Cue Laughter!

You know, it’s humiliating when you really think about the esteem you are held in by the powers that be.

After all the t-crossing and i-dotting I did at the IRS office a month ago to get into “compliance,” and agreeing that I would try to start paying (come December) $50 a month toward the $45,000 they want to collect from me, I got a letter in the mail from the IRS stating that they want me to pay over $6,000 immediately for my 2010 taxes.  Talk about a buzzkill.  Here I was, looking forward to the holidays, remembering how difficult it was to go through them last year in Kuwait – away from my boys.  But this year, I’ll be putting up the tree early and leaving it up late, happily scraping together what I can to light up the boys’ faces when they look under said tree in late December, and thoroughly soaking up the holiday glow as much as I possibly can.

But the powers that be, first of all, don’t have to look over their shoulders at past tax liabilities – many of them have none, because they had no liability to begin with.  We who would “soak the rich” via the income tax are laughed at.  As a reminder:

New York Times, June, 2011: “There are 78,000 tax filers with incomes of $211,000 to $533,000 who will pay no federal income taxes this year. Even more amazingly, there are 24,000 households with incomes of $533,000 to $2.2 million with zero income tax liability, and 3,000 tax filers with incomes above $2.2 million with the same federal income tax liability as most of those with incomes barely above the poverty level.”

There are over 100,000 wealthy people who could look at my tax liability and just laugh it away.  “Ain’t my problem!  Sucks to be Kurt Henning!”  And that’s all it would be to them.

But it’s a lot more than that for me.  For me, it’s the year after my deployment where I get to try to rebuild my business.  It’s the first holiday season back where my business is pulling in about half of my monthly living expenses and I still must draw on whatever savings I brought back from my service overseas – savings that will dry up in about three months if business doesn’t improve soon.  But Uncle Sam is serious about what I earned in 2010, and the debt I incurred for earning it.  “We’ve got to have that six thousand bucks, Henning!  We mean it!  We’re depending on you, you American patriot, you!”

Fuck that.  Fuck the whole income tax system.  I didn’t fall into “compliance” out of a sense of patriotic duty.  I’m not complying so little Timmy will have a school to go to and little Sally’s mommy will have a nice road to drive on.  We had all that shit before we had an income tax.  I’m in “compliance” because I don’t want to have to try raising my children from a prison cell, and I don’t want to give the IRS the “right” to pull everything I have out of my own bank account.  It’s called compulsion, coercion, extortion.  It’s just the legal kind, which makes me a legal victim – and that makes it all better.  But legal and legitimate are not always the same thing.

So, I’ll march back over to the IRS office and show them the letter, and I’m sure they’ll say something like, “That letter was automatically generated.  You’ll probably get one for each year you just filed for.  Don’t worry.  We’ll just start your payment plan in December like we talked about.”

There are over 100,000 very wealthy people who never have to worry about such letters, who never have to worry about rebuilding their business after a deployment, who never have to worry about fulfilling the holiday wishes of their children.  And, somehow, Uncle gets along without their income tax money.  No letters, no liability, no worries, no threats.  Must be nice.

And the galling thing is that the difference is this: those people in Congress who literally write the tax code and send it off to the government printing press, they hold those wealthy folks in higher esteem than they do me.  I’m easy to look down upon.  I am easy to disrespect.  I am easy to exploit.  Because I am not one of the wealthy class who can scratch the backs of the “representatives of the People” [laugh track], I am just one of the Many who can be milked.  “And they have to let us squeeze their hardworking teats, or we’ll throw them in prison!”  They laugh.

Can you hear them laughing?  You signed a W-4 for your job, right?  They’re laughing at you, too, sucker.