New Year

The first check I wrote this year was for $25.34 to cover a four-page IRS “notice of intent to seize your property” for the tax year 2005 — ten years ago — with interest calculated quarterly, at rates ranging from 8% down to 3%, yet somehow totaling only 7 cents.  “For a detailed calculation of your interest, call 800-829-0115.”  Which I plan to do, because I think Uncle Sam short-changed himself.

Then again, as this notice related not to my taxes but to $25.27 apparently due on the long-since-dissolved trust that my dad, who died in 1983, set up for my mom, who died in 2011 — and as it was addressed to their attorney not me (he faxed it over) — I’m not sure what property the IRS contemplated seizing.

Still, I am one of those who does not hate the IRS; who thinks taxes are the price we pay for civilization; and who can only imagine how hard Congress has made the IRS’s job — and how gleefully it has underfunded that job.  So off went the check.

The second “check” I wrote this year was in fact a gigantic charge put through here to help support the core infrastructure that everyone assumes someone else will pay for – yet without which the Tea Party wins.

(Jeb would have been bad enough. Nice man, horrible governing priorities.  But Cruz?  Horrible man, horrible governing priorities.)

The whole world is at stake — the Court for the next 30 years; war and peace;* potentially catastrophic climate change;** stuff like that.

And the two parties could not be further apart.

What a year 2016 is likely to be.

Here’s hoping reason and good will prevail.

Happy New Year!

*Dick Cheney told us New Year’s morning that, yes, had he to do all over again, he would still have invaded Iraq.

**Chris Christie is adamant [here, at 38:51] that it’s not a crisis, should not be of much concern.