Don't Ask

April does not want to get going around here. My desktop PC has been home but has also gone back to the doctor again for further therapies. Good thing. I managed to transfer my tax files to the laptop which, just this morning, finally, managed to dispatch “that which belongs to Caesar” back to Caesar via Turbo Tax. So don't ask. Give me some time now to recover...

They've Accepted Us

It’s a little mad, I know, but I am sitting out of doors in sunlight writing with a pen on a genuine Staples clipboard even though the temperature is grimly stuck on 39. Time for a face-off. Strengthened by having done my Turbotaxonomy (link), and both Fed and State having “accepted us,” it’s high time to stare down a stubbornly clinging winter and do what in clement season I do every morning in sunshine, later in the shade, and, between thoughts, idly watch tiny ants and very high-tech bees visiting our flowering plants. No flowers yet. But we saw a single bee two days ago trying to learn to fly. And the ants have been exploring. Birds? They are a little slow, a little tentative, but they are here.

Now for that title of mine. Ages ago, our girls still quite young, we arrived one evening at an extremely crowded motel very close to the Atlantic shore in Delaware. It was a big holiday. We’d tried two motels already; both had been full. We wanted to be close enough to walk to the beach before dawn to watch the sunrise. I parked the car and said to Brigitte: “I’ll go and check. I hope they’ll accept us this time.” The girls got out to go with me while Brigitte stayed behind to listen to the radio. Daunting. There were lines before three clerks. We waited our turn. At last. Yes! They still had room. I filled out the form, credit card, ball of wax. We headed out. People stood about. Our girls at once set off on a run toward Brigitte shouting at the top of their lungs: “They’ve accepted us! They’ve accepted us!”

We had a good laugh. That’s how family slogans are born—used many times since on fitting occasions, always with laughter. So I am out here in the cold trying to signal to Spring: “We’ve accepted you! Come right in. Plenty of room. Don’t be so shy!”

Cigar Smoke...

An idle thought occurred the last time I lit a seductively aromatic cigar—noted, the aroma, because I like to run cigars under my nose before I light them, and the mysterious nature of these leaves comes in through the nostrils. Thoughts are peripatetic creatures. The sequence went something like this: Well, they haven’t gotten around to banning these yet, the beady-eyes. Prohibition. Odd strain, that, in the American culture. Balanced by beady-eyed permissiveness. Abortion yes; second hand smoke, horrors, NO! Is this tax-cutting frenzy another instance of it? Another irrational kind of prohibitionism? Innocent hubris? Mixed with the vagaries of democracy? Minimally four millennia of human drinking and carousing, but we shall forbid alcohol! So there. Salvation by law. At least the same tradition of taxation, but now we shall do without it—and prosper? But, yes. It is. It is a kind of prohibitionism. The romantic things it always produces. The Speak-Easy. We owe you much, beady eyes. What’s next? The mandatory social tithe? Those lesser cultures without the law should hire our PR people and rename things to make them right. Market-driven government? In the form of the legalized bribe?

A Small Down-Spiral Slide?

A story this morning (New York Times, “Starved Budgets Inspire New Look at Web Gambling”) suggested a slide down the spiral of social senescence ahead. That story also illuminates the oft-repeated problem of unanticipated consequences. One consequence of faith-based tax-cutting (as one might label it) is budget collapse. But while the right hand wants tax cuts, the population shakes its left fist when states or cities curtail or stop services. In consequence “novel” or “innovative” ways of raising revenues appear as pressures build. Gambling and fees are contenders. The first is regressive—because the poor gamble more. The second is arbitrary; it taps sub-groups of the population using some facility or consuming some category of services or products in order to fund the whole.

I liked what one of our Detroit mayors said when trying to defeat a casino measure a few years back. He suggested that we should legalize prostitution too. It might turn out to be even more popular than gambling, he said. And not least with convention visitors, I might add. The mayor eventually caved, alas, but he’d made a good point.

Give us this day our daily bread…and deliver us from “innovation.”

Same Old, Same Old?

Not for the first time yesterday I e-filed our joint Federal Income Tax return. In that process we had to “sign” the electronic return—but how do you sign an intangible something? The act is in the same category as raising a number to the power of 0.39. In the one case the physical image is of a fountain pen, in the other of doing a series of multiplications—but in this strange world neither actually applies. The last time we signed electronically supplying the adjusted gross income (AGI for short) of the year before sufficed. That number matched to our two social security numbers, was signature enough. This year TurboTax told me to call the IRS. A nicely modulated recorded female voice then guided me through the process. And behold. In no time at all, I got both Brigitte’s and my own IRS PIN, which stands for Personal Identification Number. The speaking computer required our SS numbers, last year’s filing status, and our dates of birth. Now we are both owners, in some invisible dimension, of a five-digit number of our own. It makes us uniquely what we are.

For a while there I had doubted that Douglas Adams was on to something in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. No more. At the end of that story the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything turns out to be the UPIN, the ultimate PIN, the Number 42. The greater the item, the fewer the digits, I suppose. We’ve got to lose quite a few digits before we become important, and it seems that even Life, the Universe, and Everything hasn’t quite got there yet.

The process must have made an impression on me because all through the night I dreamt of acquiring a new identity. In the dream the new identity was a green little square—and it lived on a spreadsheet—and it was Hispanic (don’t ask me why)—and a philosophical discussion went on as well—in which I argued that this was not identity theft—because I already had an identity—and therefore I was not really stealing it but just kind of multiplying the identity I already had, originally from God. Get it? My dreaming self was cooking up a stew of the two mysteries that April 2011 had spawned: taxes and logarithms.

Woke up this morning thinking I ought to write a post titled Identity. Careful as I tend to be when important projects lie ahead, I looked up the etymology of the word first—and then came a great delight, a genuine pleasure!

It turns out that the root of that word is “sameness,” from late Latin identitatem. That term, in turn, comes from identidem, meaning “over and over.” And that phrase, once removed, comes from the Latin phrase idem et idem, meaning “same and same.” And I was laughing, reading that. Wonderful, wonderful! The Romans, again, got there before us on that phrase as well. Now I knew my true identity. It is the same old, same old over and over again. But until when? The end of time?

D & T

Blogs anchored to some extent in the quotidian ought to reflect seasonal recurrence. Those of us lucky enough can start our tax preparation journey, armed to the teeth with TurboTax Deluxe, until just days remain. Last year’s tax preparations—while they began around the same time—extended over several weeks of dreadful shenanigans. They were occasioned by the subprime meltdown in the wake of which I had to assault heaven and dig up hell in efforts somehow to salvage something from the ruin. This year the process took a mere four sunny hours—but the time was still long enough for me, in between punching in answers, to reflect on death and taxes.

My own take is that neither the one nor the other is unwelcome per se. One represents a transit of sorts, the other a necessary contribution to things collective—some of which we might deplore but most of which we actually favor. But it isn’t death, as such, nor yet paying taxes, as such, that make these words sound dreadful. It’s all in what leads up to them, people, not the mere fact of the matter. Signing the check if you owe (or looking up the bank’s routing number if you anticipate a refund)…closing the eyes in that last moment before you shuffle off the coil—those things are easy. But sometimes the path to either one of these events is rocky indeed. And sometimes not. Today’s event was (to be sure the fingers will remain crossed for a while)—not.

Turbotaxonomy

Doing taxes is the royal pain it is for reasons more domestic than federally bureaucratic. The really big job, in other words, is to assemble all of the necessary slips of paper that actually prove that we exist. In Taxland, that is. Those pieces of paper rarely matter, but when they do, they really do. I remember the shock I experienced some years ago when, applying for Social Security on or around my reaching ultimate ripeness, the SS Administration turned up its nose at all manner of proofs that I exist—my immigration certificate, my citizenship certificate, my honorable discharge from the Army, and lesser documents yet. No! They wanted my birth certificate! But here I was, age sixty-six, and I’d never actually seen it—only a typed translation from the Hungarian into German, I think, that my father had procured by some odd stratagem in the late 1940s. I was born in Budapest just before that city was laid under siege by the armies of the U.S.S.R. during World War II. The city was badly bombed and shelled. Could I possibly get anyone now, two-score-years-and-counting later, to come up with that piece of paper from over there? So far as the SSA was concerned I hadn’t been born; I was the mirage of an elderly man; I existed physically, for there I stood—and in the United States of America I had the necessary papers to prove myself real—but not in SSA Land. I began the process by painstakingly assembling old Hungarian words to address the Hungarian Embassy in New York (on paper, of course), the folk bureaucratically indicated as the keepers of the gate. Amazingly it all went very smoothly. Thanks to humanity’s widespread passion for hoarding old records, the appropriate place in Budapest still knew me! Heaven be thanked! They hadn’t been bombed or burned! Now came another surprise. SSA accepted the certificate as it was, in Hungarian, and scoffed at my offer to provide them a translation. “We’ll take care of that,” they told me with dark knowingness. And now, that I existed, I could approach the table and sit down.

Even in those days now half forgotten when at tax time you praised the Lord for electrical calculators and sharp pencils, I’d come to the conclusion that actually doing the taxes, which amounted to filling in blanks as instructed, was not really beyond the powers of a person able to read. Indeed, back then, I used to joke that I made my living by the power to read alone; many had learned the art but had decided not to exercise it once out of school. But the trauma of tax-time was then no different. Find the little pieces of paper.

TurboTax, my well-paid slave (this year’s package cost me $60), automates the fill-out-the-form process, thus shaving a very thin sliver of effort from the entire process. You still have to enter the data on the keyboard, but all the numbers will end up in the right place, the slave does all the look-ups, does all the calculations—and dispenses good advice during the process. But this begins after you’ve assembled that ominously named documentation.

This year, horror of horrors, I discovered at the end of the longish day that we owed a huge amount in taxes, over against last year, despite the fact that our income was just a thumb-width greater than in 2007. Why? Why? Why? The printout of the new 2008 tax form on the screen, I compared it to the printed version of the 2007 return—and discovered that, somehow, we were missing (shriek, cackle!—as the comics put it)—two pieces of paper!!!

We were missing, to be specific, two form 1099-Rs, those that recorded our RMDs from our IRAs, one from Brigitte’s, one from mine. I’d filled in the actually RMD amounts from other data; but without the forms themselves, I could not discover whether we’d paid income taxes on those sums or, worse, had not. RMDs have now etched themselves into my memory after these experiences. The letters stand for “required minimum distribution” from “individual retirement accounts.”

As always on these momentous days, I descended from the fumes and nasty fires of my working desk upstairs to find Brigitte serenely living her life, watering plants in our bright sunroom. Brigitte is Keeper of Records and CFO of this unit; nowadays letters like that must be appended to underline the person’s importance. Her face took on a rigid form. The search for 1099-Rs began. It took a while. The tension mounted. At last we found a soiled copy of mine, abraded somewhat by having slipped off a tax-pile on a desk. We already had the number, not the paper! At last. The second one required, finally, a telephone call to Merrill Lynch, the spelling of whose name (two Rs, two Ls) tax time always re-teaches me. Now we are in the clear, at last, and the turbotaxonomy of our lives is ordered properly. I can breathe easier now and therefore have decided to postpone e-mailing our Federal return until tomorrow.