Moron of the Day

This is good news; people stupid enough to let go of their clients will allow some other business to hire someone to support these new clients. They're telling us that they're willing to trade income for leisure, while many other folks have the exact opposite problem. We should encourage them to slack off.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/letters/la-le-tuesday3-2009mar03,0,4... I have employed about 50 people during the last 20 years, and my family's taxable income is about $300,000. In order to avoid paying a higher percentage of taxes on all of my income, I will decrease output, lay off some staff and still end up keeping the same amount. I have no incentive to hire people or expand my business, because the more I make, the more President Obama will take to expand government. This discourages expansion of the private sector. It will backfire with disastrous consequences for all. It is repulsive that Obama is being allowed to take this country backward by pickpocketing the very people who run the private sector through their energy, money and creativity. Kay Santos Diamond Bar

Hey, I am not "Anonymous," goddamn it. I am pseudonymous. Totally different thing.

According to her LinkedIn profile Emily Friedman is at most 24 years old. She graduated from UW Madison in 2007. Her parents probably still do her taxes for her. This doesn't excuse her editors letting this through or the fact that she apparently wasn't sharp enough to realize her mistake while reporting the story.

I truly believe this is how most Americans think our tax code works. I hear people talk like this all the time. Not so much the desire to lower their income but the worry about "changing" tax brackets because of some minor raise of cost of living adjustment. The idea that one could stray a few dollars into the wrong bracket and suddenly owe a huge amount of tax on your whole income is something I've heard people say since I was a kid. Sure, one would hope the populace would be smarter but I think you also have to blame the the tax forms and instructions which turn figuring out your taxes owed from your adjusted gross income into a hunt though pages of tables in tiny type rather than the rather simple arithmetic formula it really is which if displayed properly on the forms, with each bracket given it's own line so you could see the income and tax assigned to each, could serve to educate the taxpayer about how the system really works rather than make it all seem like a dark art. You would also probably kill off a lot of talk about a flat tax as well since I think a lot of people don't understand that the complexity of the tax code has almost nothing to do with the number of brackets, which currently stands at 6 and has been as low as 3 within the past two decades. I'll bet you anything that most people assume that every one of those $50 increment table entries in the back of the tax instructions is a separate bracket.

Sorry, that wasn't Ms. Santos. I just thought it would be fun, but I'd gotten used to name fields filling in automatically. I do wish could find her email address, though.

ABC posted an incredibly lame Editor's Note today. "Yesterday ABC News published a version of this story which some readers felt did not provide a comprehensive enough analysis of Obama's tax code for those families making $250k or more. ABCNews.com has heard those concerns and after review has decided to post an updated version of the story below." not 'comprehensive enough'?

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