The Record Newspapers - Hometown News For Orange County, Texas

Well, I hope everyone survived the April 15 bank account massacre. I dropped my check in the mail and then went home for a cold libation to hopefully soothe the pain of an eviscerated pocketbook.

For good or bad, folks are still talking about all those Tea Parties. I was impressed. I heard a couple hundred thousand showed up.

Naturally, the conservative right will inflate the numbers, and the liberal left will deflate them.

That’s politics.

Demon politics. That has to be the reason the President of the United States bowed to a foreign dignity.

I don’t know about you, but that disgusted me, but to calm the apoplexy of you Bush haters, I felt as much disgust as when George W. (for whom I did vote) held hands with that Saudi monarch during the latter’s visit to Bush’s ranch.

American President’s don’t bow and cow!

Unlike many supporters on both sides of the political spectrum, I’m an open-minded person. Politicians lie. Bush lied; Obama lied; but Obama can lie with much more grace and finesse than Bush who just always barged ahead with the inane conviction that he was the “decider.” So there!

Speaking of lying, how many of you fudged (a pc term for lying) on your tax return? So what’s the difference?

Anyway, after getting the last of my obligation off to IRS, I plopped down on the couch and when no one was looking, cried.

Then I got an e-mail from a friend about tax deductions, two or three bizarre attempts to slip a deduction in under the long nose of the IRS. I thought, why not? We need all the help we can get!

The e-mail was about George and Gracie Burns. Remember them? No? Oh, well, that’s your loss. Anyway, Gracie claimed a personal expense deduction for $120 for a “wave.” When asked to explain, she said, “I saw a friend who waved. I waved back and ran my car into a tree.”

Naturally, IRS disapproved it as they did her $50 medical deduction for a full-length mirror. “But,” she explained, “I got it for my father so he wouldn’t get pneumonia again. You see, before he only had a half-length mirror, so when he went outside he forgot his pants.”

Oh, there are all kinds of sneaky deductions out there, but let me give you a hint as to some more that won’t make it past the leering scrutiny of IRS.

You’re not going to get away with claiming your pet’s boarding costs as a travel expense while you’re on vacation; nor if you’re an actor can you get a deduction for new dentures that allow you to enunciate without a hiss.

Not many of you are bodybuilders, but for you who are, IRS will kick out your effort to claim dietary deductions for buffalo meat and protein shakes. On the other hand, they will allow you to deduct the expense of that oil you smear over your body to make it glisten during your performance.

I don’t know about you, but that’s shaving the difference pretty thin. Right along with the oil business was the exotic dancer who claimed (and received) a deduction for a breast implant to a 56DD. One of the most unusual but logical deductions I ran across was a parent who received a deduction for clarinet lessons as a medical expense to improve their child’s overbite. More power to them.

In the future however, we won’t have to worry about deductions. Oh, no. From what I read, our head-bowing, knee-scraping president is going to redo the tax code. He wants to make it easier for us. (I get chills when the government says it wants to help us).

I have it first hand that his new tax code will fit right in with his Mother-of-all-Budgets. His new tax code? “Take 10 percent from your salary, bank it and send me the rest!”

Hey, don’t gripe. He could have said, “Send me everything!”