Profit Is Their Most Important Product*

[Our topic for this cycle: The Tax Man Cometh]

We filed our taxes early this year and now I regret it. If I'd let GE go first, I might have done the whole thing differently.

All my life I've been terrified to file late or make a mistake. Back in the nineties, I started a business and had to consult an accountant who began to name all the deductions I could take: my car, of course; my office rent and furnishings and supplies; the part of my house that served as a second office; my employees. Wait, I didn't have any employees. So he told me to hire my kids. Who were thirteen and sixteen. In a solo psychotherapy practice. Righty-o, that was gonna work.

I told him I just wanted to pay my estimated quarterly taxes without any creative deduction razzle-dazzle and I wanted to pay them on time. He looked at me like I'd just fallen off the turnip truck. Apparently, nobody in town in small office practices--not the doctors, nor dentists, nor lawyers, nor any of those people I used to look up to when I was twenty--was IGNUNT enough to just pay the US Government what it owed them, much less on time. Apparently, paying taxes was for patsies.

Later, with the practice in full swing, I uncovered an unforeseen consequence of all those creative deductions and extensions: a guy could get stuck sleeping with a woman who hated his guts.**

I did a lot of marriage work, which means that, since hardly anyone ever showed up in a marital therapist's office until their lawyer made them or their wife threatened to take the Audi, I did a lot of divorce work. Usually, it was the wife who came alone. Wives go to therapists; husbands go to lawyers. It would be different in a perfect world, but then I wouldn't have been able to send my kids to private colleges.

A surprising number of those wives were married to doctors, lawyers, people who did things with teeth and gums, etc. And an equally surprising number of those wives couldn't dump the jerks they were married to because the jerks hadn't paid their taxes in ten, fifteen, twenty years. Jerks would refuse to agree to a divorce because the so-called Family Court would require them to have all their financial affairs in order so things could be divvied up fair and square.

Which meant that the wife's lawyer would have to threaten the jerk's lawyer, and so on, in ever escalating spirals, until I'd start to get worried about having to testify in a castration case. This stuff could go on for years. A couple of cases like that at the same time would put me off my feed and make it hard to sleep at night. Makes you wonder how well the jerks slept, don't it?

Hat Tip and all glory to my friend Meg of Member's Lounge, whose creation this is:

"GE, where 2010 saw them netting 5 billion dollars in profit. And paying ZERO federal income tax. April Fool’s everyone! WTF, how do they get away with that?"

*GE slogan: "Progress is our most important product." This was replaced in '03 with, "Imagination At Work. Especially In The Accounting Division."

**I never encountered a female tax jerk, but, in all fairness, maybe there will be some now that you know the IRS will let you go years without sending you to jail. This is a good time to own a business in America.