days good enough just has to be good enough. Then again some days don’t even rise to that paltry standard.

3. Facebook memories. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to disable Facebook Memories, because every morning I open the damned app I’m met with the picture of a bulldog doing something alternately ridiculous or endearing. Jorah has done quite a lot in the last six months to patch up the sucking chest wound Winston left behind, but those pictures every morning still catch me directly in the feels. Despite the myriad of issues, vet bills, and costs, I don’t think I’ll ever really get to a place where I don’t miss such a good dog.

A dark and rainy Friday…

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As I was sitting here on a dark and rainy Friday morning seething quietly after cutting a check for a $1825 special assessment from my condo’s governing HOA, I realized it’s been a few days since I posted anything. What can I say, rage, it seems, beings out my inner soul as a writer – or maybe it’s just the catharsis I need after getting gang banged by a homeowners association board who must have been holding on to a shit ton of proxies when they voted.

I’m always curious about those who see rental income as a surefire pathway to wealth. Maybe it is under certain circumstances – if you’re local and can do many of the repairs yourself, if you paid cash and aren’t using at least a portion of the rent to make the note, or if you aren’t governed by an HOA that’s at least as good at spending other people’s money as the United States Congress. I’ve been renting out this condo since 2003 and I’ll admit that there have been a few good years – those years when nothing breaks and there’s no damage to be repaired. Those years are the rarity. Far more often it’s a break even proposition where you’re lucky to be about $500 into either the black or red by year’s end. Then, of course, there are those years where you end up pouring your own cash into the place hand over fist. No one talks about those years when they tell you what a great idea it is having a rental property.

At least the bastards got the bills out in time to use the whole damned mess as a 2018 deduction instead of having to wait an additional year to recoup a few pennies on the dollar. When your “bright slide” is consoling yourself that you have something to help offset the decreased federal deductibility of state and local taxes, you’ve really got to rethink the whole plan from start to finish.

This dark and rainy Friday is going to largely be about resisting the temptation to drive down there and nail a for sale sign to the door and being done with the whole bleeding mess.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Looking busy. During an average year there are plenty enough times when the number of requirements arriving over the side are large and numerous enough to swamp you before you ever get a chance to close them out. The few days before Christmas are not, generally, one of those times. The real issue now is no matter how important the thing is, the people you need to provide the answers, aren’t around. Sure, you’ll make an effort to close out those things that can be closed out without needing a lot of outside input, but with that done, you’re left largely with either make work projects or simply trying to make yourself look busy. At least when I get back after the first of the year, I’ll have a beautifully set up file system already built for all of those new 2018 emails. You can’t see it, but I’m rolling my eyes.

2. CNN. The day after a bill passed out of Congress giving most Americans an income tax cut, CNN’s website lead off with the banner headline “Enjoy your tax cuts while they last.” They go on to concede that “a lot of households… will see a lower tax bill in the next several years.” The article largely focuses on the expiration of many of these individual cuts by 2027 – a decade hence. The thing is, though, Congress can pretty much do whatever it wants. Tomorrow they can pass a bill making these cuts permanent. The next day they can pass a bill that changes the date they expire to a week from Tuesday. Sure, I would have loved to see the individual tax reduction provisions made permanent in the original bill, but I’m damned if I’ll reject a reduction now when balanced by what might be a decade in the future. A decade is a hell of a long time in politics – more than enough time to apply maximum pressure to our duly elected representatives to ensure the cuts they’ve made now are made permanent or replaced by better alternatives… and bird in the hand and whatnot.

3. The shortest day. We have the solstice over with now, but it’s a long, dark climb back to a point when we don’t exist as a race of mole people, traversing to and from home each day in utter darkness. I’m sure some people will wax poetic about the majesty of the shifting seasons, but I’d be happy enough stuck on high summer with its ready supply of daytime in big, beautiful 15 hour blocks.