Facebook is starting to tick me off

We all join Facebook for different reasons. For some, it's complete social networking -- 300+ friends, many of whom you hardly even know. For others it's to keep up with family, whether immediate or extended, and yet others are there just to be there.

I joined Facebook at the urging of my longest and dearest friend because there is an alumni page for the summer camp we went to, the place where we met. Once there, I primarily used it to keep up on what my kids were doing, since I'm old now and don't see them very often.

My experience has since evolved to include mostly some very old and dear friends, people I'd lost touch with long ago and always wished that I hadn't.

And now it's starting to piss me off.

This afternoon, a friend of a friend of mine became friends with an old, old girlfriend of mine. Now, since I'm not a friend, I can't read all the particulars of her life, but I was able to browse through her profile photos. It's unmistakable -- this was my old girlfriend, someone I stopped seeing 34 or so years ago, who I last saw when I bumped in to her in a bar in Brooklyn in 1979 or therabouts.

So why does this piss me off? She was *so* recognizable. The woman has not aged. I'd have been able to pick her out of a crowd in an instant. And this is not the first time!

I must begin with my spouse, whom I met when she was 18. Today? Hot. Hotter now than then. But she doesn't freakin' age!

I scrolled through my friends list, and my four oldest friends, all of them women, one is another ex-girlfriend -- friends of mine since puberty or before -- they all look like a million bucks! Any one of the four of them could be walking on Main Street USA at Disneyworld amidst a thousand tourists, and I'd recognize them now, because they are just as they were back then. Damn you all!

When I was 15, I always liked the fact that I looked older. The drinking age was 18 back then, but I would never be asked for ID. When I turned 39 I didn't share this enthusiasm, as some coworkers assumed that I had turned the Big FIVE-OH! (I began coloring my hair the next day) Now that I'm 50, okay I've aged! But why isn't everyone else keeping up?!!

My friends, ALL the same age -- look young, sexy and vibrant.

I look like I'm about 100 with one foot in the grave. I'm sure if I had a photo taken with any of these friends, somone looking at it would say "Oh, is that your father?"

Bravo to all my old friends.

As for me, I recall the line from Indiana Jones: "It's not the age, it's the mileage."

Liberal Lies - Calling them out

A low-income client of mine asked me to compute her estimated tax payment for January 15th.

You see, some years back she had inherited some stock, and in 2009 the company was acquired and created what was essentially a forced sale of that stock. She wanted to make sure she had her taxes paid.

I spent a couple of hours computing the holding period and the amount of forced gain, then punched it in to the tax software and came up with the astounding realization that the transaction would not be taxed!

Wow!

I then went back and verified what I had once known, but had forgotten about since I have so few "low income" clients. And that is this:

Under the Bush tax cuts, low income people pay ZERO tax on long-term capital gains for 2008 to 2010. Zero, zip, nada.

I then informed this client that even though this was a forced sale, she should be happy it happened in 2009. Why? Because the Bush tax cuts will expire after this year. If this same transaction were to take place next year in 2011 -- her tax bill would be $6,980!

This applies for low income people only, and has nothing to do with middle or upper income taxpayers.

Read this again: When the Bush tax cuts expire, this low income taxpayer would have paid nearly $7,000 in extra tax.

Now -- How many times have we been told that the Bush tax cuts only benefit "the wealthy?" Hundreds? Thousands?

I can't tell you how often I tried to explain to people that this was total bullshit -- all taxpayers benefited from the Bush tax cuts and that in fact lower income people made out the best. But no, we never heard that. All we've heard for the last 8 years was that the Bush tax cuts were for the wealthy.

Well, I'll tell you what -- when the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire, there are going to be a lot of pissed off people, and the economy will slow yet again. That's fact.

Let the liberal lying continue.