Income Tax Blues

Oh my gosh – I’ve got a public! Someone emailed me missing my blog post last night!!!! How truly exciting.

I have no excuses except for taxes. I’ve put them off as long as I can, and my husband tied me to my desk last night and said I couldn’t move until they were done. At 2:00 a.m. I remembered I had a switchblade hidden in my shoe (never go anywhere without it), so I was able to get my shoe up to my mouth, untie the laces with my teeth, scrape the shoe off on the desk leg, contort my hand down to the switchblade, saw through the ropes and free myself. After all that struggle, I was in no mood to blog.

Oh, and before I forget, I have some nice swampland in Florida I’ll sell to you at a very good price – a steal really. Please respond directly to this post for more information.

The reason the tax stuff is so daunting (and sucks) is because I own a very small yet very unlucrative business doing anything anyone will pay me to do, which apparently isn’t much, and I do my own bookkeeping. I hate accounting with a passion. More than a passion, even, with a vengeance, and even more than that if I could come up with a more loathsome word. I hate it because I lose receipts, forget to make entries in my checkbook, and make business purchases with the wrong credit cards. I have a business credit card, American Express, that isn’t taken everywhere, so I use one of my own. How do I account for this? Plus if it’s only a buck or two, I pay cash. Am I supposed to keep that receipt somewhere and if so, why and where? Because I can’t even keep the AmEx ones that I know belong with the business.

I have folders, and I’m very well organized with everything but accounting. I can retrieve a picture I took six years ago of a random squirrel on my computer in 3.7 seconds. But there is no way I can find yesterday’s receipt for photocopying.

It’s a combination of dislikes that causes it. Keeping up with accounting means typing in numbers – and there’s the origin of my mental block. My fingers protest at having to reach that far. They never liked it in high school typing class, and they don’t like it now. To show their disapproval, they go to y instead of 6 and o (oh) instead of 0 (zero). Here’s what one of my number’s looks like: y3r.o5. If I’m typing a whole column in Excel and hit Sum without looking at the typing, it just doesn’t add up.

The second reason I hate accounting is because it has to do with the IRS. I despise tax code as much as I fear tax men (and women). I know I’m going to get something wrong, even with the best intentions. Besides, tax code is designed by the wealthy for the wealthy. You know the system is screwed up when Warren Buffet pays less in taxes than his secretary. I advocate an across the board 10% flat rate for everyone above poverty level, but would that ever fly? Not no but hell no. H & R Block, millions of tax attorneys and accountants, and nearly all the IRS men and women would lose their jobs. It’s a self-perpetuating infestation eating away at the core of the American dream.

If I had my druthers, here’s what my tax return would look like:

Annual income: $ r,43y.uq

Tax Rate %: x .1o

Total tax due: $ r43.yu

Now that’s the kind of taxes I can live with.

Oh, must sign off now. My husband’s coming, and he’s got a rubber hose…*

*(My public – and I love you all – will get this inside joke, or see the Score Some Gore blog).