Effective federal income tax rate: 6.8%
Effective state income tax rate: 4.2%
approx sales tax paid as % of income: 1.4%
12.4%, an eighth. I do not feel overtaxed.
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(1)
08:54:07 AM,
Wednesday 31 January 2007
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Taxes done. There were two remaining complications. The address is different for different forms, so the envelope from the 1040A they sent me would have started my 1040 off in the wrong department anyway. Also different addresses depending whether payment is included. Then, I weighed the final envelope and it was over an ounce, requiring 24c in additional postage. Fortunately, we had some 3c stamps left over from when postage rates went up some time ago.
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08:18:55 AM,
Wednesday 31 January 2007
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Hey! when you get to the line that says 'Credit for federal telephone excise tax paid'... that means you! It was one of those nasty little charges on your long-distance bill, which was intended to pay for the, um, spanish-american war. $30 for individuals, +10 for each additional person up to 3. Or, alternately, you can dig up 36 months of long distance bills.
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(8)
08:55:10 PM,
Monday 29 January 2007
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Gaah. According to this article my ESPP discount income may have been included on my W-2, and if it wasn't, it should have been, because I turned around and sold it quickly, so it's disqualified, and is regular income. Which would have made me happy, had anyone told me. So then I guess I'd use the non-discounted price when calculating capital gains? Gaah! Also, the whole 28% tax on short-term capital gains is a over-simplification. That is the maximum. If your actual tax bracket is lower, then it gets taxed at your bracket rate. So if you're in the 15% bracket (under 63,700 after deductions, married filing jointly) there is no difference between short-term and long-term capital gains.
Also, congress renewed the tuition dedection, but they did so after they printed all the forms. So now I have 3 things I need to look at. 4. 4 things.
-How was my ESPP reported by my corporation, if at all.
-What then happens with my capital gains from the sales (I think the stock went uppish this year, but could be wrong)
-Can the tuition deduction be combined with the lifetime learning credit? How do I fill out the tuition deduction?
-What about the alleged credit for putting money in my 401k?
These credits make me nervous. I'm the sort of person who keeps track of his out-of-state mail order purchases so he can pay taxes on them, on the principle of the thing. The under-the-table subsidy of Amazon bugs me. I suspect there is a conspiracy of tax preparers who stifle information about these credits, so as to have a competitive advantage over home filers. The E-file system bugs me. Not only that, the forms and instructions are actually inaccurate. Gaah.
All in all, I'm getting close to looking for professional help here. Though it looks like if you want them to actually explain things to you, rather than just fax your forms to some accountant concentration camp somewhere, it gets rather pricey. Do someone's taxes for them, and you have a customer for life. Show them how to do their own, and you've got a couple hours consulting fees.
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(4)
11:35:01 AM,
Monday 29 January 2007
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I had just finished my taxes, and was feeling all smug and contented, when I realized that a Capital Gain from selling stock is a different beast entirely from a Capital Gain Distribution from owning a tax-eligible mutual fund. So now I have to tear open the envelope, and get started with a 1040 instead of a 1040A. Stupid EmployeeStockPurchaseProgram. I'll probably come out with about 600 dollars out of it, after taxes, and probably spent 20 hours on forms and so forth in order to do so. Which is a good hourly wage, so I suppose it was worth it, but it's entirely unproductive time, from a societal standpoint, sheer unapologetic financial jiggerypokery which did nothing of value for anyone. It's just a roundabout way for me to extract a bit of extra blood out of my corporation.
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(12)
03:17:03 PM,
Saturday 27 January 2007
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A math problem:
The way RPS-101 is laid out, it's possible to pick two gestures such that no third gesture beats both. For instance, alien and monkey. Monkey infuriates Alien, but nothing beats both. Is this necessary? Is there a solution that for any pair, a third one defeats both? What is the lowest RPS-n where it becomes possible?
I've got an answer, sort of, but it isn't elegant. I'd tell you why I care, but I'm not up to writing my discourse on RPS-n strategy yet. I'll just say that I think there's a way to wring a real game out of it.
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10:50:01 AM,
Friday 26 January 2007
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I slipped up and spelled Freudian Fraudian. This amuses me, but not very much. My feet are cold.
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10:35:18 AM,
Friday 26 January 2007
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I just lay awake for about 3 hours thinking about 2 things. First, Moss claims that trying to teach a pig to sing doesn't work, it just annoys the pig. This, of course, led to naturally to the realization that I'd like to teach the pigs to sing in perfect harmony. (as a sidenote) And that lead to revelation that pigs could be put in nearly any song with an annoying chorus, for example, she seems to have an invisible pig.
Eventually tiring of that, I than starting thinking about the strategy of Rock-Paper-Scissors 25. (Not RPS 101, because it horrifies me). I'll save the details for later, because there are rather a lot of them, and I haven't done all the math yet, but the point is, this is also Moss's fault.
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(1)
07:38:19 AM,
Friday 26 January 2007
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Is it possible to get a small program that unobtrusively pokes all your windows every 15 seconds so your web sessions don't time out? If not, I think I may write one.
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(4)
04:18:17 PM,
Thursday 25 January 2007
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The One True Tetris! And Oregon Trail, and Defender of the Crown, and so many other things. It's my childhood in an applet.
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(17)
09:35:24 PM,
Tuesday 23 January 2007
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So, a hypothetical: that this bit of Saudi public diplomacy is accurate, and that if we pull out we will be leaving a Arab-Iranian proxy war, with Saudi Arabia flooding the market with oil, driving down oil prices, and speeding global warming and peak oil. Still pull out, in acknowledgement of our own inability to help? I'm not completely sold that, even if we are simply delaying the inevitable, that it might not be worth delaying. Does the case for 'Leave Iraq Now' rely on the assumption that we're doing more harm than good at this moment, or does it stand regardless? A few years ago, I bought the notion that the collapse of the Baathist government was inevitable, so why not do it now, in a controlled manner, before it does more harm. Now it feels like the peace camp is using the same argument; we're going to have to leave sometime and let it burn, so better to do it now, before we do more harm.
Sigh. I feel the same way about foreign policy as I do about mutual funds. Other people out there know much more than I do, devote their lives to this. They have opinions on how to win. History shows that they're generally wrong, but they still know more than I do. The safe, easy thing to do is to pick a nice simple ideological position or index fund, it hardly matters which, accept that you'll be wrong sometimes, that you're going to get exploited by hedge funds and hypocrites, and get on with eating well, since there's nothing to be done about it.
Yes, I'm using applying my talent for complication to politics as a means of procrastination. Isn't that what politics is for? I've been thinking, some people study philosophy because they want to know. I studied it because I enjoy creating complications. The desire to know is more laudable, but it doesn't get you through sophmore year.
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(3)
04:53:31 PM,
Tuesday 23 January 2007
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Kinsley on his brain surgery, from last summer, which I somehow missed.
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08:22:50 PM,
Friday 19 January 2007
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site & script courtesy of Moss
