feel my pain or, I suppose our pain, the "our" in this instance being mah spousette and me, she being a self-employed attorney. In the many years of our premarital cohabitation I could always count upon a nice few thousand dollars coughed back to me each tax season (I habitually overwithhold as a sort of subliminal savings plan), but since, ah, making an honest woman of her my extra contributions are all gobbled up by her liabilities: we barely escaped the wrath of the IRS for deficient deposits this year.

I note, looking at the detachable portion of a recent paycheck (I speak metaphorically of course: even the brain-dead employer went direct-deposit twenty years ago) that I'm now paying $2K/month in federal and state income taxes alone (medicare, heath insurance, professional dues, retirement &c all excluded), and marvel at the sum: thirty-five years ago, cut off from parental assistance, I contrived to put myself through college on dishwashing wages amounting to not much more than $2K per annum. I would have imagined myself fabulously wealthy to be making what I do today, but as a humble young dishwasher I had not yet grasped the murderous subtleties of compounding inflation, and would have swooned, quite, at the monthly housing outlay (indeed, I still swoon, quite, at our winter utility bills).

For the rest...SCOTUS Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes once famously observed that "taxes are what we pay for a civilized society." Today, of course, that "we" largely excludes those sectors prosperous enough to purchase legislative exemptions for themselves, and the taxes don't come close to covering Holmes' desirable abstract of roads and police, much less the cost of underwriting our tottering empire, and we are perforce involved in borrowing the difference. It will be interesting to watch it all unravel.

cordially,