The Last of a Dying Breed...

It gets very difficult pulling the wagon from time to time.  Every year, more people are in the wagon and fewer and fewer of us are pulling it.  Every year, I see numerous examples of why.

For instance, today's mail?  Contained a letter from the State of Michigan saying that my 2009 Michigan Single Business tax return was incorrect.  They wanted me to send them about $1,500 because of the mistake.

Problem is, there wasn't any mistake.  The two errors they think they caught were that they claim they never received my quarterly estimated payments, and that they don't have a record of carrying over an overpayment from 2008.

So, I ran to the bank to get front and back images of the checks I wrote them, which I sent them, which were deposited, and which, after all that, they claim they never received.

The carried over overpayment?  All I can do there is show them copies of my 2008 return since it's not possible for me to show them that I didn't get the refund.  "Look, see?  Here's the check I didn't get."

All I can do is show them that I asked them to apply it to my 2009 tax bill. 

This tax, by the way, is a particularly insidious one.  For those not familiar, Michigan has a tax called the "Single Business Tax", which taxes businesses based on gross, not net, volume.

It is one of many, many reasons why nobody in their right mind puts a business in Michigan if they can avoid it.

Michigan's attitude towards jobs is pretty good.  They want them.  They want lots of them.  They want them to pay well.

This, unfortunately, does not jibe with their attitude about businesses, which is that if you create one, they'll jump on your back and ride you like zorro.  If you make a dime, they want it.  Even if you don't make a dime, taxes like the single business tax will nail you, anyway.

Honestly, this has been a very, very hard year, and things like this hit me harder than they might if I were more prosperous.  I'm in the fight of my life trying to meet payroll and keep the lights on, and instead, I lose a day running to the bank and the CPAs office because some state bureaucrat has nothing better to do than to hound people for tax money... even if the people already paid the tax money.

Basically, if you're the little guy, and you're doing the right thing, and every day, you wake up and devote 100% of your business towards doing the right thing, the government steps in, says you did the wrong thing and then the burden of proof is on YOU to show that they're wrong.

But if you're the big guy?  And you do the wrong thing?  The government takes a bunch of money from the little guy and bails you out.  Nice system, that.  Seems I got on the wrong side of that equation, though.

I am starting to wonder if I've simply been incredibly naive my entire life.  I believed in the power of capitalism.  We've all seen what a total joke that is.  My faith in capitalism is completely misguided.

Capitalism has nothing to do with life in America right now.  If you're politically connected (Wall Streeters and Union Members), then you are immune to not just the laws of capitalism, but the laws of economics.

If you're not politically connected?  Well... the state tries to get you to pay your taxes twice.  Even if you already paid them.  Even if you pay through the nose every year to have a CPA make sure you pay them.

If you make a profit?  They are first in line to snag the lion's share of it.  Over 15% Social Security and Medicare taxes.  If you're lucky, only 20% or so for Federal.  Another 5% for State.  $4 grand a year for property taxes.  (Unless you've paid on two houses, like I have... then, it's $8,000.)  Local income taxes.  Business taxes.  Sales taxes.

If you're lucky, you get to keep less than half of what you made.

If you're not profitable?  Hey, you need to be destroyed by the creative destruction of capitalism... never mind that all the taxes you've paid your entire life saved UAW members and Wall Street from this same necessary creative destruction.

I believed that it was virtuous to work hard.  Again, what a joke.  Far better to go to Wall Street, take a home run swing every day and if you strike out, make the taxpayer hold you aloft until you can take another swing at a multimillion dollar payday.

Rather than working, having a small business, how much farther along would I be to just be a slip and fall attorney?  Sue these insurers every day.  Make some poor schmuck with a small business pay for it by paying his premiums so that the insurer and the attorneys can get rich.  When I say attorneys, by the way, I mean both the plaintiff's and the defendant's attorneys. 

Take 1/3 of my clients' insurance settlements?  How much better is society off if guys like me, instead of going to a rigorous MBA program and starting a business, went across the campus to the Law School and just became trial lawyers? 

Okay, society would be no better off.  I sure as heck would, though.  I'd be in the wagon, making a living off the efforts of others, instead of being foolish enough to pull the wagon for others.

Every month, I pay my health insurance.  Why?  So that people on public assistance can have better health coverage than most low-wage workers?  So that Obama can make secret backroom deals that ensure that pharma and insurers will always rip us off and that 10% annual increases will never stop? 

Why even try?  Why keep pulling this wagon?  Used to be I thought it was a point of pride.  I thought it was the right thing to do.  I thought business was my calling.

Now?  I think I've just been stupid, and naive.  That I was dumb enough to be idealistic.  That I was foolish enough to work hard.  That I was pathetic enough to believe that I could compete in the market.

When I was young, I was raised by a grandfather and grandmother on social security.  I wore used clothing from garage sales and shoes from KMart.  Little did I know that I was actually entitled to a check from social security every month because I was the dependent of a retiree.

My grandparents would never have even dreamed something like this would be possible.  How would they?  They, like me, believed that the way you got ahead in life was to work hard, take care of yourself and live within your means.

How silly they were.  The way you get ahead is to find out what the government is subsidizing, then milk the hell out of it.  If the government subsidizes home mortgages?  You get rich selling subprime mortgages.  If the government is subsidizing college tuition?  You get rich by opening a diploma-mill "college". 

If you aren't thinking on that sort of scale, you get on the dole, then milk the crap out of that.  Your kids go to college for free.  You get a caseworker who tells you which offices to go to, and you get to live a modest life without ever doing a speck of work.

My grandparents weren't hip to this.  They worked their fingers to the bone for their modest lives.  Their kids, myself included, had to join the military to afford college.  What a bunch of suckers we all were.

What I needed to do was spend all my time thinking about how to be in the wagon, instead of pulling it. 

I spent 4 years active duty and almost that much time in the reserves willing to defend this system.  Again, I'm a chump.  I'm willing to die so some Wall Street banker can bet a zillion dollars of other people's money on a red-or-black spin of the roulette wheel, and if he loses, I have to pay to bail him out.

I don't even have a defense to offer on that one.  Naive.  Stupid.  Where in the world did I get such an antiquated world-view.

Today?  Every day, I look myself in the mirror and wonder why in the world I'm such a chump.  The worst part?  It gets worse every day.  I weep for the country that our children will be inheriting.  By that time, there will probably be 20 people in the wagon for every person pulling it.

If that poor fool pulling the wagon stumbles?  The government will finish him off.  He won't be able to pay his taxes, which will make him utterly useless to all the folks in the wagon.

Woe be unto the fool who thinks he can get ahead by hard work and square dealing.  It just doesn't seem to happen like that these days.  For the most part, it looks like our role is to keep the system going so the folks in the wagon, bureaucrats and Wall Streeters included, can make their fortunes while we toil away.