Yahoo News The 2020 Tax
I haven’t paid my taxes yet. Way back at the start of the year, I promised myself I wouldn’t wait until the last second, but then this year became this year and everything turned upside down and the idea of spending even a microsecond with my finances from 2019—a year when I traveled on airplanes and went in buildings and ate in restaurants—felt like one thing too many in a year that’s already had enough. Plus, the IRS extended the deadline to July because of the pandemic, so it wasn’t like I was that late in April. And besides, how long could everything feel upside down? Come July, I filed for the extension to October which is now, in a blink, upon us.
Everything is still upside down.
Which is how it happened that I finally started my taxes at the very same moment that the New York Times released a series of reports alleging Donald Trump has basically paid no taxes for the last 15 years and paid just $750 the first year of his presidency. Seven-hundred-and-fifty dollars is an absurd amount for the president to pay, a number so tiny it seems to have been inserted simply for fuckery. It’s an insult, a razz, a bawdy joke for which we all are the punchline.
Except nobody’s laughing, because in 2020 we’ve already been taxed far in excess of anything the president will ever pay.
There’s the tax we’ve paid in American lives, more than 200,000 now, because of the president’s refusal to focus on the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer. But instead of doing anything to cut this tax, the president continues to play it down, telling rally goers just last week that the virus “affects virtually nobody.”
There’s the tax we’ve paid watching our jobs evaporate in the spring, the unemployment supplement disappear in the summer, and the absolute inability for Congress to get it together enough to send us another meager check to help make ends meet in the fall. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the bat-out-of-hell speed that Republicans in the Senate are moving to confirm her replacement shows that they can act quickly, but have chosen not to because, apparently, they give no fucks about us.
There’s the tax on black bodies, one that’s paid in lives lost at the hands of police and the virus, dual pandemics that wound around each other like snakes this year, making it impossible to see where the injustice of one stopped and the other began. It’s a centuries-old tax that’s never lifted in a nation that tells itself stories of dumping tea into the ocean.
There’s the tax our children will pay for years to come because no adults could put them first in dealing with the pandemic, shunting schools to the bottom of a list of reopenings that saw bars and crossfit gyms take precedence over our children’s future and safety. Of course, putting our kids last is familiar footing in this country. The fires that continue to rage in the West and the hurricanes lined up in the Atlantic are a reminder of just how much we’ve leveraged their futures.
The debts of all these taxes add up to the toll we all are paying now, as we see the entire year crumble away, lost in days that stretched into weeks and then into months. It’s a burden that gets heavier by the day. That weight you feel, dragging behind you every day as you try to make it through? That’s the tax of 2020, the final ledger of this godforsaken hell year, already delinquent and in collections, banging on your door to collect.
I’ll pay my taxes this year like I do every year, hamfingering my way through Turbo Tax, hoping their algorithms will find some magic deduction that never comes. I’ll pay whatever number pops on the screen, because that’s what you do as an American who likes roads and schools and pork to be checked for whatever pork is checked for. It will be a number significantly larger than the president paid and infinitely smaller than the toll extracted by all the other taxes of 2020.
Marvin Gaye once sang that there are only three things that are sure: taxes, death, and trouble. This year has already had too much of all three, and the threat of colder weather bringing increased virus cases in its final months may increase the amount due.
The president, of course, refuses to pay. Like his own tax burden, he’s never accepted responsibility for a single of 2020’s catastrophes. He's refused to pay a single tax, mourn a single life, issue a single apology. In its bombshell reporting on his taxes, the New York Times paints the picture of a man with a preternatural ability to outrun his debts. But with November 3rd just five weeks away, it may be finally time that Trump’s tax becomes due.
You Might Also Like
