The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Just about when I finished our federal taxes … for the third time … I come across an article listing 60 large corporations that pay no tax whatsoever. Maybe you remember the whining and moaning awhile back that American corporations pay too much compared to other countries’ taxes. Maybe you even believed it. If so, all I can say is that your taxes are simple: put down what you earned, take your standard deduction, sign the form and send a check or wait for a refund. You probably figure corporations do the same thing. Put down their earnings, deduct their cost of doing bizness, that’s the profit, divide by 40% or whatever it used to be and lick their wounds and their stamp.

Tax laws are complicated. There are more loopholes in there than I have mice in my shack. If you ever wondered what lobbyists do to earn their salaries, spend a few hours looking through the IRS list of forms. There are quite a few. If you have a few days, scroll through a couple of them, maybe try to follow the worktables, see how they work. I guarantee you need to be a pretty good accountant. And if you’re a corporate accountant, I guarantee you’ll take every deduction you’re allowed plus plenty that are, well, arguable. Since audits are pretty much a thing of the past, you won’t have to make an argument, just breathe easy. And if in the end you don’t have to pay taxes, well, as a taxpayer who does, I’m just glad we aren’t sending these overtaxed corporations refund checks for all their bother.

Oh, wait, maybe we are. Allowances for next year’s taxes, carry-overs, tax exemptions for simply moving to our town, the list is long and depressing. Sure wouldn’t want them to feel disadvantaged, I know, but there is something inherently wrong with a company like Amazon paying zero taxes, then wrangling concessions from their new headquarter’s location, all the while using predatory tactics on their competition. The average of all corporations in 2018 for tax on their profits was, get ready, 7%. No wonder the corporations are crying bloody murder. 7%. Yeow, owww. Little doubt there why wages aren’t going up when these overtaxed companies can barely stay afloat under such fiscal onslaught. Over regulated, over taxed, overseas and over the rainbow. Why should I complain if I pay more than them? Just helping out the economy. So what if Amazon, Delta, Chevron, Netflix, Duke Energy, Honeywell, Occidental Petroleum, John Deere, General Motors and about 50 more large firms couldn’t chip in a dime? Little bizzy making profits for their shareholders, hey. Me, on the other hand, not too many shareholders in my company.

So once again, another fiscal year, another check to the IRS that pays my fair share of schools, fire and police, roads, welfare, the military, infrastructure, border walls, national forests and parks, all those things government does that make my life easier and richer. Corporations? Not so much. Good citizens? I don’t think so. The right to give money to political action committees just like the rest of us humans? You tell me….

You maybe remember Trump’s promise to simplify your taxes. Said he’d make em fit on a postcard. Well sir, he kept his promise, at least the part about fitting on a postcard. My 1040 really would fit on a postcard. At least page 1. Page 2 would fit on one too, maybe the back side. Course there was the Schedule C for my so-called bizness and don’t forget the Schedule SE for paying my own part of Social Security most folks’ employers pay. And Schedule B that showed interest on savings. Big whoop, that, considering that interest on a savings account or a CD is lower than inflation and inflation is pretty damn low. Then there was Schedule 1, additional income and adjustments where I got to deduct half of those self- employment taxes, and don’t forget Schedule E for supplemental income and losses.

Half of these would fit on a postcard, the others not really. All together they add up to a vacation that lasted a month with a postcard to everyone you know sent every few days. A lot of forms. A lot more than the good old days where most of that was on a 1040 somewhere but now is fairly obscure and way harder to find. Line 17 on form X goes to Line 54 on form E, then that gets moved after a subtraction or two to Line 22 on the 1040. It’s a little like picnicking in a woods that has 3 or 4 trails and poor signage. Although to be fair, you can go online and dig out the trail from a PDF. Again and again.

Now I know, being a small biznessman, one of those vertebrae in the backbone of the American economic engine, that my taxes are probably nearly as complex as Amazon’s. Even if I actually pay something and they do not. Fair is fair and I don’t want to come off as a Whiner. But … even though some of my taxes fit on a postcard they are not simpler. They got a lot more convoluted and complex. I ended up doing them twice because I screwed up a critical component early in the calculations and since I don’t have Turbo or Turgid Tax to redo the math, I spent half a day figuring out all those corollary tangents that octopused out into fiduciary hell.

What you figure out along the way, kind of like Dorothy on her way to Oz, is things aren’t as they seem. All those caveats and loopholes and deductions for this and depreciations for that, they’re in there for a very good reason and the reason is not simplification or transparency. They’re there for obfuscation. You’d have to be a forensic accountant to follow all these threads and when you got to the other side, surprise, surprise as Gomer used to say, shezam, the rich get richer. Is that simple enough for ya….?

I know my many Republican friends were more than happy to accept Attorney General Barr’s terse summary of the Mueller investigation as a total and absolute vindication of Trump. They’re the same folks who smell smoke but refuse to see fire. I get that. After all, I’m the boy who smelled smoke behind my electrical panel, called 911 and waited to see if they’d arrive before my old house burned to the ground. Never did see flame, but when we crowbarred the old barnwood off the walls, we could see melted wiring, gooey roofing asphalt and scorched metal. I don’t think the assumption was that nothing was going on behind those shorted out breakers.

Barr wrote a letter to Trump before he was nominated to be the next Attorney General that set out the argument that a sitting president couldn’t be guilty of obstruction of justice. He was, if you follow the logic, head of the Justice Department and therefore immune to the laws that govern other bureaucrats. I think Kings have this same inoculation. As do Dictators and Fuhrers. Needless to say, that kind of argument will get you a nomination from a President under siege.

Mr. Barr says he will offer up a redacted report sometime soon. Meanwhile he’s interested in investigating the spying that was done by the intelligence community on Trump’s campaign. As Roy Cohn taught Joe McCarthy and Trump years ago, the best defense is a hard kick to the groin. If anyone but the Republican Enablers thought the Attorney General might remain unbiased, well, we were disabused of that notion after the genital karate chop by the Attorney General.

Ditto the President’s tax returns. Not gonna see em, the Trumpster sez. Won the election so it proves nobody is interested. And anyway, they’re under audit and as everyone knows, the IRS can’t release them while they’re under audit. Long audits, all those years back, and no, the IRS tells us they can be released even if they were under audit.

I’ve spent the past three weeks putting my electrical back together. New wiring, new panel box, electrical inspections, nice new digital meter, conduits, new siding, new interior paneling, discontinued circuits, a long lament of remodeling and anguish. The place didn’t burn down … but plenty of damage was done. I’m hoping the government under Trump manages to survive these years, but I suspect that smoke we’re smelling is a lot more than partisan imagination. There’s plenty to see here. Whether we get to see it is another matter altogether.

At the entrance to an LAX restaurant stands a white robot with a round head, eyeballs with red sensors, blue eyes that blink in cute humanoid fashion as the head swivels to find its audience while it answers questions two kids about its same size ask by pressing a dozen or so prompts in the android’s chest. The kids are totally enthralled. Not so much by the voiced answers — they got gizmos and devices galore that do that — but by the creature’s white plastic androgynous physical self. It’s practically one of them.

The kids’ dad catches me watching this futuristic scene and we lock eyes momentarily and both smile. Kids, ya know? Cute. I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking: it won’t be long, couple of years maybe, and they’ll have the real thing, a thinking talking responsive version, a parental substitute, a pet, a playmate, a helper, a babysitter, a counselor, a friend, all of the above. Cute.

Not too far back we had Chatty Cathy, pull the string in her back and she’d croak out a few inane comments. Even had one doll that would wet herself, if I remember right, so odd now I wonder if I’ve conjured a fake memory. Who wants a doll that pisses itself?

The robots aren’t going to piss their pants. If they even wear pants. Or clothes. They’re going to make us love them. We already love our smartphones and they aren’t cute, just useful, although watching 90% of my fellow airport travelers thumbing the gizmos, I’d say they’ve become indispensable, babysitters for the bored. Not too hard a leap to our own personal android, a smarty pants without pants, turning on the lights, adjusting the thermostat, playing our favorite tunes, using its GPS to give us directions from the backseat of the car, tucking us in at night, locking the doors and activating the alarm systems, doing our banking, dialing phone numbers, cooking dinner, cleaning the toilet. Permanent companion. Sex slave too, I’m betting, for those who can afford the premium price.

Those two kids have seen the future. Just not very much of it. Dad and me? Probably we’ve seen more than we wanted.