Preparing my tax return each year, I feel like a half-drowned conquistador, kneedeep in the Amazon, fruitlessly searching for El Dorado, which in my case is the mythical "refund" I can claim from the IRS.
Alas, I am forced to abandon my expedition: bedeviled by the darts of invisible foes, afflicted with malignant diseases, lost and bewildered in a dense, inhospitable and impenetrable jungle of American tax law. Eventually, I succumb to despair.
My wife's tax return, on the hand, reminds me of the work of Herodotus: a detailed exposition of the government's war against small business. Thermopylae has become the home office deduction, the last, ever-shrinking, and ultimately doomed bastion of defense against the income pillaging oppressor.
"The business of America is business," Calvin Coolidge famously belched prior to the Great Depression. But in modern times, the business of America has become taxing business into unrecognizable rubble, observe the long lines of self-employed refugees trudging from the smoking ruins of once profitable ventures towards the wage slavery of the so-called Gig Economy.This process is euphemistically known as entrepreneurship.
But I should quit complaining. Our health insurance premium increased by thirty percent again this year and will do so again for 2018. Soon we'll make so little money I hope to qualify for no tax status and you won't have to read my ranting on the subject anymore.
