Tuesday, April 14, 2015

A quick commentary about taxes on the eve of Tax Day.

Two things, as I've just completed my tax returns:

  1. I totally forgot that, even if you can get your taxable income down to zero, so long as you're self-employed you still owe SE taxes, for Medicare, SS and such. :P So it turns out, instead of prepaying state, I should have prepaid federal, last year, which, I'm not sure what I was thinking, except that I rushed to get my forms in, just a few minutes before midnight, April 15th, and that might have caused me to stop thinking critically. This year, of course, I'm getting it done a day early, because I'm going to be on an airplane, tomorrow.
  2. The Portland Arts Tax form asks if you have under $1,000 in taxable income, but it's not the same as State and Federal taxable income. Apparently what the City of Portland is saying, is that even if you have zero federal or state taxable income, surely you must have money saved away to pay for the Arts Tax. Yes, $35 is peanuts, but it violates the spirit of progressive tax policies, to be charging people money that they didn't actually have left over from the prior year.
And now I'm off to do other, fruitful things.

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