Failing Trump administration. Sad!

Now I’m retired and my income is less predictable, I have years when I’ve come up short and had to pay, and the following year I have to adjust my quarterly income tax payments up to prevent that from happening again.

This is the group that I know of that get behind. They don’t pay quarterly, they pay the penalty but even one bad year, one emergency, one unexpected issue with the business or personal life and they’re behind… forever. They don’t have the money. They had to use it to fix the car they use in their business… just an example.

Understood, but on household incomes below about $75k (on average), I think tax credits and other transfers exceed the actual tax liability. I have no doubt some people fall through the cracks, but if you’re self-employed and choosing not to pay quarterly payments, you’re already cheating — that’s why there’s a penalty.

If you are self-employed and you make say 15 or 20 dollars an hour and you’re single and probably honest, you’re not deducting everything down to a loss. You’re clearly not accepting just cash or if you are you are reporting or else you wouldn’t have that big tax bill in the first place, SEP can kill you.

I think a number of people assume self-employed means someone is running a business and make other assumptions. There are number of people out there that are self-employed though and their not making a lot, newspaper carriers, house keepers, babysitters, and the like. They’re just like most low-waged earners, one car repair, health episode (not a lot of insured in this area) or one bad decision away from what can be a permanent fall behind. They’ll tell you they’re making more than minimum wage. $15 an hour! But they often forget to included SEP in that, and when it comes down to cutting a check to Uncle Sam or putting gas in the car so they can work some more, they put gas in the car so they can keep working assuming they’ll just make it up later… except later never comes and they do that 4 or 5 times and suddenly they’re a year behind in making tax payments they can’t make and now they add that to what they should be holding this year… as in they need to pay this years taxes, they owe for last year and the penalties start building… 3 years out, it’s not happening 4/5 they stop filing.

I’m not excusing it, but it’s not difficult to see how someone who is not getting a W-2 can fall behind and yeah they just disappear because they simply can’t pay. I guess the IRS can come take their mobile home, try and put a lien on a car that barely runs but…there’s not much take in these scenarios. This is the same group that gets suckered by those 800 numbers that promise take your 10k IRS bill and turn it into 1k, a scam, and the fact is… they don’t have the 1k either.

No, I don’t think that. But if you’re making $15 an hour, that’s $30k a year at full-time employment, and the tax liability on that is less than $2,000. I can understand how you could get behind on that, but being forced to pay it off in full isn’t insurmountable. Pay $200 per year for 10 years.

In any event, I’m guessing this isn’t where most of the leniency comes in. But I don’t know that, so maybe it is.

I think you might be misunderstanding what I am saying is SEP, or I am not using the right lingo. I am not talking about the Income tax. I am talking about Medicare and Social Security and then you add the Income tax on top o that.

I was, sorry. But I guess I don’t understand the argument. If someone is deliberately not paying both payroll taxes and income taxes, when they arguably could pay them (because many other people earning $15 per hour do), then we should do what? Forgive their income tax debt? Give them credit for their unpaid Social Security and Medicare?

I mean, if there’s a hardship reason, and some process for assessing it, then I’m ok with some leniency here; but not if they just basically decided they didn’t make enough money to pay taxes. I’ve been poor, so I know how it is, but I always paid my taxes.

Well they didn’t decide they couldn’t pay it, they thought they could, managed their money poorly or ran into a situation they couldn’t recover from.

What good does it do to suck blood from a turnip I guess is my answer to that. We can spend fifty years hoping to get money from them that we can never get and watch them go full underground or… we can do what was mentioned above, try to recover some keep them in the light.

You can easily fall into 10k+ debt with just a few years of poor choices and/or bad luck, and for someone making 30k… It’s not ideal. But yeah, I know. I’ve done the SEP thing and the W2 thing. W2 is a lot easier and harder to fall into that pattern.

Please please please Santa, there’s nothing else I want for Christmas. Just let Newt be Chief of Staff. It will be a Christmas miracle.

And you’ll also take care of my Christmas present for next year - I’ll get to see Newt in jail!

The only thing better than Newt as COS would be Newt as Press Secretary, so people can see him being an ass every single day.

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God Yes!

If Kelly is a babysitter of sorts, Newt will be that babysitter that let you drink soda and eat candy. I can only imagine how even less will be done with Newt as CoS. Especially because I am sure Trump will hate him.

Newt likes the spotlight. Trump will be unhappy with him if he takes away attention from Trump.

I am truly afraid that my eyes will fall out of my head from the most powerful eyeroll in history if Gingrich becomes Trump’s CoS.

Man, in the three-way race between ICE, DHS, and the CIA, I just can’t figure out which enormous “law” enforcement wing (yeah yeah CIA’s a bunch of spooks but I really wanted to write law in quotes up there) of the federal government is the most evil.

I’d say easily ICE just for the sheer intentional and direct awfulness of it.

It’s one thing to do evil out of bureaucratic indifference, such as DHS, but the intentional flaunting of law and human decency of ICE to target people racially is on a whole ‘nother level.

I mean I hate to always play the “Guatemalan Card” in these debates, but my reasons for loathing the CIA run deep yo.

Oh understandable! They definitely take second, though this may also be a recency bias thing.

DHS is the banality of evil.

There’s probably a good Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic Evil Alignment Chart to be made here, but, eh.

Trump – who already has been routinely working shorter and shorter days and showing up late for them over the last week – is apparently taking a 16-day vacation to Mar-A-Lago over Christmas and New Year’s.