Say it again, Ben
Ben Franklin said it, “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Well, if you’re among us on the green side of the sod, today’s the day to pay up.
I guess a grim pundit might suggest that COVID gave us both an extra 90 days and a novel means to exercise our singular levy-defying option. But it’s mid-July and the heat’s on. The day of reckoning has arrived and I reckon, as usual, the most of us – not being billionaires -- will pay up.
As if we had a choice. For any of us drawing a paycheck, Uncle Sam has already taken what he claims as his due. Filing a 1040 is just our way of trying to get a bit of it back.
The scheme behind paying income tax is a lot like running a big sale at a merchant where we all know we can save big money. We’re charged full price, then have to send in a form to get a refund for what we were overcharged. Fail to do the paperwork and Uncle gets your money, regardless … and if you’re dead, well, the IRS does Ben Franklin one better.
Thinking of taxes at this time of year sort of picks an old scab for me. It was right about now, better than a half century past, that I first made personal acquaintance with the Internal Revenue Service.
Now I was already several summers past the age when father, family and folks in general felt a healthy young fellow ought to wile away time out of school sleeping late, horsing around and generally enjoying three months of youthful indolence – not when there were rocks to pick, beans to hoe, buttonweed to pull, hay to bale and lots of farms and farmers looking for cheap, unskilled labor. If I wasn’t being indentured to family friends and relatives, Mom had three-quarters of an acre to be planted, hoed, harvested and put in the freezer … and she knew where I lived.
Now the pay for these labors was, let us say, meager and irregular at best, and with no recourse to OSHA or a Fair Labor Standards Board to arbitrate the hours pulling, scrubbing and blanching Mom’s carrot crop, once I was old enough to convincingly lie about my age, I went looking for other employment. And I’ll be darned if I didn’t find it.
Gengler’s peas were ready and Leo was hiring. He peered down from a high stool, asked my age, and after I told him what he wanted to hear, I was told to be there the next morning. I’d be pulling down better than a buck an hour and there’d be a roof between the top of my head and the sun. My career was launched.
I spend the next week picking stones, twigs, cockleburs and June bugs out of a shallow river of shelled peas slowly moving along a conveyor enroute to being blanched, cooled, packed and frozen. I learned to keep an eye out for Annabelle’s cigarette ash if she knocked it off making a long reach for a nearly overlooked pebble and made sure to always look busy when Red, the foreman, shuffled through looking for slackers to haul out to the farm to stack vines. As jobs go, it wasn’t all bad.
At quitting time at the end of the week, Leo made his way through the plant, distributing long window envelopes with pale green checks inside. I made it as far as the shade of the first tree down the block before ripping open the envelope, knowing down to the last penny what would be printed on that check and exactly what my plans were for every penny of it.
The howl scared the squirrels and sent the sparrows flying from their roosts. State tax, federal tax, FICA – all week I’d been working and all week I’d been robbed.
Or so I felt.
Somewhere, old Ben Franklin was having a good chuckle.