Tax rant

[torquill]

I'm mad now. I'm depressed and anxious and discontent too, but I am getting angrier all the time.

I just looked at my tax return as it printed out. I saw the number I recognized as my total tax liability for this last year ($176). I looked at the text on that line: "Self-employment tax".

I made $1,226 or something ridiculous like that off my tiny web design business. The feds have put me in the 12% bracket when my self-employment income is less than $2,000. Way to support the small-business owner, Mr. Preznit. Way to make the tax code friendly to the home-based entrepreneur, the people who are just starting out of their own garages and have credit cards maxed out on equipment. Way to help out those little people you so eloquently (*snort*) talked over to your side in this last election.

I'm all for taxes. If I had a regular income -- like somewhere above the poverty line -- I would be content to pay my share to keep this country going; I have done so before, and I won't say I enjoy it, but I feel like I am fulfilling a civic responsibility. It's when my income is less than some people's yearly car payments and the federal government wants to gouge me down below the break-even point for even my small bills, yet the people who can afford to buy influence get large breaks and live comfortably cushioned lives... that's when I really start to get furious.

This is fucking ridiculous. I can't get the EITC because I'm claimed as a dependent, I can't get a Pell grant because I'm claimed as a dependent -- and if you want a good example of what makes me livid, the grant boards' attitudes of "someone paid your essential bills last year, so just get your sugar daddy to pay your $3,000 in school costs too" make me seriously want to throw things. That's aside from the fact that Pell grants just got cut almost in half by our compassionately conservative Preznit. I guess if the Intelligentsia are a threat to the theocrats in power, cutting education funding makes sense...

Every time I drive over roads that are increasingly starting to look like those of a third world country -- Oakland near upper 580 comes to mind, or the 80/101 merge in SF -- I think about how starved of funds our public services have been, and how we're really starting to see and feel the crumbling infrastructure of twenty years of neglect and underfunding. We need that tax money on a local level. California is tumbling toward a real financial crisis partly because of politicians who are afraid to utter the "T" word. And yet the fed tax code is trying to pound someone far below the poverty line, when I know full well that California probably won't see a dime of that. (The state is giving me $9 in rebates, for the record. I'm very tempted to donate it to some transportation fund somewhere, despite the fact that I might need that $9.)

"Have the IRS audit poor people. They're more likely to try to cheat." I almost wish I could...

I don't have this money. Not if I'm going to be able to make it two months to the start of a hypothetical summer job. God... I hate being broke. I hate it more when people try to dig me deeper.

Comments

[kitabare.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how it works with the whole self employment thing... but I'm not even bothering to file my taxes this year because, unless things have changed since last year, you don't have to file if you made under 'x' amount of money ($6000 I think). Just a thought you might want to check on.

[luna-torquill.livejournal.com]

I went and looked. All of this tax is self-employment tax, which needs to be paid if I have business income over $400. If all I had was W2s, yeah, I wouldn't bother.

I can't claim a net loss as in previous years either, since I didn't buy enough equipment to wipe out the profit. It's turned into more of a pain to be self-employed on a small scale than to be dead broke.

Love that support of small business, there.

[cyan-blue.livejournal.com]

Did you itemize all of your business expenses? Even stuff like stationary, travel gas, that kind of thing -- it adds up.