Last night (Friday night), while I was posting here, an automobile drove past the William Rivers Pitt and up the driveway; I immediately recognized it as belonging to someone for whom I had done income-taxes.
I almost immediately recognized two of the five people therein; Felix, a transplanted Texan, and his wife Annamaria. Felix is about 35 years old, somewhat short and round, and like most Texans of Hispanic descent, dark. His wife is perhaps a couple of years younger, and as wide as the side of a barn. They have two young boys (who were not with them last night).
Felix works somewhere where one takes hides off of cattle; not at a slaughter-house or meat-packing plant, but a "rendering" place; this is the sort of job where one works perhaps ten hours one week, seventy hours the next week. Felix made $68,000 last year, doing this (he has been doing this for about ten years); his wife does not work.
They all came to see me because Felix knew it had been my birthday, and because they were so happy at the simply-enormous income tax refunds, federal and state, they are getting.
Felix thinks franksolich had something to do with all this, but franksolich had nothing at all to do with it.
The deal is, even though married and with two children, Felix steadfastly insists upon having income-tax withholding done as if he were a single male, meaning that tons and tons more money is taken out, than what needs taken out, of each paycheck.
Felix got one Hell of a massive refund.
I've done income-taxes ever since I was in high school, and it always perplexed me that certain segments of society "feel better" about having too much deducted from their paychecks, and then when the inevitable refund results, they think the guy who did the paperwork made it possible.
These "certain segments" in Lincoln usually involved Vietnamese, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis; in Omaha, Sudanese and Hispanics; and out here in the Sandhills of Nebraska, Texans.
I've never been successful at persuading such people that maybe it's better for them to have this money in their pocket right now, rather than loaning it to the federal and state treasuries.
One thing I have done, and the lesson does seem to sink in, is that since about the time of the first Reagan tax-cuts in the early 1980s, I give "customers" a chart showing what they would have paid in income-taxes under Kennedy, under Johnson, under Nixon, under Ford, under the Incompetent One, up to the present president.
Actually, it's two charts, one adjusted for inflation since 1961, and the other just straight dollars.
I think it's important illumination, although most of us need no illumination about the way income-taxes have gone under Democrat and Republican presidents.
I have no idea how taxes have changed for the rich and the super-rich since 1961, but I'm intimately acquainted with how taxes have changed for the middle classes, the working classes, and the poor, the past forty-five years.
No one here needs to know how oppressive income taxes were for the middle classes, the working classes, and the poor, prior to Reagan; but there's a lot of people outside of here who need that illumination.
