My taxes are complicated:  kids, mortgage, Schedule C income from writing, business income from my business, employment income from teaching, and any number of separate forms and deductions. All of it straight-up, but none of it qualifying as simple. Earlier this year I paid the full amount of what my accountant estimated I owed the state of California for 2008. Yesterday he came to me with a revision, based upon what’s going to be the final filing, and the good news is that the state now owes me a refund.

The bad news is that the state now has no money and who knows if I’ll ever get that refund. Starting today, my fair state started issuing I.O.U.’s. (Mostly to people in wheelchairs, judging from the news coverage.) No, there’s no forecast on when they’ll be repaid, or if there’ll be any interest. What if we all adopted this system? I go to fill up my car and hand the gas-station owner an I.O.U., redeemable… oh… when I get around to it. What if, after that, he decides that he needs someone to write him up a good sign explaining why he can’t accept I.O.U.’s, and we agree that I’ll let him redeem the I.O.U. in exchange for me writing that sign? Then we have a barter system — which I’m starting to think is where California is heading in its financial management.

Hey, by the way, if you’d like to take a crack at balancing the state budget (which would allow paying off those I.O.U.’s, and would wind up meaning more money in my checking account, thank you), here’s a fun interactive Deficit Meter on the L.A. Times site. Let me save you some time:  No matter what you do, you can’t follow the state GOP’s playbook of no-new-taxes and still balance it. At least, not without enormous I.O.U.’s to everyone in the future, wheelchair or not.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Politics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.