Washington Post Magazine, Sunday, April 15, 1984.
Yes, We Have No Taxes
Not as Long as We Watch
On April 15 I moisten my stamp with tears. The sob ducts can’t seem to shake all the doom-and-gloom pronouncements that litter the painful countdown to tax time the way dead leaves carpet the winter.
* The moans from the politicians about how a middle-class family making $25,000 can’t hack it.
* The Sunday supplement confessions of the $50,000 family up to their Benson & Hedges in hock.
* The slick magazine sizzlers that rip the lid off the miseries of the over-the-$100,000-a-year crowd.
Boohoo.
The wife and I don’t pay income taxes, haven’t for years. What’s our loophole?
We beat taxes the old fashioned way - we don’t earn it.
What, are we dropouts?
No, I’m not writing this from an earthen hut in Potato Junction, Maine. I get articles printed in the The Washington Post. My wife’s art is in the Hirshhorn Museum. Then how do we get by on so little money - $2,800 in taxable income to be exact? Do we, shudder, live on the edge?
Yes, I guess I can reveal a considerable list of lapses. We have no life insurance, no health insurance, no hospitalization. I haven’t been to dentist in 20 years, and we waited 10 days after the legal deadline before buying mandatory car insurance in the District hoping a judge would throw the damn new law out.
Our car is 18 years old. We have no dishwasher, no garbage disposal. The refrigerator is wired up to keep the freezer door shut. We use a plate hanger to keep the oven door shut, and a coat hanger serves as our handle for the broiler. Our TV is a black-and-white hand-me-down. It blinks wildly two times on the hour so I have to lie down next to it and cuddle my arms around its plastic girth and fiddle lovingly with a knob. We have no dining room table, no easy chair, and have spent $200 on furniture in the last 10 years. We have no washer and no dryer. We hate laundromats and do the wash in the bathtub. Hand-washing helps clothes last longer.
I’ve bought three pairs of pants in the past five years. The last shirt I bought was at Value Village. It cost a dime. I’ve never bought a suit or a sports jacket. I let parents do the shopping come gift time (you bet we have parents - upper middle class parents.) They send quality enough for a free-lance writer: L.L. Bean shirts, corduroy pants and a jacket.
My wife is a visual artist, a racket with spiffier sartorial standards, but last year she still spent under a hundred bucks on clothes.
We don’t dress up much, and avoid charity balls and black-tie openings. We haven’t been to a movie in four years. At the Kennedy Center we sit up in the rafters where you can’t see but you can afford.
We are both 36 years old, have a parakeet, two goldfish, no children and we cut our own hair.
Is that the edge? Is that doing without?
We don’t think so. We have everything you really need to live the good life in Washington: two air conditioners, a library card, $3,000 in a Maryland savings bank (where the interest is higher) and time enough to take 123 days of vacation last year. Highlights included spring training in Vero Beach, Fla., with the Los Angeles Dodgers; on the St. Lawrence River in the Thousand Islands at the opening of bass season; Venice for the film festival (we didn’t go to any films, but liked looking at the people who did); Vienna for the opening of the opera (standing room costs 60 cents and the new white wine $2 for two liters); and New Year’s in Costa Rica.
How can we afford that and still not make enough to pay taxes?
The numbers are pretty boring. Our gross income from all sources was around $9,300. From that we could deduct just under $2,000 in business expenses, $2,500 in cash gifts from our parents and $2,000 in personal exemptions. That left a taxable income of $2,800. Not until a married couple filing jointly makes over $3,400 do they have to pay a federal tax.
Our housing costs were $4,200 for payment on the two bedroom apartment and utilities and telephone. When we are in Washington our other expenses amount to about $75 a week. For the 34 weeks we were in Washington that amounted to about $2,550. That $6,750 in bed-rock expenses included about $500 worth of business expenses (telephone, electricity, bus rides, incidentals). Add the rest of the business expenses (materials to make art, reams of paper for unpublished novel) and our total expenses in Washington were about $8,250.
Our domestic vacations cost us about $300. My parents own the cottage in the Thousand Islands and live two blocks from the beach in Vero Beach.
The trip to Italy and Austria, where we stayed with Italian and Austrian friends, cost about $1,800. The trip to Central America, where we stayed with Costa Rican friends, cost $1,200 but that stretched into 1984, so debit only half its cost for 1983. So our total expenses for 1983 were about $11,000.
Since we started the year with $4,200 in the bank, we dipped into savings to cover our deficit. Our bank account never got below $2,000 so we were always at least three months away from having to get a job. And as luck would have it when we got back from Central America, $1,300 in 1984 income rolled in for articles already written.
Obviously if our parents weren’t generous, making ends meet and meeting the ends of the earth would be more difficult. But hey, should we disown them?
None of the money we made in 1983 was guaranteed. And no checks in the future are either, unless the Social Security system really does survive. We do have to pay a 9.2% social security tax on our net incomes from our professions.
It wouldn’t be accurate to say we avoid making money just to avoid paying taxes. But by being self-employed we can regulate our affairs so that we decrease the probability of getting bogged down making too much money. We’d been planning the trip to Italy and Austria for three years. When a rain of early spring income swelled our bank account we rode the flood to Europe. Being in Europe, we couldn’t make money in Washington.
The trouble with making a big salary at a nine-to-five job is that you don’t really have enough time to think about spending it. You take the easy way and do what everybody else does, what the advertisers train you to do. To me “nine-to-five job” is a synonym for lowered resistance.
The joy of not making money is that you have plenty of time to philosophize about how you lead the best of lives by not spending what you don’t have.
No insurance: Why pay for a catastrophe that may never come? When the medical establishment saves your life, then get a steady job and pay them off. What if everybody was that irresponsible? Medical costs would never have risen so high without insurance to foot the bills.
No first run movies: Our popular culture is so front-loaded and unambiguous (that’s the only way movies can succeed in a crowded market trying to gull bored thrill seekers) that you know all you need to know about movies just from seeing the promo clips in advertising and at Academy Awards presentations.
No shopping sprees: What’s wrong with bird-watching? Collecting leaves? And plopping your big Huckleberry Finn down on some dry turf and watching the clouds on sale?
No eating out: So we gave up frequent dinners at Washington restaurants for one dinner in a restaurant in Italy. I’ll take one bowl of pasta in Italy over six full-course meals at any Washington restaurant.
Appliances and car on the brink: If you don’t have a job, you have plenty of time to cope with disasters.
But what about the exhilaration of meeting the challenges of the clock, the thrill of ambitions fulfilled or dashed on a daily basis? We had a friend who had an old unused piano in his basement. We moved it into our apartment and taught ourselves how to play. When we want to beat the clock, we turn up the metronome.
I’ll admit that it can be lonely at the bottom of the income scale where there’s plenty of time to feed the birds and an ingrained disinclination to buy a buddy a drink. Yeah, I get so lonely on April 15, I really do get choked up. I even look for suffering high-rollers in need, but of course I wind up pocketing the change. The rest of the world is at work trying to afford their taxes.
No comments:
Post a Comment