Tag: Annoyances

As I’ve been collecting the bits & pieces of paper for TAXES that represent my “Being a good Citizen”, A.K.A. a MORON!

I’ve been angry about taxation for a very long time. My Father was angry about taxation, My Grandfathers (both sides) were angry about taxation. My Great Grandfather was super pissed about taxation.

My Great Grandfather was pissed off especially as I recall, because he was born shortly after the “Damn Yankees” started charging “A God damn tax for living”.

In reality he was talking about the income tax imposed in 1867 to pay for the Civil War. 

He got a double dose of taxation in his lifetime with 1913 income tax being imposed under Taft. He spoke ill of Taft and Franklin Roosevelt until the day he died.

In his case the “Damn Yankees” part was, I’m guessing was something he picked up from his father. You did not want to get him talking about growing up in the aftermath of the Civil War. 

Like a lot of the South, the family was farmers, and most of the time they just barely got by. The mortality rate in the family was very high. If a baby lived more than a year it was notable.

If you asked Great Granddaddy about how many slaves his family had, he would loose his shit! It was hard to follow because he’d be yelling in mostly German with bits of English thrown in.

The translation was something like:

“Why the hell would we have a God damned slave? We could barely feed ourselves. Slaves were expensive and more trouble than they were worth. With a slave you had two people doing the work of one and that didn’t make no damn sense.” He’d go on for at least an hour, and it was obvious that he had very strong opinions. 

I once asked my Grandfather what Great Grandaddy meant by having two men doing the work of one. Grandpa explained that you had to have a strawboss (overseer) making sure the slaves were doing the work. Which was wholly impractical on a small farm.

Grandpa said slavery only worked at scale with large plantations and with crops that could be transported without spoilage. For instance, cotton, sugarcane, tobacco, tea, various nuts, and dried spices.

Can you say East India Trading Company? Good! I knew you could.

Since our family was mostly poor dirt farmers with small farms, a German kind of pragmatism, and some pretty strong religious beliefs about slavery in general, the whole concept of buying and selling people was a non-starter.

Which is why Great Granddaddy was pissed off about the taxation. He viewed it as a bunch of city folk who never did a days work in their lives, punishing everyone in the South whose economy, lands, crops, and homes, had already been destroyed.

His view was the damn war wouldn’t have happened if the northerners had let the cotton plantations sell the damn cotton wherever they wanted to.

There’s a lot more to that story. The oral history in my family, differs from the history I was taught in school, and also from history as is taught now.

In the history I was taught in school, the implication was that all Southern Farmers had slaves, and that everyone in the South took up arms against the North. Neither was true. The Northern Army is always painted as white knights and the Southern Army is painted and horrible, evil, men. From what I’ve learned, the Civil War was like every other war. Atrocities were committed on both sides. 

There were regiments from the North that burned, raped, and pillaged. A friend of mine from Tennessee showed me their family bible. In it, was recorded the atrocities of a Confederate regiment, who shot his great great granddaddy in the front yard, took all the food and anything else of value, then prevented the family from going to help him instead, making the family watch their father bleed to death in agony.

To this day, my friend and his family express a quiet but palpable hatred for anything to do with the Confederacy. I can’t blame them. His people think and act just like my people. He’ll cringe at me saying this, but his people are “Southerners” in that they have a long memory, just like my people. I’ll owe him a Jack Daniels over saying that.

To hear Great Graddaddy tell it, a whole lot of “them boys” (Southerners) only joined the Confederate army after the Yankees had burned their farms and their crops in the fields. Even then it was only so they could get paid and support their wives & children who were homeless and destitute.

Great Granddaddy like most of my family had strong opinions.

I remember him saying a couple of things in particular.

1. It’s damn funny that the Yankees said slavery was bad, then turned around and made us all slaves with taxes.

2. If we ain’t got nothing, they can’t tax nothing. 

There were unconfirmed rumors in the family that Great Granddaddy spent years after Great Grandma died, living in a shack hunting and fishing for his meals.

He supposedly would shoot at the “God Damn Tax men” if they dared stray onto his land. I don’t know if I believe it, but it was said Great Granddaddy would sometimes send a box of offal to the tax assessors office with a note saying, “Here’s your part of my hunt.”

Great Granddaddy eventually ended up living with Grandpa. I remember him reading me bedtime stories drifting between English and German.

I suppose that I’m a product of an environment where the wounds of the Civil War were in living memory. I’m sure that there are a lot of “Boomers” who could tell similar tales from both sides of the Mason Dixon line.

Why is all of this remotely relevant?

Because at tax time I remember my family all being pissed off all the damn time. I remember them calculating their taxes right up to the very edge of legal.

And I remember Great Granddaddy advocating for registering nothing, owning nothing, and being as small and invisible as possible.

He seemed to believe if you’d served in the military to defend the country, that was enough, you shouldn’t have to pay any taxes ever again.

He hated that every year the government grew, every year they exceeded their budget, every year they found something else to spend money, that didn’t directly serve the best interests of the United States.

He, and later, my Grandfather warned that the government was inherently corrupt that our elected leaders were only interested in obtaining wealth. Both of them outright called politicians thieves and liars. Sometimes to their faces.

They both said that the taxation wouldn’t stop until the people rose up and stopped it. As the tax rates climbed, and the government grew, My Grandfather began to suggest that the Communists had won.

The rest of the family shushed him.

After the recent revelations of DOGE. The breathtaking waste, the obvious graft and corruption, I find myself thinking that my Father, Grandfather, and Great Grandfather were absolutely 100% correct.

Add to that, this bullshit about the IRS knowing what you supposedly owe them but forcing you to jump through the hoops and expense of accountants and tax attorneys to come up with the same number and I feel like its just additional punishment for no reason except sadistic pleasure.

Except that it’s not. The IRS puts everyone through this bullshit, so that you do make mistakes, and that allows them to charge you penalties & interest for your mistake. If there’re setting up the situation where you make mistakes, then penalizing you for making the mistakes, isn’t that called entrapment? Just sayin…

The IRS would be just as content if you always err on the side of them keeping a few hundred dollars that they’re not entitled to because people are scared of them.

Why else would the Biden administration have authorized 87,000 new ARMED IRS agents? That told me everything I needed to know to know about what the Democrats had planned for the citizens of this country.

It’s safe to say that the number of armed agents would have increased year over year. I doubt that the millionaires Biden kept telling us weren’t paying their fair share, would have needed to have guns waived in their faces to write checks. They have the resources to hire a battery of attorneys and lock up IRS collection cases in court for years…

I suspect that the armed IRS agents were actually going to be kicking down the doors of citizens like me, and you, and the rest of us that don’t have the necessary cash to lawyer up. If a twitchy IRS agent was waving a gun in the faces of your children or your spouse, you’d give them anything they wanted…

And that was exactly the point.

Politicians in D.C. had rightfully concluded that the people were probably not going to put up with more tax increases it was unsustainable.

But the government needed more money and would always need more money to fund the lies, graft, & corruption.

So the next stage for the politicians was to have armed thugs running a legalized extortion racket to wring every last dime out of average taxpayers teetering on the edge of hunger & homelessness.

Unless Trump is able to unwind the provisions for the IRS in the 16th amendment. We’re only going to see a short reprieve.

Honestly, after a lifetime of this shit where almost 1/3 of my income got sucked down a black hole of waste and corruption, I’m half tempted to send the keys to my house to the fucking IRS and the Fucking State of California, and let them fight over it!

I could see myself just walking away, saying “Fuck it!”

(I think “Fuck It” is the position of a lot of the later generations. I get it! Why play a game you know you’re going to lose before you start? That’s the position our government put them in.)

Me pitting the State and Federal governments against each other might be amusing. Watching them trying to fuck each other over, instead of me for a change would be a welcome sight.

My only income is my God damned Social Security and these fuckers want their share of that.

I ask, “How is that in any way reasonable?”

They’ve had the money for 46 fucking years. I have not had access to it, nor derived any benefit from it.

They on the other hand, could have invested it in any number of funds, or projects and made a profit on the money they took from me. In fact the government probably did exactly that.

Then they’re keeping the interest they made, and in fact they’re not disclosing just how much they made on my money over 46 years.

Then via DOGE we learn that there are people receiving Social Security payments that are over 125 going to 200 years old. News to me that the lifespan is that long. It’s a miracle! Or now we’ve got Vampires… 

We also know that 535 members of Congress one way or another have been raiding Social Security for years.

And yet, somehow I’m supposed to pay the government more from my monthly check that, by the way, is almost $2000 dollars below what is considered to be minimum wage.

How the hell does that make any sense whatsoever? How is it that illegals or people on welfare get more?

Oh right! I’m supposed to be a good citizen and just give my tax money to politicians, the Ukraine, the poor starving children in Africa, let’s not forget condoms for the Congo. 

But we all know none of that money went where we were told it went. We all know a substantial portion of it looped back right into the pockets of politicians or some organization that politicians had an interest in.

See, when I start thinking about what our government has done to us, Not just in the arena of taxation, but health, and infrastructure, and all the ways the government has literally failed in their primary responsibility, I get really pissed off.

Whether you agree with RFK Jr or not. You can at least look at the number of FDA recalls of medications, and medical devices over the past 3 decades and question how some of these things got approved in the first place.

Oh but going to the FDA website and asking for Drugs that have been recalled presents you with a list of mostly OTC products like sunscreens. There are very few Drugs listed. Which makes the “Fact Checkers” right and someone like me automatically wrong because there is no evidence. 

Remember the weight loss miracle FenFen? It caused heart attacks. How about the pacemaker recalls and the hip & knee replacements that disintegrated? Or the use of thalidomide? How about using polypropylene mesh for hernias and as a vaginal mesh to repair the vaginal canal after childbirth? Anybody remember Zantac? Yeah on OTC antacid that’s linked to cancer.

See, I remember these things. Yet according to the fact checkers… It never happened, my memory is faulty, which makes people who do remember wonder if they’re going out of their minds.

Some of these things were approved because they were “Similar” to other approved things, but “Similar” doesn’t mean actually throughly tested.

How many bridges need to be replaced? How about roads that are so full of potholes that a dirt track would be smoother?

These are but a few of the monumental failures of the government whose overarching “loving” embrace we’re supposed to blindly trust.

Somehow, I’m supposed to happily write a check to the United States government essentially paying them to continue butt fucking me.

When I think about it from this perspective, the Southern part of me starts screaming, “ It’s time for the South to rise again!” 30 seconds after that thought, the vision of The Boston Tea party flashes into my head and the best fit algorithm in my head says that’s a more accurate fit.

Maybe we should all dress up as illegal aliens and flood the government offices  in person filling out welfare forms and generally clogging up the government works.

If that doesn’t work then… The Rebel in me starts screaming for politician’s butts on walls.

All of this flashing through my brain at once is painful. It makes me very cranky and me handing the keys to the house to the fucking IRS looks better all the time.

Let them dispose of the shit in the basement, let them dispose of things that due to titles and licenses are locked up by the State in such a way that it takes greater effort to unfuck the mess than to just walk away and let it be their problem.

I’m in favor of doing away with the IRS, the State Tax board, and property tax. 

Before you come at me asking the question, “Then how would we pay for necessary government things?”

Let me put it this way, until I see a balanced budget. Until I see the government living within its means like I have to. Until I see responsible spending domestically, where shit tons of cash isn’t being sent everywhere but here.

My opinion is that obviously the government has more than enough money. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be the possibility of all these un-necessary expenditures. I know on my budget, I don’t have a lot of excess cash to spend!

I guess that like my Father, Grandfather, and Great Grandaddy… I’m just sick and tired of playing the government’s games.

I finally understand why so many politicians have pushed so hard for gun control. I understand why California, an essentially one party, corrupt Democrat run state has made or tried to make gun purchases and ammunition purchases harder and why they want to know who has what kind of gun and where.

The politicians, A.K.A. don’t want to fear the people.

Here ends my raging against the machine. I got it out of my system and for that I’m grateful.