In the past few years, Emily and I have never quite managed to get our taxes paid in full via check withholding. For a long time, the culprit was the division of her paycheck into two sources of income – one from PIRG’s 501c3 wing that did pure “research” work and the other from PIRG’s 501c4 wing that could do lobbying. When she’d get two checks each pay period, each would assume that it was the only check she was getting and thus guess that Emily was somehow making even less than the paltry sum PIRG offered her as compensation.
This remained a problem even when Emily fled PIRG for non-sweatshop employ, because the two checks we’d get as married spouses working would each be assumed to be the entirety of our married income. It’s like our tax withholding system is stuck in the ’50’s, assuming one steady job to support a happy family of four with a house and a raft full of deductions. Turned out the twentysomething full-time working couple with no assets and no kids was not what withholding could grasp in its automated little mind.
And for some reason, in all those years of tax filing, we insisted on getting our tax papers, along with the hefty checks for both the Feds and the state of California, filed by about February. It’s never precisely been pleasant to do taxes, but I’d do them or she’d do them and we’d get them in crazy early, along with our weighty little piece of paper offering a few extra thousands for killing Iraqis or building substandard schools or whatever.
Fast forward to this year, when we finally tricked the withholding machine into taking too much money from us by only working half the year! They assumed we’d maintain those income levels all year, when suddenly they disappeared mid-annum so we could flee to Jersey and live on idealism and ingenuity alone. According to early estimates, the Feds owe us something like $3,000 and we might not even owe either California or New Jersey a penny.
Of course, our taxes still aren’t filed. And their due, uh, tomorrow.
It’s challenging for me to theorize why we were in such a rush, while working day jobs for a combined 90-100 hours/week, to pay the state, but we’re now so slow, while going to school and writing/coaching, to get our money back. I guess it’s part of a long list of why we as a couple sort of break economics and the presumed incentives of the greedy individuals American capitalism was built for. It probably doesn’t help that the interest we could have accrued on that money over three months adds up to about a ha’penny. But even if it were 5%, I bet we’d be in roughly the same situation.
Maybe it’s just fear. When we owe money, we’re worried about someone coming looking for it, but when the money is due back to us, we’re not as concerned. This doesn’t really register with my conscious perspective, though – I never felt the IRS would come after me unless I actually breached the April 15th deadline.
Hopefully tomorrow, we won’t find out.
