That's me -- one of the few, the proud, the handful of people who actually pay for things . . .
Almost nobody likes tax day, but people may look back nostalgically on tax day 2010 and those of earlier years because, almost certainly, taxes are going up in the future, and they may go up a lot. With hindsight, tax day 2010 may seem almost dreamy.
Why? For starters, almost half of U.S. households aren't paying any income taxes on their 2009 earnings. The exact figure is 47 percent, says the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, two think tanks. Among elderly households, 55 percent pay no income tax; among all households with children (including those headed by single parents), the nonpaying share is 54 percent. By contrast, only 38 percent of married couples filing jointly don't pay. (Of course, this doesn't mean people pay no federal taxes; about three quarters of households pay more in Social Security payroll taxes than in income taxes.)
. . . or as we're know in Washington, the suckers.
I may have posted this last year or the one before, but at least I have one reason to consider myself happy on Tax Day, if only delusionally -- I get a nice refund. Years ago, I got a nasty letter from the IRS that I owed too much money at the end of the tax year. They apparently didn't like that, since it meant I was keeping too much of my money in my possession for too long.
ass="inlineComponentRight">So I redid my withholding forms to have more taken out each paycheck. I must have done the math wrong (imagine that!), because now I get too much of a refund, meaning the government gets to use a lot of my money all year before sending a pittance back to me. Some of my acquaintances, especially the more conservative and libertarian ones, think this is scandalous and urge me to rework the withholdings again to get as close to even as possible -- neither owing the government on April 15 or due anything.
