I find it interesting that my daughter’s refund info suddenly showed up on the ‘Where’s My Refund?’ web site two days after the Treasury sold $35 Billion of Two Year Treasury bonds.
Submitted by Cognitive Dissonance on 02/23/2012 16:22 -0500
Ben Bernanke
Ben Bernanke
Best Buy
BLS
Bond
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Chicken Little
Creditors
Free Money
Real estate
Where’s My Refund?
By
Cognitive Dissonance
Beginning way back when my children grew old enough to work ‘on the books’ and thus earn enough taxable wages to ‘voluntarily’ pay their (Social Security and Federal/State/County-Local income) taxes and ‘voluntarily’ file a Federal Income Tax return (oh sweet puberty) I’ve handled the annual spring rite of documenting their IRS 1040 wage slavery by filing their tax returns for them. This ‘voluntary’ documentation always includes spouses and/or girl-boyfriends….and occasionally even the parents of spouses and/or girl-boyfriends. Please don’t try this at home boys and girls.
Now that the electronic filing option has trickled down from the IRS to nearly all the states and now that the various retail software tax preparation products (such as Tim Geithner’s TurboTax) have worked out most of their bugs and are reasonably reliable, the time I spend discharging my now permanent parental duties is tolerable. Best of all I gain the satisfaction of knowing that it’s all done right…….or at least that I’m the only one screwing up my children in preparation for the return of the (Government) debtors prison. Ah, but the good old days (remember the mid nineteenth Century?) seem to be lurking just around the corner. But I digress.
Several of my children have simple tax returns that encompass traditional W-2’s from established employers who also ‘voluntarily’ withhold my kid’s portion of their ‘voluntarily’ tax offerings. (How kind of them to help.) With little to no investment income, capital gains, real estate or trust income or any other complications, their returns are relatively simple affairs. (Thank you IRS.) One of my kids is married with a child, which means she and her spouse claim the child credit and a slice of the earned income bribe……..err………credit given to low wage earners to entice them back onto the wage slave hamster wheel for one more year. But I digress……again.
My children generally receive tax refunds and I dutifully file as early as possible in order to ensure that they’ll soon have fat wallets stuffed with ‘free money’ that immediately burns a hole in their pockets or purses. Nothing warms a parents cockles quite like getting a text message from their child informing them that s/he just received her/his IRS tax refund, a text sent while shopping for 55” LCD TV’s in Best Buy. (“Thanks Dad, you’re the greatest.”) Unfortunately we begin to lose our children to the PONZI’s consumer frenzy by the time they’re old enough to watch TV, meaning 2 or 3 years of age. BTW I’ve heard real, supposedly intelligent, people [“not my kids” says proud CD] call their tax refund ‘free money’, but I’d rather call it a partial return of our ‘voluntary’ tax donations. But (sadly)
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/where%E2%80%99s-my-refund
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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