Work and Taxes

Recently saw a comment on facebook that was a snide remark about how Obama was going to tax the rich and give it all to the workers.  It was obvious the guy had bought into the Reich-WingNut bullshit about how it doesn't do any good to tax the rich.  The irony is that if they don't get more money from those that can afford to pay taxes, he is in a group that is the easiest in the country to get more taxes from.  He works for a company at an hourly wage, and if the government decides to raise his taxes, the employer will automatically suck it out of his paycheck and there's nothing he can do about it.

I left a snide remark about how I was glad he enjoyed paying a higher percentage of his income in taxes than the super rich.  Also gave an example of how once back in the late 90s the Senator of the state I was working in at the time released his tax return.  He made over 10 times what The Old Lady and I did the previous year and paid less than half of what we did.  This was not percentages but actual FUCKING  DOLLARS!!

As sometimes happens, this kept popping up in my mind most of the day.  When I figured out the percentages, I got pissed.  We paid 10% of our income(which shows how fucking little we made) in federal tax, the Senator paid less than half a percent!!!  Based on percentages, we paid over 20 times as much of our income than the Senator!!!

Looking back(hindsight being 20-20 and all), that was what probably caused me to lose any and all enthusiasm for working.  I'd never had much enthusiasm for working, usually worked when I had to to survive, but after that I had more "quality time" in my work history.  I guess in the back of my mind(??) I was thinking, why bother busting my ass to make more money when all it would mean is paying more taxes to subsidize the rich bastards who paid little or no taxes.  I would never get to the point where I could reduce my tax burden like the Senator did.  We have never been able to reduce our taxes with deductions, the standard deduction was always greater than our itemized deductions even though we have had mortgages and paid hefty interest on them.

This is all water under the bridge so to speak, shoulda, coulda, woulda!!  I'm retired now, but if I had worked more, I'd get a few more dollars each month in Social Security.