Posted: 1/15/2007 6:38:22 PM EDT
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Today is Jan 15, the last day to pay your quarterly taxes for 2006. I just made out and mailed the check to the "United States Treasury". You can't even begin to know how much that pisses me off. I pay more and more taxes every year and the government won't do a damn thing about all the illegal aliens in the country - many who don't pay any taxes at all or use someone else's SS number! 
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Somehow, every year, they end up writing me a check. I don't get to have all of the cool toys you have though. 
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I really don't mind paying taxes with all the blessings I have in my life. And they are plenty! I am thankful to the Good Lord for those blessings. I am most assuredly not deserving!What really irks me is that I feel my tax money is wasted on bureaucracy by incompetent and deceitful politicians. Having worked for the government, I saw first hand the waste of coin they pull on a daily basis. I'm paying a large chunk of property tax for a votech center - Francis Tuttle Technology Center - that is two miles from my house. They have several administrators that make over $100K a year, have paid expenses - car and gas, and direct classes like Feng Shui for the Home, Answering the Phone at Work, and some very technical classes like Bicycle Maintenance. And then there is the graft and corruption. I can tell you first hand that OU has many ghost employees drawing checks but are never at work. They kept paying me for two months AFTER I quit to use my credentials for an academic review. When I told them to quit paying me, they transferred me to the a**hole in charge of payroll. He told me - "We have a lot of people getting paychecks that don't work here and never complain about it. Why are you bitching?" With bureaucrats that stupid, you'd think they'd be put in jail. But the state authorities won't do that because it would give OU a big black eye. Meanwhile I pay taxes every year to support institutions like that. 
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I think we would have better government at all levels if *everybody* had to write checks to pay their taxes. No offense intended, but as it is, folks like Shrek sound like they feel good about getting a check from the State and Federal government paying off the interest free loan those governments have enjoyed for the previous year. Most folks have no idea how much they pay in taxes. Some think "they didn't pay any taxes" because they get a check back sometime in March or April. If it was all added up: State & Federal income taxes, FICA, Medicaid/Medicare, property tax, gas tax, sales tax, the tag for your car (a tax), the tax on your phone, cable, internet access, the tax stamps on your booze and cigarettes, etc and etc and one check had to be written and handed over to a single tax agency that distributed it to all the people that now have their hands on your pockets; I predict somebody's tea might get dumped in a harbor somewhere. Someone once said taxation without representation was not acceptable; well, taxation *with* representation hasn't panned out too well because they learned how to get it from us a penny at a time either directly out of our paychecks or on the installment plan by spreading it out over everything we do. |
Folks like Shrek realize that they can't change the system, and folks like Shrek also realize that the tax game is here to stay. We're all forced to play the game, and I play it to the bst of my ability. It also helps to have a very smart wife who used to work professionally in the tax game and who is quite knowledgeable on how to win said game. |