You live in a different world than I. It even made the major (s)nooz
networks.
So? That isn't the collective.
Many were royally PO'd. ...and it didn't take three years to
notice. The next paycheck showed the difference.
I'm talking about that. I'm talking about the retroactive.
I don't see how back taxes owed could have been taken out of
paychecks spread across three years.
You are confusing grumbling about tax increase and then
acceptance with honest outrage of the many. Since this
increase had been advertised by those same news reports
as a tax on the rich, the middle class didn't peep.
Story time: Around here, when Reagan's tax increase was
about to be implemented, the banks ran seminars about
the increase. I went to one. The enthusiastic gal
who gave the presentation asked me, as I was walking out,
about my views of the subject. I told her that I only
came to find out how much my taxes were going to increase.
She was appalled and tried to tell me that it was a decrease.
I told her to do her last year's taxes with the new laws
and she'll see her taxes were going to increase. I told
her that any time a politician says that a tax increase is
only going to apply to the "rich", she can be sure that
it will be her paycheck affected.
Another thing I don't understand about these PC people
is their insistence that screwing the rich is a winner
because it is the middle class who pays these bills.
I see your point, but losses are something I prefer to not carry.
You don't have a choice a lot of times. With a cash buy-out,
the price and date of sale is set for you. If you've been
reinvested dividends, all those little purchases over the
years have to be split up into all seven categories. It was
actually 7 for the state and two for the Federal because
end points of each category didn't quite match. When these
idiots started it, there was also a before-date period and
an after-date period.
Now I could have cheated successfully and lumped all of these
into fewer categories, assuming that a purchase of .12387
shares wouldn't be traceable w.r.t. long/short-term holding
periods. But I was pissed off so I listed each category
and the data enterers had to do the same. If you want
to change policy, you show the data entry people and/or
secretaries why the change is a good idea.
As long as the series converges... ;-)
A miracle happens. I have yet to figure out how this
miracle works. Note that I enjoyed doing taxes because
it was a simpler exercise of sketching a flow chart than
I did at work. Each "event" block also gave hints of
what the politicians intended in the future so I could
extrapolate and plan. I can still do this with the US
Federal forms with the exception of all those fucking
worksheets. Those are beginning to look like a clone
of Mass. tax forms.
The best way I can describe the flow chart of a Mass.
income tax form is a PUSHJ to a co-routine which calls
itself, then JRSTs out of a DO loop at location x.
Eventually, one of the instructions in the coroutine
(which you havent' exited yet and you're still in the
PUSHJ call) jumps back to the line at location x-1/2.
Yes, that is an x minus one-half. When you've finished
with the form, you still have a dangling call on the
stack that hasn't been POPed.
;-). Our state income tax is much simpler, at least for me (multiply the
Fed by .24 and send it in). Amazingly, for those making less, the forms
are much more difficult (property tax munged into the income tax). In
fact, it's almost impossible for a low-middle wage earner to do his own.
Of course. That is intentional. Think about the work flows (that's
what I call them). It creates more work, and costs more, to
collect payroll taxes that will be refunded if only the taxpayer
submits a form. Most won't or they will have somebody else do
the work for a price. All of these laws are passed under the
banner of "getting the rich to pay more taxes". The goal,
my hypothesis, is to remove monetary control from the "poor"
and have "The Governement" do it for them.
Gradually, the "poor" threshold will creep up until the
threshold is middle class, perhaps a little higher.
Another tax-soaking technique is to pass a tax law that
supposedly is for the high-income people. However, this
threshold is placed such that, after a couple of years,
the people who are paying the tax are the middle to upper-
middle- class. Example is the AMT. The people who
do have a lot of money, have enough to hire full time
accountants to avoid this tax. The only ones who don't
have this kind of money and are not trained to be
bosses, are the people who are in the middle class range.
They don't know how to be a boss nor how to hire nor
supervise accountants, lawyers, and all the infrastructure
needed to support their work.
/BAH
In any event, $21.5M,
