So the tax ‘rebates’ are going out sooner than planned. Qualifying folks whose Social Security numbers end in 00 - 20 should be seeing their stimulus payments in their bank accounts this week.

The IRS said all checks for those who filed tax returns on time are scheduled to be deposited or mailed by July 11. The direct deposits and the paper checks are being processed by the last two digits of a taxpayers’ Social Security number.

For people receiving direct deposits, those with a Social Security number ending in 00 to 20 will have their economic stimulus payment deposited to their bank account by May 2.

Those with Social Security numbers ending in 21 to 75 will get their direct deposits by May 9 and those with Social Security numbers ending in 76 to 99 getting their deposits by May 16.

If you’re not sure if you qualify for the stimulus payments, here’s a handy dandy little calculator that will tell you if you qualify, and how much you’ll be stimulated if you do.

I will not be stimulated today. I will not be stimulated on May 9 or May 16. I will not be stimulated with my green eggs and ham Sam-I-am.

This should upset me. But it doesn’t. I’m used to giving more than half my pie to government only to be told to continue to bend over and grab my ankles so they can take even more.

If you’re like me, seeing the numbers on your 1040 tend to make your blood boil.

My husband and I paid over $35,000 in Federal income taxes for 2007. That’s more than some of my friends make in a year.

We paid $15,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes through payroll deductions and self employment taxes. A big fat piece of our pie given to someone else, as we’ll never see any of that again. Both programs will be insolvent by the time we retire. Senator Hope and Change would be proud, no?

The state of Arizona took $5,700 in income taxes and the county and other localities hit us up for $3,500 in property taxes. I chose to live in a state with low income and low property taxes. Lucky? No. Good life choices.

Before factoring in sales taxes on the things I buy and gas taxes on every gallon of gas I use…I’ve given government $60,000 this year.

$60,000 and Senator Hope and Change and his lovely bride think I should pay MORE?

How much more?

No, seriously. I’m asking.

How much more of my pie should I give to someone else?  I work over 2400 hours a year for my salary (normal full time is 2080 hours a year), plus extra time outside my W-2 job to help out with our side business.

How much more should I be paying? How much harder should I be working to give my pie away?

I don’t mean to pile on to Rachl Lukis’ butthurt, but Tax Freedom Day is April 23rd.

Somehow…the fact that it’s 3 days earlier this year doesn’t ease the sting of realizing I’m working almost 4 months a year to give my pie away so that others can have some.

If I didn’t have a sense of pride, or a strong work ethic, an insatiable need to succeed or a desire to do more than just get by… I’d quit my job and suckle at the government teat.

But alas, I want to do more with my life than know what was on Dr. Phil today. I better get back to work.

If you haven’t read this yet, do it now!

If it were later than 12:16 p.m. and if I had eaten anything yet today, I would take a double shot of whiskey right now. I might do it anyway because any negative repercussions from that would have to be better than feeling every ounce of pain I’m enduring today.

I am doing my taxes.

And you know what, right this second, I’m NOT proud to be an American. I’m not even proud to be a human being today. I am certainly not enjoying the fact that I share air and a planet with whatever assholes invented and maintain the IRS.

It makes me want to blow shit up. Not people, that would be taking it too far, but definitely shit. Like watermelons and outhouses and maybe even a taco truck.

And it only gets better from there.

Is it possible to have a chick crush in the same way dudes have man crushes? Cause I totally heart Rachl Lukis.

Seriously though, it wasn’t the burger smack down that brought me back. It was the even more exciting topic of taxation. Try to keep your excitement contained, mmk?

It seems like I’m the only person not running for President these days. I haven’t been paying much attention to the field. As a matter of principle I refuse to get sucked in until after Labor Day. It’s June of 2007, the first primary is still more than six months away. Unlike other bloggers, I don’t get paid to be a political junkie. I get burned out on blogging and I disappear for a month or three.

In any case, candidates on both sides have made overtures to their tax policy platforms. As details slowly become available, I’ll be here ripping their proposals apart.

My Spidey Sense tells me I’m going to have lots of fun with John Edwards’. That just makes my fingers tingle with excitement.

It’s April 13th, and I’m done early. Most of my client work for the 4/15 deadline (yes I know it’s the 17th this year) is finished. Only things left are a few straggling extensions, and my personal returns. The last thing I want to do at night is my own taxes, but I really don’t want to extend this year either. Blech.

This filing season was uneventful compared to the others I’ve had. There were no printer mishaps or deleted files, no lost engagement rings. I didn’t get locked in the parking garage late one Saturday night. We did have an associate go to another firm last month, but we managed. The hours were still long, but we managed.

However, I am in desperate need of a vacation. Preferably one where fruity adult beverages are delivered to my beachside chaise lounge by a six-pack with legs named Carols.

I also need to knock off two more items from my list - with busy season I’ve fallen behind. I was thinking something like bungee jumping out of a hot air balloon. Killing two birds with one stone, if you will. But I’m open to other suggestions too. So long as adrenaline is involved, it would probably fit something on my list.

Oh, and what you’ve all been waiting for…regular snarky blogging resumes now. Yay!

Can you at least pretend to be excited?

The MSM went bonkers last week trumpeting the record profits ExxonMobil earned last year. But as always, that’s only half the story. What you didn’t hear about were the record taxes ExxonMobil was paying. Emphasis mine.

While they were recording record profits last year, they were also writing checks to Uncle Sam to the tune of $100.7 billion — two and a half times what they made in net profit. In fact, previous Tax Foundation research found that from 1977 to 2004, federal and state governments extracted $397 billion by taxing the profits of the largest oil companies and an additional $1.1 trillion in taxes at the pump. In today’s dollars, that’s $2.2 trillion.

Surely paints an entirely different picture now, doesn’t it?

(via The Tax Foundation)

What do you think the government would do with $15,000 worth of Jell-O? Feed the homeless, donate it to The Salvation Army…or make a replica of the city of Scottsdale, AZ?

Yep, $15,000 of my hard earned tax dollars went to an ‘artist’ from San Francisco (not surprising) to make a city out of Jell-O.

Scottsdale’s latest public art project is a bit shaky but will definitely provide food for thought.

It is a sculpture of parts of downtown Scottsdale created from nearly 40 pounds of gelatin.

Scottsdale in Jell-O will be unveiled to the public at 10 a.m. today in the atrium of the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts.
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The sculpture covers two large tables and depicts much of downtown Scottsdale, including the Scottsdale Civic Center Mall and the new Scottsdale Waterfront, a retail-condominium project, along with a backdrop of Camelback Mountain. Everything is to scale.

A free artist reception is planned from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday.

Not surprisingly, Jell-O will be served.

Award-winning San Francisco-based artist Liz Hickok has been working for the past week to create the temporary, $15,000, publicly funded installation, which will run through Monday.

That $15,000 could’ve paid my house payment for the next year, or my car payment for the next two. Last I checked, that was 1/3 the starting salary of a police officer. My $15,000 could’ve paid for numerous other goods or services to benefit the public.

Instead, I’ve just paid for some whackjob ‘artist’ to play with food. What a waste.

The business reporters at The Arizona Republic are messing with me. They delight in ruining my day.

Bastards.

Today’s WaPo has a rather interesting article discussing tax breaks for specific companies that were included in the tax package passed by the 109th Congress recently - The Tax relief and Health Care Act of 2006. According to the WaPo, select companies were given tax relief in the form of suspensions of import tarriffs. That’s not unusual. Suspending import tarriffs is common, and we all know the Internal Revenue Code is a tool in which to reward and punish those big evil corporations.

What I need some help with here is the reaction of Rep. Jack Kingston (R- GA). Remember, that’s an ‘R’ next to his name:

“This is just good old-fashioned pork,” said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), vice chairman of the House Republican Conference for the 109th Congress. Kingston described the suspensions as a stealthy version of the congressional earmark — a term for a measure that directs the government to spend public money on behalf of a particular special interest.

“A lot of members of Congress are just clueless as to what is going on,” Kingston said. “You can spend money away or you can tax-credit it away. Either way, somebody else is going to pick up the difference.”

That’s an ‘R’ up there by his name, right? I’m really confused now. I’m not a sophisticated DC type, but I always thought ‘good old-fashioned pork’ was Congress using my tax dollars to spend on special pet projects - things like $50,000,000 for an indoor rain forest in Iowa and $20,000,000 for school reform in Texas.

How did giving taxpayers a tax cut become ‘good old-fashioned pork’?

Rep. Kingston was right - members of Congress are clueless. Starting with him. Suspending a tarriff isn’t a tax credit. It’s not requiring a certain tax to be paid for a specified period of time. If the tax isn’t paid to the U.S. Treasury, Congress can’t tax-credit it away. They can’t spend it either, for that matter. The money remains right where it belongs - in the hands of those evil corporations. You know, the ones that hire people and pay wages and buy supplies and services and generally keep the economy chugging along.

If Rep. Kingston, and the rest of the ‘R’ folks in DC can’t seem to remember those tax dollars they’ve been spending belong to taxpayers, and one of their core principles is to return as much of those dollars to those that paid them, they’re in for an even bigger spanking at the polls in 2008.