Tag Archives: taxes

Wealth Groupies

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Like “Joe the Plumber” — who is not a licensed plumber, whose first name isn’t Joe, whose boss’s business makes $100K, not $250K and isn’t for sale, and who couldn’t afford it if it were for sale based on his own income of $40K and his outstanding tax lien — a certain sad proportion of white blue-collar men I know are wealth groupies.

Like Joe, they imagine they’ll make big money some day. They imagine themselves rich some day. And so they doggedly vote as if they were rich already, voting over and over again against their own self-interest, because they don’t want to identify with their own economic class — not in their hearts, and not in the voting booth, either.
– Lisa Small on the popularity of Joe the Plumber

All This Stuff has a Price Tag

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“In truth, however, I know there are lots of Americans who, whatever their income, believe that the government should get its grubby hands off their money. To them, I’d simply say that if you drive on a highway, walk on a sidewalk, use the postal service, send your kids to public school (or appreciate the fact that public schools keep your neighbors’ kids off the streets), and generally enjoy the fact that 300 million people are able to live in something other than chaos and squalor, you should accept the fact that all this stuff has a price tag.”
–Vanity Fair (via Heilemannr)

Bike Fenders and Federal Taxes

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I got to test my new bike stuff this morning. It’s been snowing over the weekend, and last night it was really cold, so there’s snow and ICE all over everything, and I have a 30+ block bike ride to work. I only crashed once, at the first intersection, as I tried to brake too quickly. Lucky for me, there were no cars to run me over. I got to work fine, and I’m glad I bought the fenders, because the sun is out now, melting the ice and leaving a layer of slush and mud all over the streets, which would otherwise have sprayed all over my back.

Also, this morning I found out that my new job does not take federal tax out of my paychecks. What the hell? So now I have to set aside one out of every four paychecks to make sure I don’t owe the government money at the end of the year.

The best part of the deal is that my bosses didn’t even tell me, and I specifically asked if they took tax out. Turns out they meant they remove Social Security and Medicare, but not federal, which would have left me high and dry if not for one of my coworkers casually mentioning it.