by Sandy » Wed Oct 05, 2016 9:17 am
I've been royally burned on the clergy housing allowance, by a church treasurer who didn't know what he was doing. Fortunately, I've been able to pay off what I owed, and was allowed to pay back into FICA to restore my social security standing. Several other staff members at the same church, including two pastors, got burned as well, one had to sell his home to pay what he owed. The church did not help.
Conservatives and their ultra right wing extremist media screech and flap their lips over the fact that so many people don't make enough to pay taxes, and lament over budget deficits and debt, and yet they are perfectly fine with those who have influence, via their money, rigging the laws so that the corporate oligarcy and the wealthy can "legally" avoid paying taxes at the same rate and percentage of their income that the rest of us do. So now you've got a guy running for President who has clearly taken advantage of loopholes that no ordinary, middle class citizen could ever get, who is proposing a tax plan that "cuts" taxes, for the wealthy only, and raises them up to 20% on the middle class, and the same shriekers and lip flappers want to blindly support that. If you genuinely "avoid all the taxes that you can," then how do you vote for the guy who is going to raise yours and cut his?
I'm all for taking all of the benefits that I get when it comes to taxes. But I think I should get the same benefits as any other American does, including Donald Trump. He was apparently able to take the full dollar amount of an estimated capital loss, over an unlimited number of years, and avoid paying any tax for nearly 20 of those years. My wife and I sold a house in Missouri in 1990, at a loss, but we were capped on the total dollar amount we could deduct in any given year at $5,000, and limited to only 5 years of eligibility. So we only got to claim a third of the actual loss. That puts some context on the "fair share" argument.