For those of you that think Kerry is not a waffler here are a few examples of his positions and then his revised positions.
Category Archives: Soapbox
Tax Law Stumps The Stupid
According to Fox News the average tax filing time has increase to 28 hours and 30 minutes.
28 HOURS!! Are you kinding me?!?! What in God’s name could you possibly be doing for that long. I think I could read the entire 1040 instruction packet in like 2-3 hours… sharpen my pencils for 30 minutes… search for my calculator in vain for an hour… build an abacus in around 6 hours… what are you doing for the other 18 HOURS???
Seriously, though. This is the average return – not some self-employed day-trader that really should be using a CPA… this is middle class america with some capital gains and some child credits. So you’ve got capital gains: copying numbers from your 1099 form provided by your brokerage firm to your 1040. Child credits are harder because you have to do complex mathmatical equations like subtracking (that’s “take-a-ways”) the early refund tax check you got last summer. Is anyone else confused?
Ok let’s forget about the hard stuff: the 1040EZ (the EZ stands for EASY) is supposed to take 3 hours and 43 minutes to complete. You can’t even file a 1040EZ unless you make under a certain amount of money and you don’t have any of those other craze forms (like the afore mentioned 1099 form). It’s ONE PAGE. So unless you spent 2 hours searching for where you put your W2, I’m at a loss for how people can take that long as an AVERAGE. Some people do worse.
The Fox News articles then goes on as several other articles have done – lamenting our ever increasingly complex tax code (a noble cause) and then talking about how -gasp- it’s forcing people to turn to tax software to save them. Citing increased usage of tax software to prove this point. Uhm. What if people are using software not due to complexity but for other reasons like efiling? I used the online software from H&R block not because the tax code overwhelms me (a re-read publication 17 on dependants and learned about the lifetime learning credit that I can now claim from the IRS website instead of relying on their automated assistants) but because of the SPEED it allows. Sure it speeds up the filing some by doing the math for you, but then you can efile and direct deposit your refund to get your money back in MUCH faster.
Apparently I’m a speed demon when it comes to taxes because it took me under 2 hours to do my taxes last night including reading some documents from IRS website and restarting the process. You see i had guess-timated that i owed money and so i started filling out an extension (which is automatically granted for 4 months) until i realized that i was, in fact, getting a refund which prompted me to start over and file. I must say i was overall impressed with the H&R Block SW – though I found some of the “add-on services” funny. My favorites were the “why wait up to 2 weeks for your refund when we’ll advance you the money tommorrow all for the low fee of $70” and the “why pay with a credit card when you can use your checking account instead with a low $10 echeck fee”.
Really though, you don’t have to value your time very much to pay $35 to save 27 hours of you life. Heck it’s even free if you make less than $28,000 a year. All online so you don’t have to install (and then uninstall) anything. My real question is: if it takes 28.5 hours to file your taxes these days — how can you procratinate until the 15th any more?
New Stock Market Record
Now if someone came up to you and told you that they could TRIPLE your money in 8 months, what would you say? Laugh, and tell them “no thank you”, right? I mean A) if they could triple someone’s money wouldn’t they triple their own? and B) if it sounds to good to be true….
Unfortunately, that is how most people think and so they stay forever content with the paltry 1.5% interest at their bank and get really excited about their company’s 401k mutual funds doing 20-25% returns. 25%! That’s like giving money away! – right?
The truth is you can make a huge return on your investment – if you know how. And all I need to tell you about it is 6 easy payments of $19.95…. now seriously, their are those out their that GUARANTEE huge returns in short amount of time without ANY risk and usually want some $$$$ to let you in on the secret. All three of those are warning flags – though it is possible to have low risk, guaranteed returns at lower return levels like 15%, (suddenly that 1.5% savings account not sounding so good?) but that is a different story altogether. We are interested in HUGE returns, right? Now from my own personal experience I have to say that one easy way to make big returns is the stock market. And when i say that i mean STOCK market, not mutual funds. Mutual funds are for lazy investers that what to “diversify” (because they heard that was good) and let someone else manage their money for them. The money manager of course needs to get paid which lowers your returns, but that is really only part of the reason mutual funds do poorly after short term success. Hint: If you are looking at a fund that has had great past growth – realize that most of it’s growing is already over. Which i know is counter intuitive for many people. Again, I digress about things which i will strive to cover later… the real reason we’re all here is for the cold hard facts about how much of a return is possible in the stock market. But first let’s touch on an important point.
Pass The Grandma Millie
My Grandmother who likes to go by her first name – Millie – is quite the cook. She has several specialites but most probably fall into either the desert catagory or the big holiday meal type catagory. One thing that doesn’t fit either of those groups is her version of chex mix. I’ll add the recipe when I can since we are working on a cookbook here, but I can’t remember it all off the top of my head…
Anyway, Grandma Millie would often make us a batch of her “chex mix” when we were going on a church retreat kinda thing. She would put it in one of those tins that all grandmothers have and it would go with us on our outing to be inevitably passed around the bus. Now when you are on a church bus sharing a snack, calling for “Grandma Millie’s Chex Mix” can be quite a mouthful. I mean your hungry and all those words are delaying the time to get your yummy snack. Also, since it wasn’t exactly chex mix, asking for it as such seemed – well – somehow inaccurate. So time and time again this yummy snack was shortened by distinct individuals to simply “Grandma Millie”.
Now this led to some rather funny situations and facial expressions from people not really up on exactly what was going on. Imagine if you happened upon a group of people casually passing around a tin of Grandma Millie…. now imagine if people started snacking out of that tin…
Learn Your ABC’s In Graduate School
We need education reform. In this country the average age to graduate from school is 25 and it’s trending toward 30. Our country’s reluctance to tell anyone they didn’t make the cut has caused a massive reduction in standards across the board in education. This reduction of standards has watered down the value of each level educational attainment — thus causing the need for higher levels of education to compete for the same job. This need for higher levels of education and our country’s reluctance to tell anyone they didn’t make the cut has led to a lowering of standards that “doesn’t leave anyone behind” which has watered down the value of that level of educational attainment….
This maddness has got to stop! “Not everyone is college material” used to be a meaningful phrase from days gone by… it has been replaced with not everyone is phD calaber material because soon you will need a phD to get a normal professional career job… or perhaps just a Masters and a Law Degree… Which would be great if it still meant what it used to mean to attain those degrees. Instead we are “educating” people for 30 years to be able to effectively maintain the status quo in a middle management job. We should be trending towards full education by 20 years old. Imagine the economic benefits for the individual and the country. Instead of lowering standards and letting everyone through – which forces the first half of each institutions curriculum to merely reteach everything that you should have learned in your passed institution and hope that you learn it this time -we should be raising them. Then at least 50% of schooling could litterally be thrown away without any sacrific in lost knowledge. For instance, instead of having 2 years of “core” classes during undergrad that reteach everything that should have been learned in high school – instead of reteaching everyone – we would only re-teach those that didn’t learn it the first time. And we re-teach them where they should have learned it: in high school.
To use a fake example: The institute of running shouldn’t have their walking class slowed down by people that haven’t learned how to crawl, because they didn’t learn it in the crawling classes offered at the walking institute due to the fact that no one is held back at the institute for crawling lest we hurt someone’s feelings. I mean why hurt someone’s feelings when we can undermine the entire educational structure instead. The crawling institute should teach crawling. The walking institute should teach only walking as there exists another institute to teach crawling and if you need to learn to crawl you should go there. Same with the running institute. Only running. No remedial walking courses. You want to learn to walk go there. When you are ready to run come here.
We should move people through an educational system because they have mastered what we were teaching them – not because they have become a year older.