The taxman cometh

Why do they say that you should “beware the ides of March?” I think we should beware the ides of April. After all, April is the cruelest month.

Maybe the best thing about April 15th is that it’s the birthday of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). You remember Leo, he invented the bicycle…and the helicopter, the submarine, parachutes, machine guns… architect, engineer, pop singer, ring a bell? Maybe you know him better as the man who painted The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa.

Of course, for all his contributions to art and science, da Vinci was no above scandal and suspicion. He had a habit of borrowing cadavers from the local morgue so that he could dissect, study and draw them. He kept hundreds of notebooks, all written backwards and in latin. Many people feared that he was some kind of occult wizard, actually he was left-handed and wanted to avoid getting an arm full of ink. Then there were the allegations about his young male assistants which made da Vinci sort of the Michael Jackson of the Renaissance.

This is the day in 1970 when, the U.S. 1st Infantry Division withdrew from Vietnam as part of troop withdrawals announced by President Nixon. That’s good if you wanted our boys to come home or if you thought that Presidents Johnson and Nixon were wrong to commit so many U.S. troops to Vietnam for so long. But maybe it’s bad if you feel like we were cutting our losses and leaving the South Vietnamese at the mercy of the Communist North.

This is the day in 1912 when at two in the morning, the H.M.S. Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.. The massive ship, carrying 2,200 people, had struck an iceberg two and half hours before, and survivors weren’t rescued by another ship for more than another hour. Brrr.
In my opinion, the worst thing to happen on this day was that this was the morning, in 1965 that President Abraham Lincoln, died from a bullet wound inflicted the night before by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. Just six days after Robert E. Lee surrendered the Southern army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, ending the American Civil War.

One conspiracy theory says that this led to even worse things. The internet-fringe claims that that’s why April 15th is “Tax Day.” See, in order to pay for the Civil War, Lincoln issued war bonds. Those bonds were known as “1040 Bonds,” because they were supposed to mature in 10 or 40 years. To collect the interest on these bonds, a “1040 form” was instituted and by the newly created office of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, predecessor to the IRS.

A different theory is that originally, income tax was paid mostly by the wealthy. The “fiscal year” ends June 30, but the super rich, as everybody knows, spend their whole summer vacationing. So, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue figured, "we should make sure we collect early, before they leave town."
The Sixteenth Amendment permitting both corporate and individual income taxes was ratified on February 3, 1913. March 1, 1914 was the first filing deadline. They changed it to March 15 in 1918, leading to a dumb St. Patrick’s Day joke- “how can we be expected to celebrate the wearing of the green, when just two days ago they took it all away from us?” Thank Jack Benny for that one.

It got backed up to April 15 in 1955, so, so much for the Lincoln theory.

Various states have levied income taxes ever since 1789, originally to pay for Revolutionary War debts.

I would have loved to have seen whether or not Johnson’s “War on Poverty” would’ve been more effective if $25 billion a year wasn’t being siphoned off to pay for the war in Vietnam. Just one Hugh’s helicopter used in Vietnam cost around $1 million, enough to pay for sixty-six low-cost two bedrooms houses.

The cost of the war in Afghanistan is already around $20 billion. Some estimates put the price tag on the war in Iraq at $100 billion or more.

Since 1913, taxes have been the major source of revenue for the federal government. No President, including Lincoln, has been able to cut taxes during war time- until now, President Bush Jr, has cut them twice. Mostly for the wealthiest 2% of Americans. And we wonder why we’re running such massive deficits.

Ben Franklin once said “… an unjust peace is to be preferred before a just war.”

Because we have two kids, part of the Bush tax-cuts was a tax credit on each child. What a nice help. We could’ve applied it to our child care cost, since we can’t afford for either of us to stay home, we both need to have jobs to get by. Guess what? The state of Iowa taxed our federal tax break. I understand, Iowa has a revenue problem right now, but does Iowa understand that I have kind of a revenue problem right now too?

In 1789, Ben Franklin wrote a friend in a letter that “Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.”