Tax Freedom Day - An Oxymoron - RF Cafe Forums

RF Cafe Forums closed its virtual doors in late 2012 mainly due to other social media platforms dominating public commenting venues. RF Cafe Forums began sometime around August of 2003 and was quite well-attended for many years. By 2012, Facebook and Twitter were overwhelmingly dominating online personal interaction, and RF Cafe Forums activity dropped off precipitously. Regardless, there are still lots of great posts in the archive that ware worth looking at. Below are the old forum threads, including responses to the original posts. Here is the full original RF Cafe Forums on Archive.org

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 Post subject: Tax Freedom Day - An Oxymoron
Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:03 am 
 
Site Admin
 

Joined: Sun Aug 03, 2003 2:02 pm
Posts: 878
Location: Erie, PA
Greetings:

This thread has been created to collect comments on my "Kirt's Cogitation" regarding taxes. Since April 15th, the last day for filing your personal income taxes in the U.S., is creeping right up on us, I thought it would be an opportune time to let anyone else besides me vent about the inhumanity of it.

[url]https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/factoids
/cogitations20.htm#Tax_Freedom_Day_–_An_Oxymoron[/url]

Please read through the article and give us your experiences and/or opinions!

_________________
- Kirt Blattenberger 
RF Cafe Progenitor & Webmaster


 
   
 
 Post subject:
Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 11:37 am 
 
Lieutenant

Joined: Fri Mar 23, 2007 11:31 am
Posts: 1
A tax freedom day of April??? Canadians should be so lucky. Generally the tax freedom day I've heard in Canada (varies from province to province) is in the June timeframe.

Count your lucky stars for only April. There is a little something to be said for having a lot more people in your country - you can spread the infrastructure costs around a little more. We have more land area but only a tenth of the population to pay for developing it.

However, I like not having to fight for breathing space, as well.


 
   
 
 Post subject: Definitely an oxymoron, but it could be worse
Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 11:20 am 
 
Lieutenant

Joined: Fri Sep 15, 2006 4:01 pm
Posts: 3
Location: Santa Cruz, CA
Like the previous poster, I grew up in Canada and spent the start of my working life there, although I now live in the U.S. (Don't hate me for being a foreigner; it's not my fault I wasn't born in the best country in the world.) One fine year while still living and working in Canada, I filed my taxes like any good citizen, using QuickTax (the Canadian equivalent to TurboTax), and found that I owed a certain amount of money. I filled out a check for the amount I owed and mailed it along to CCRA (the Canadian equivalent of the IRS). Not too much muss or fuss. Or so I thought. Then CCRA sent me a letter saying that they had decided I owed another $4,000 in taxes. There was no explanation given; as far as I could tell, this was an arbitrary decision. Nice, isn't it? The strange thing is, I sent them a check for the additional amount, but they never seemed to cash it. Maybe they realized they had made an error and just shredded the check. Even if that was the case, it doesn't place a great deal of faith in the people who handle Canadians' tax returns. :/

Federal tax in the U.S. is quite ridiculous right now. I live in California, and the state tax here is not too bad considering how expensive this state is, but my federal taxes this year are about 6 times my CA state taxes. If you look at the recent history of our federal taxes, the federal tax rate increased *every* year of Clinton's administration; it then dropped sharply when our current Bush took over, but after a couple of years, it then went back up to Clinton's later levels. Most of the money is probably going to fund our insanely expensive wars. I don't want to get too political with this, but I do seem to recall the days when the Republicans were supposed to be the more fiscally responsible of the elephant and the donkey...


 
   
 
 Post subject:
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 11:11 pm 
 
Lieutenant

Joined: Thu Mar 29, 2007 7:37 am
Posts: 1
Location: Toledo, OH
Man, you hit a nerve of mine here, too :!:

Neither will I go into details, but will say that I paid more than $50,000 in personal income taxes in 2005. My workweeks were at least 80 hours with NO vacation. Since then I look with utter contempt upon those with their hands out while never working a day in their miserable lives. Whoa, I'd better stop here or someone will accuse me of being a hate monger.

:roll:

_________________
Craig Ziperman - RF Consultant


 
   
 
 Post subject: Riddled with issues
Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2007 11:50 am 
 
Lieutenant

Joined: Sat Apr 14, 2007 11:14 am
Posts: 2
Location: Greensboro, NC
Kirt,

First let me say how much we'll miss you over at RFMD. I'm glad you're taking the plunge and continuing this site because it really has a lot of great stuff to offer.... but it won't be the same place without you.

As far as the tax system goes. I agree that the regular tax system is pretty bad, but it gets even worse. How could it get worse you ask? ':shock:'
There are a few cases in which a taxpayer can get completely screwed by the government. Specifically I'm talking about the AMT system. In the pre-2000 tech bubble, many people were caught in the same trap but it doesn't make it any easier to take. Basically, if you exercise options and hold them for more than 1 year, you run the risk of having to pay Alternative Minimum Tax.... which is basically a tax on an unrealized capital gain in the case of Incentive stock options. Unfortunately, I was a victim of this snare. Long story short: the federal government has an interest free loan of my money... way more than I'd care to admit. For me it was mostly inexperience with stock options and some really bad advice from an accountant who was the "supposed" expert, but I think more and more Americans are getting pulled into this heinous trap.

The good news is that in December of 2006, Congress passed a bill to phase out the AMT on ISO shares, but in my opinion the damage has already been done. Hundreds of families had to take out loans to pay their taxes back in 2000 as a result of this mess. It just goes to show how convoluted and unfair the tax code can really be.

-Ryan (VTEE94) :shock:




Posted  11/12/2012