Thursday, April 30, 2009

Tax Freedom Day

Ironically enough, on April 16th there was a group of students tabling on the quad at American University, advocating for the abolition of taxes.

These students yelled out to me, "Do you HATE taxes?! We're advocating for the abolition of all taxes!!"

I took one of their post cards which shows the trend of our "Tax Freedom Day" for the past 40 years. The tax freedom day is the day when you start working for yourself, and stop working for the government. This year, Americans only had to work, on average, until April 13th for the federal government. Their wages for the rest of the year are theirs to keep. This method of thinking is alternative to reasoning that about one-third of each day's wages earned goes to the government. Another trend on the post card I received indicates that our tax freedom day, adjusted for the federal budget deficit, is a record high May 29th this year.

A short recap of my tax season:
  • My longest day was 14.5 hours.
  • My shortest day was 4.5 hours.
  • My hardest worked stretch of time was 47 hours in 4 days.
  • Sometimes people receive taxable payouts because someone they know has passed away. It is unbelievably awkward to try asking a client if their significant other is still alive.
  • I received several tax forms from clients that had food on them. I'm not talking about coffee, either. I had a form with a smushed blueberry on the backside.
  • After my last post, I conned Windows Vista into letting me illegitimately beat the Minesweeper basic level in just 9 seconds. My legit record is still 16 seconds.
  • My waist expanded by 0.5" between my first day at work and my last.
  • this is getting a little personal.....

All in all, I learned a lot and I'm glad to have written this blog to chronicle the adventure. I will continue my position at this firm through this summer, and will continue to write about my experiences. My role will be different for the summer months, however, because other accounting tasks begin to take greater precedence.

Your continued readership is much obliged.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!