Our family consists of my wife, 3 step children, 1 child which does not live with me and myself. I have a good job and I make a decent living. My wife also works but her gross income is about 1/3rd of mine. I pay child support to my ex-wife who is pushing to have my support payments more than doubled to almost $1000 a month. I claimed a few with holdings on my taxes last year but I worried it was not enough. My wife and I set our with holdings to 0 about mid-way through the year in an effort to avoid owing taxes in 2009. Apparently that was still not enough.
I recently pulled up the turbo tax website as I do every year and put in estimations of income based off of our final paychecks for 2008 since as of the time of this writing we do not yet have our w-2 statements. According to turbo tax we owe over $8000 on top of the $20600 we have already paid in income taxes for 2008. Wow! I would say we were surprised but this is a drastic understatement. We are devastated both morally and financially. How are we going to raise that kind of cash when our budget is already razor thin?
We do not live a life of excess. We eat out once in a while out of necessity. We shop around always trying to find the best deals on groceries and other things we buy. We have some credit cards with a total balance of less than $1950 and always pay more than the minimum each month. We make too much to declare bankruptcy yet we do not make enough to pay huge bills like this in a timely manner when they surprise or blindside us. We have no savings to speak of and I constantly worry about retirement and not having enough to even pay for basic costs of living. When we retire social security will probably be non-existent according to the common opinion of pretty much everyone I talk to. So why do we pay such high taxes on income? Why do we lose 30% of the money we work hard to earn?
As I sit here late tonight writing this I have no answers, only questions. Why must the government make it so hard for me to continue working by stealing around $30 for every $100 I earn? How can we expect people to continue working when our government is fiscally devaluing the very work we do? The taxes I have already paid in 2008 average out to almost 1700 a month. This is more than the rent on our apartment or the combined vehicle payments we make each month for our 2 cars which we need in order to get to work on a regular basis. This is more than most people could stomach paying to any one debt yet I am forced to pay these taxes according to law. If I do not fork over a huge chunk of my income each month than I will be found and will be dragged off to jail or worse.
This fact scares me and it is why I pay my taxes. The mob used to make shop keepers pay for ‘protection’ and this situation feels an awful lot like that. So here I sit typing a few paragraphs that could either earn me public scrutiny or praise. I’d prefer neither, I simply want my money back.
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