The Government and me

Phlemfatale had a post on property tax, which indeed sucks. I am having issues with capitol gains tax.

2007 I sold a piece of land that I had owned for close to thirty years. I made a good profit. I had to invest a lot of time in prepping the place for sale, changing the lot boundary and generally jumping through hoops. No problem, it's always that way.

I consulted my accountant and wrote several large checks to have the money in my tax account to avoid penalty's. As I was leaving town I filed an extension on the filing date so I would not be late. While I was in the tax office for the state I asked the people working there, who you would expect to know something about the tax laws, if the state had a capitol gains tax.

If you expect the people who work with the tax laws to know anything, you would be wrong.

When I finally got home I filed my taxes, and found I owed another $15,500 roughly, I drove from the accountants office to the tax office and wrote them a check.

Six months later I get a notification that I owe another $1687 in penalty's and interest to the state.

Why did it take six months? Now I have 45 days to act, pay or write for a review, if the useless tits that work in the office had done something like heroic, like look it up, or know something about their job, they would already have their money.

It gets worse.

When I sold my land, because there was no structure on the land, I paid a ten percent commission on the sale, the federal capital gains tax is fifteen percent as is the state capital gains tax. Yep, that's forty percent right off the top. Now lump that right into my income for the year, now I have topped the Alternative Minimum Tax threshold.

Keep in mind, I have no deductions, everything I own is paid for. I will have to check but I think I paid upwards of $80,000 in taxes.

I took me thirty years to make a profit, and one year for them to keep more of it than I did. And now they are getting more.

Yeah, I love my government.