Do people even know what a tax return is? Do they really understand what a big return check actually means?

I'm sure most of you readers do because if you read my bullshit you are probably somewhat literate or at least semi-literate. The latter in this day and age seems good enough to get by with so let's leave it at that.

Anyway, a perfect tax return is ZERO. Yes, zero. You pay nothing in, you get nothing back. That is actually how it would work in a perfect world.

Let's say you are a ditch digger and work 40 hours a week with no days off except for your 2 week vacation. Of course you don't work during your vacation. You foolishly squander it taking your wife and kids to Disneyland instead of wisely spending your entire vacation at the strip club getting bombed out of your mind but I digress.

You work 8 hours a day digging a ditch for five days a week. That's fifty weeks per year at forty hours per week. You never get sick so you lose no time. They give no holidays so you work them. There is never any overtime nor do you get sent home early. At the end of the year you have worked a total of 2000 hours.

You have no 401K, you don't deal with banks and save your money in a fruit jar you hide under a loose floorboard therefore have no interest income or any other form of taxable income.

At the end of the year if your employer has taken the proper amount of money for income tax out of your check you will neither owe Uncle Sam any money at all, nor will he owe you anything. You're square.

All this being said, it's not really a perfect world. Uncle actually has the employer take out a little extra every week and your refund comes when you settle up and get the difference between what has been taken and what is owed Uncle Sam.

It is a refund for the extra money Uncle Sam has collected from you. It was and still is your money. Uncle Sam is simply giving you YOUR money back. If they had taken out more of your money you would have gotten more of your own money back in the form of a bigger refund. Had they taken out less you would have had a smaller refund.

Just because your refund was bigger doesn't mean you paid less in taxes. It means that they took out more money to begin with. A smaller refund means they took out less.

None of this has any real bearing on what your actual tax is/was.

To compare what you paid to previous years look at what you made last year and what you paid in taxes last tax year. Compare it to what you just paid. If your gross net income figures are about the same it should be fairly obvious. 

If not do the math to see the percentages.

I wrote this because I met an idiot that says that his taxes went up based on the fact that his refund was lower this year. I told him they took less out and he had a hard time figuring that out.

When I tried to explain to him that the government was giving him back his own money he couldn't understand it was his because it came to him as a government check. At first I thought that he was so stupid he ought to be euthanized but I thought twice. If we euthanized everyone that was that stupid it would mean a genocide of such epic proportions that the Holocaust would be dwarfed in comparison. 





To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY