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Taxes
- 2006-04-19
TAXES
Well, my taxes are done. It was a pain this year and i'm glad it's over. i owed some money this year. In fact everybody i know owed money. I did READ about somebody who got a refund --the Vice President, and he got a whopper. Yup, Cheney got a refund of 1.93 MILLION bucks. For one year. That's more money than i have made in my whole life. How'd he do it?
For one thing, he made a lot of money, $8.82 million. He made more money from Halliburton ($211,465) than he got paid for being vice president. I still don't get how he can say he's not involved with a company that pays him close to a quarter mill a year, but i'm not the expert. The rest of the money came from 'stock options' and his partner's book royalties. Altogether almost 9 million bucks. They gave millions to charity and ended up with a tax bill of $5K and change. That roughly puts them in a 5% tax bracket. Pretty cool for a millionaire.
Now, to be honest, i haven't put a lot of effort into getting rich, so i'm not surprised that i'm not. And i don't begrudge a higher level of wealth to those who are willing to worry about it. But it seems like things are out of balance here. Maybe it's just the scale that seems inappropriate. We do after all live in a country that's trillions in debt, where 40 million people have no health care and 25% of children are living in poverty. If Halliburton pays the guy $200K what does he need with a government salary? Is he just rubbing our face in his excess?
And how are we going to change the tax collection methods when Congress is elected not by the voice of the people but by the campaign contributions of rich people? How we run campaign and elections may be a good place to start.
