Walk Like an Egyptian

[New blog topic for the remainder of April:  Location, Location, Location!]

ATC created by Ima June Pullet (aka TexasTrailerParkTrash)

The Uterus Song

(With thanks to Maineiac @ http://miraclemama.wordpress.com/)

Canine calculations...

(Some more thoughts re: the Tax Man Cometh!)

I spent all day Saturday tending to a household member who was sick as a dog. And sick as only a dog can be sick. Scooter Pie, the geriatric dachshund (the vet's terminology, not mine!) who owns me, had me quite worried. The poor thing was obviously in discomfort, and unable to keep any food or water down. Even more worrisome, she didn't sleep at all during the day. Those of you who share quarters with dogs -- particularly aged ones -- will understand that this is quite out of the ordinary.

As I was on the verge of putting my shoes on to take Scooter to the emergency vet, my daughter phoned. While she and I talked, Scooter finally fell asleep. Simultaneously relieved and alarmed, I poked the dog every hour or so to make sure she hadn't lapsed into a coma. Five hours later, she woke up and was her usual goofy self, rolling around on the floor and barking to be played with. The mysterious malady passed as quickly as it came, and Scooter has been fine ever since.

Worrisome though the dog's illness was, it pains me to admit having some uncharitable thoughts as she suffered. She'd been to the vet's for a dental cleaning two days -- and $420 -- earlier. I doubted that I'd be entitled to even a partial refund if Scooter hadn't pulled through. And I'd just spent another $200 in December for "standard" care. Barring unusual circumstances (like last summer's wisdom tooth extraction), I don't even spend that much per annum on my human kid's care!

So, I thought, why can't I claim Scooter Pie as a dependent on my income tax refund?

As it turns out, the IRS does have a provision for claiming veterinary and other expenses. Of course there's a catch: Scooter Pie would have to be a service dog. Arguably she does perform a multitude of services for the household. She is an auxiliary doorbell, a backup alarm clock, a combination vacuum-cleaner and dust mop. She guards the birdfeeder against invading squirrels. She is an excellent therapist, one who never interrupts while I'm talking or asks me why do I think I feel a particular way. And she helps to reduce our energy usage -- I don't need an electric heating pad when Scooter Pie is nestled next to my aching knee.

All that aside, I know I really can't put a price on the real value of having a dog: unconditional love. But then again, if Leona Helmsley's hairy heir, Trouble, doesn't have to pay income taxes, why should I?

Image Credit:

http://www.superstock.com/stock-photos-images

My Unmentionable Body Part Path To Prosperity

[Topic for this cycle: The Tax Man Cometh]

Click To Incorporate

It's rare in blogging that we have the opportunity to pull three big news stories together into one semi-coherent whole. Since I am accomplished at semi-coherency, I'd be remiss if I failed to bring you this post--even if it means I have to talk about unmentionable body parts, horse piss, big government and tax deductions all at the same time.

Throw in a little squeamish self-disclosure and blogging doesn't get any better. Let's use a chronological approach.

From The Rachel Maddow Show last night, this clip featuring Florida State Representative Scott Randolph. In response to the Florida legislature's unbelievable eighteen anti-choice bills presented in 2011 so far, Randolph confronted the state house with its small government for corporation/big government for the common woman hypocrisy.

The Florida ACLU's Incorporate My Uterus site (link to image above) offers an excellent incentive to incorporate:

Businesses get special treatment these days. If lawmakers and other politicians see your uterus and your body as a business, maybe they’ll work to get government out of the uterus regulation business as they do for every other company

Fast forward to today's WSJ and this article on Doug Stives, a New Jersey CPA, college professor, and self-proclaimed "Most Tax-Efficient Man In America," who offers lessons in incorporating your own consulting firm to avoid taxes and maximize income.

From the companion WSJ article,

Doug Stives, a CPA from Red Bank, N.J., went skiing in Utah.

"I always dreamed of coming here for peak conditions," he said in mid-March between runs at Snowbasin Resort.

The trip is among the many perks that have accrued from his decision, in 2006, to become, in effect, The Most Tax-Efficient Man in America. The experiment has led to a new career, frequent travel and obsessive documentation of expenses, such as a $6 hot dog he recently bought in the Philadelphia airport.

You're with me so far, right? Tax breaks for body parts; at last, an equal-opportunity shot at the good life for middle and lower-class women and their families. All you've got to do is incorporate your womb and keep careful records. Don't forget the hot dogs. Check.

And onward to this late-breaking change of tone on the breast cancer-hormone replacement therapy link from the NYTimes :

In a finding that challenges the conventional wisdom about the risks of some hormones used in menopause, a major government study has found that years after using estrogen-only therapy, certain women had a markedly reduced risk of breast cancer and heart attack.

The research, part of the landmark Women’s Health Initiative study, is likely to surprise women and their doctors, who for years have heard frightening news about the risks of hormone therapy. But most of those fears are related to the use of a combination of two hormones, estrogen and progestin, which are prescribed to relieve hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause, and have been shown to increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer.

The new findings, reported Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, come from 10,739 women in the Women’s Health Initiative study who had previously had a hysterectomy, the surgical removal of the uterus. Nationwide, about one-third of women in their 50s have had a hysterectomy. (my emphasis)

 The estrogen-only group was not given progestin, which is prescribed only to protect the uterus from the harmful effects of estrogen. Although all the women in the estrogen study stopped using the treatment in 2004, the investigators have continued to monitor their health, as is typical in large clinical trials.

The most surprising new finding relates to breast cancer. The women with hysterectomies who used estrogen alone had a 23 percent lower risk for breast cancer compared with those who had taken a placebo. This is in stark contrast to the higher risk of breast cancer shown in the estrogen-progestin part of the trial.

“The decreased risk of breast cancer in this group is something we totally didn’t expect when we started the W.H.I. hormone therapy trials,” said Andrea Z. LaCroix, the study’s lead author and a professor of epidemiology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

There's some news in there about non-effects for heart disease, colon cancer, etc., so please be a good info consumer and read the whole thing. It's probably the first good news I've heard in weeks, but what's that got to do with tax deductions? Well, first of all, one third of us over fifty can't participate in the uterus incorporation tax deduction! Somebody needs to inform the ACLU, because that's what they're for.  Don't link away; I did that part for us already.

Squeamish self-disclosure: I'm one of those third. When my kids were four and seven, a very nice Air Force gynecologist at Langley AFB relieved me of my unmentionable body part. He was thinking cancer, so we both felt we'd come out to the good when all he wound up having to do was finesse my decision about a third child. Due to the nature of the problem, I woke up to raging menopause that couldn't safely be treated with HRT for a year. Mother Nature did not mean for woman to deal with an icing-melting hot flash while she was serving up Room Mommy cupcakes to  a classroom of kindergarten kiddies. Although, come to think of it, teachers probably have to do it all the time.

Anyway, when the doc finally gave me my script for Premarin (estrogen derived from pregnant mare's piss)--with the explicit instructions: You will need to take these the rest of your life--I could have kissed his feet. And, when they later told us all that those years of HRT were going to doom women like me, I felt cheated. I feel better now, but I'm going to miss out on those incorporatemyuterus.com deductions. Life is so unfair.

So I've decided to incorporate my Uteral Deficit. After all, there's lots more research ahead on this subject of estrogen-only HRT and no data yet on what happens when a gal who's just following instructions winds up taking it for twenty-five years. I figure I can contribute to science and take deductions on air-fare back and forth to various medical research facilities in exotic places like Seattle, New York City, Houston, and San Diego.

That way I improve my financial bottom line and make a contribution to science. If I need medical care, I can take advantage of the top facilities in the nation and bill it to Medicare. By a complicated mathematical formula familiar to Republicans, I've also figured out how my un-uterus incorporation tax deduction plan will reduce the national deficit and piss off Paul Ryan all at the same time. And blogging just doesn't get any better than that.

 "A nervous breakdown on paper.” - Rep. Emmanual Cleaver

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.