07:30 – I’m still working on taxes. My goal is to have them complete this week.
Tuesday, 7 April 2015
19 Comments and discussion on "Tuesday, 7 April 2015"
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07:30 – I’m still working on taxes. My goal is to have them complete this week.
Comments are closed.
Apropos of absolutely nothing: the California drought has made the European news cycle. Some years ago, I remember reading about the rice fields in the Sacramento valley, which is basically arid.
My wife asked me yesterday just how big those fields are; entirely coincidentally I tripped across this: California has 533,000 acres of rice fields under cultivation. That’s a bit more than 2000 square kilometers.
All of it is irrigated, because local annual rainfall is only 5cm to 20cm per year. So: 500,000 acres * 3500 kg/acre * 4000 liters/kg (wow!) = annual water usage of 7 cubic kilometers (7*10^12 liters) per year.
No wonder California has a water shortage 🙂
Hey, don’t forget all those patriarchal fascist white males exercising their privilege and taking long showers and keeping their swimming pools full. But I see Governor Moonbeam is on the case.
Just spent this lovely spring afternoon (sun just came out an hour ago, after two days of sleet, wind, freezing rain, snow, and fog) on the phone with IRS, lawyers, taxpayer “advocate” (IRS employee) and what fun I had!
Long story short: our seized/levied bank account may be the result of them not crediting the last return we filed because….
…are you sitting down?
…good…
….they saw my signature and SSN on the form first when they were looking for my wife’s and thus didn’t credit it to her, apparently, and then, without double-checking, contacting us, or sending us the required 21-day warning, cleaned us out.
The best info came from the IRS Taxpayer Advocate, a local guy; but Bernie’s office is also gonna get on the case.
He also told me we’ve had $5,000 just sitting there untouched since early 2014, money Mrs. OFD sent them toward estimated taxes for that year. Also uncredited.
So that’s $10,000 that we nor they have had the use of.
All of my phone callers today said the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing at the IRS and this kinda thing happens all the time. The last lawyer I talked to also told me not to spend money on lawyers; and he gave me the advocate’s info. But methinks we’ll need a lawyer anyway, ’cause now they’re saying we owe more than $50,000 total for 2009, 2012, and 2013.
I’ll end up like one of my brothers; working two jobs (if I can get hired anywhere and/or make money here at home) for years to pay that off. And dead by 65.
California almonds need a little more than a gallon, call it 4 liters, of water per almond. Yes, per nut. About 10% of all of their water goes to almonds.
So that’s $10,000 that we nor they have had the use of.
Just unbelievable incompetence by the Feds, Mr. OFD. No wonder the IRS is the most hated agency on Earth. Of course, you won’t get any interest. You’ll probably have to grovel just to get YOUR money back. Geez.
Can you deduct the time you spend working on your taxes? 🙂
This just in: Oz gummint cretins about to get even worse down there:
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2015/04/daniel-zimmerman/is-australia-preparing-for-yet-another-gun-grab/#more-355113
Yo, Oz buddies; someone stole Javelin missiles from an army base??? Yikes.
“You’ll probably have to grovel just to get YOUR money back.”
We’ll see. The actual IRS Taxpayer Advocate guy was the most helpful of anybody we’ve talked to here so far. Proof in the pudding, though, as we know.
“Can you deduct the time you spend working on your taxes?”
If we could do that, it would be substantial. That chit takes forever and it’s just the two of us, but every year is different. OFD is sorta happy on one hand, and not real happy on the other hand today.
Let me just say this: I NEVER had any problems with the IRS until I got remarried.
I foresee some time on the rack for OFD for daring to impugn our extremely competent and courageous IRS agents.
I wonder if they ever made racks to fit guys my height. Gonna stretch us even more??? Anyway I’ll be sharing rack space with MrAtoz, who said other mean things about them.
And Mr. Lynn, too, for trying to anticipate what the glorious IRS warrior heroes would do to us.
Time on the rack would actually be preferable to filling out all the damn forms and then having them come back “corrected” anyway, always in their favor.
The IRS never automatically corrects a return in the taxpayers favor.
So far, over the past several years, I’ve watched our alleged tax debt go from a few thousand to nearly 20-thousand and now more than twice that. And when we WERE making monthly payments, the principal stayed the same and we were apparently just paying penalties, interest and fees on it. To have any chance of paying off the current alleged amount, Mrs. OFD would have to start taking two week-long assignments every month and I’d have to work two, three or four p.t. shit jobs just to even make it worth our while. And it would still take us years; we may well both have croaked and still not have paid this off by that time.
So, I was reading a conversation over on rec.arts.sf.written and it suddenly struck me, are preppers the new cowboys?
Actually, I wrote over there, “IMHO, the modern western is the apocalyptic fiction such as _One Second After_:
http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-After-William-Forstchen/dp/0765356864/
Or, _Going Home_:
http://www.amazon.com/Going-Home-Novel-Survivalist-American/dp/0142181277/ “
Time on the rack would actually be preferable to filling out all the damn forms and then having them come back “corrected” anyway, always in their favor.
As long as they do not give me the cat of nine tails!
BTW, please tell me that you are not filling out the tax forms directly, instead using an awesome product such as TurboTax?
We all voting for Rand?
Rick Perry. The only adult in the room with the ability to say, “Hell no!”.
Hey, Rand’s announcement even made the news here. They even attempted (note the word) to explain what a libertarian is, in the American sense. They then went on to say that he had zero chance, because he has offended Wall Street (by wanting to get rid of the fed) and the big corporations (by wanting to end all federal subsidies, etc.).
If there were ever a rallying cry that ought to work, surely that’s it? The OWS people should like the end of subsidies and federal pork, the middle class ought to be in favor of anything that pisses off the Wall Street tycoons. I mean, what’s not to like?
If only he can keep religion out of it. It seems like every Presidential candidate is expected to work in some phrase showing what a devout Christian he/she is, this into every speech and every public presentation. It makes the candidates come across like Western mulluhs. I figure religion is like sex: do whatever makes you happy, but in private. No one else really wants to hear the details.
“BTW, please tell me that you are not filling out the tax forms directly, instead using an awesome product such as TurboTax?”
That is correct; the geniuses at the IRS with their tunnel vision only (allegedly) saw my name and SSN on the form and thus concluded that although wife’s was there, too, right below it, in fact, that she hadn’t filed a return and they could then go right ahead and freeze our account, and as of this morning, they’ve also gone ahead to seize her pay checks at the source. I spent all day yesterday on the phone and have done so again today; the local tax advocate office is on the case, allegedly, and I had to get fax numbers to them, tricky doing that with just the cell phone, ’cause our net was down today, too. Just to make things interesting for me. When our Comcast net is down, that’s the tee-vee, landline phone and innernet all at once. Luckily our cells are on Verizon still. Tricky anyway due to shitty cell service here.
Senator Sanders’ office is also allegedly on the case.
@brad; I agree; I’d also just as soon the buggers STFU about their religious beliefs and preferences; we don’t know if they’re sincere or not anyway. But this is, by God, a religious country, still soaked to the gills in British Protestantism/Calvinism, with a huge minority of complacent and very quiet Roman Catholics. If a typical political hack fails to swear fealty to that, and preferably some version of the Protestantism, he or she won’t stand much of a chance. That is probably changing in the next few years but that’s the way it is right now, still.
“We all voting for Rand?”
No.
“Rick Perry. The only adult in the room with the ability to say, “Hell no!””
Yeah, he says that now but how about once he’s locked up down there in Mordor being told what to do and how high to jump?
None of these clowns matter, gents. Waste of time and bandwidth even worrying or thinking about, except for the boffo entertainment value, such as it is.
I knew that’d be your answer.
Yeah, he says that now but how about once he’s locked up down there in Mordor being told what to do and how high to jump?
He was told to do that here in Texas and ignored the lot of them. He balanced the budget several years ago by vetoing the state comptrollers budget. And then he called the state legislature back in and said “fix it this time you morons”. Gotta love the adult attitude.
But, Perry is such a hardliner that he is unelectable across the USA. We may end up with Walker and Perry or Cruz on the ballot though.
as of this morning, they’ve also gone ahead to seize her pay checks at the source.
That sucks. This almost sounds more like malice rather than incompetence.
One of my son’s friends is an IRS field agent. He hates the Taxpayer Advocates office as they filed a complaint on him for not canceling his long scheduled vacation two weeks ago and pushing somebody’s paperwork through. If he gets three complaints then he is subject to firing. He is contesting the complaint though to get it off his record.
None of these clowns matter, gents. Waste of time and bandwidth even worrying or thinking about, except for the boffo entertainment value, such as it is.
I have to admit with the federal deficit over $20T when the next pres takes office, gonna be hard to stop digging deeper. 1X the GDP, $20T, is probably the tipping point. 2X the GDP, $40T, is probably reboot time.
“I knew that’d be your answer.”
Good! I loathe and despise them all.
Even assuming that the miraculous will occur and some hero on a white hoss from the Stupid Half of the War Party will be elected Prez, what makes anybody think that he or she won’t have to take direction/orders from the cabal/junta that runs our regime nowadays? This is late-stage fascism; a corporate fascist oligarchy; they are not gonna let some hack run the show on his or her own hook down there. The Prez has been merely a figurehead in our government since the days of Pharaoh Roosevelt II. Anyone who still believes in fairy tales like free elections and voting and the Constitution here is smoking better stuff than I ever got. And I had plenty, from all around the world, too.
“…not canceling his long scheduled vacation two weeks ago and pushing somebody’s paperwork through.”
Pretty funny you should mention that; when I called the TA guy back today, I got his vm which said he was gonna be out until the 13th and that any calls should go to so-and-so there, which I then accomplished successfully, eventually, and she was also very helpful. Latest word is that she’s sending the info I gave her to the IRS Gestapo and they will respond by “close of business Monday” and she’ll update me on Tuesday.
So we go yet another week with zero funds at our disposal, $10,000 sitting in limbo, and the threat of them seizing my wife’s pay checks at the source, for a mistake that THEY fucking made. No apologies, no interest paid on the money they’re holding.
Let this be additional evidence of what Dr. Bob and I have said many times here; this regime’s agencies and departments can do WHATEVER THE FUCK THEY LIKE TO US WITH ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY OR CONTROL OR RESTITUTION. PERIOD.