Poverty Sucks More Than Paying Taxes

I just did our taxes over this past weekend. I hate doing taxes. The only thing that has made doing our taxes each year worth the headache is that we’ve always broke even or gotten a little refund back. It’s like I actually got rewarded for the effort. (Yeah, I know, I’m just being rewarded my own money.)

This year, though, we actually owe taxes. That makes the effort of doing the taxes a total disappointment. It’s adding insult to injury. Rubbing salt in the wound.

When I told Cowgrit that we owe taxes this year, she said, “We owe? Why?”

Then when I showed her the amount we owe, she nearly shouted, “What!? Why!?”

It had to do with getting a good severance package for being laid off, and then getting another job a week later. Yeah, the corporate world giveth, and the government taketh away. But hey, thinking about the alternative, it’s better to owe some extra taxes than to be in the opposite position: unemployed.

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For as far back as I can remember, my dad has had a poster titled, “Poverty Sucks.” It shows a wealthy man (1979) in riding pants, holding a glass of champagne, leaning against a Rolls Royce, in front of the federal Welfare office (you can’t see the building name engraved in the wall behind the car in the small picture here).

He never hung the poster in any way — it stayed rolled up and in a closet forever. We’d pull it out every once in a while and laugh at it for a couple minutes and then put it back up.

We were nowhere near being wealthy; we were small-town middle class. We wore blue jeans for play instead of riding pants, we drank Coke and Mountain Dew instead of champagne, and we drove Pontiacs and Toyotas instead of Rolls Royces. But we could relate to the rich man’s sentiment on poverty: it would, indeed, suck.

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Coincidentally with my doing our taxes this weekend, my dad just gifted me that old poster. I plan to frame it and hang it in my office.

So here’s to a fiscal year where we ended up having to pay more taxes instead of having to draw government funds for survival. (But this is not to suggest I look forward to owing taxes next year.)

Bullgrit