Andy Chase

When it rains, it pours - a lot of potentially interesting stuff going on over the last couple of weeks, possible projects (for money!) on the horizon, along with the one I'm currently writing my tail off for. April is my worst month yet as far as this site goes.



And, because things have been so busy lately I managed to put off my taxes until Monday night. Fortunately, I don't have anything very financially complicated going on in my life so far, so Turbotax did the job quite nicely. I wasn't able to e-file from my WindowsME partition, from which I removed Internet Explorer a while ago. Turbotax apparently relies on one or more of the SSL components that get uninstalled by IEradicator, and even after reinstalling IE I couldn't get it to work. I wound up installing Turbotax on my wife's computer and filing from there.



To the federal government and the state of California I have to ask, how much is enough? Yes, taxes are everybody's duty as a citizen, blah, blah, et cetera, but I can't believe that unemployment benefits are taxable income. Talk about kicking a man when he's down, especially since anyone faced with the prospect of living on $230 a week isn't likely to ask the IRS to withhold one cent of it.



What really chaps my hide is that when gainfully employed, I already get tax taken out of every paycheck to cover unemployment insurance; so the government takes their cut twice.

"Uncle Sam... he puts his hand in your shirt and squeezes your tit 'til it's purple."