Government Joke

HOW TO SAVE MONEY ON YOUR TAXES

There are thousands of ways to reduce your federal income tax liability. Most of them are illegal. We don't guarantee the following suggestions will work, or won't end up having you sent to prison for 162 years:

AVOID MAKING TOO MUCH MONEY: The income tax code still penalizes success. The more money you make, the bigger the bite IRS takes. There is a point each year where you will have to say "no more income" and tell your boss you will work for free. Actually your choice is working for the federal government, or for your boss for free. What a choice!

ELIMINATE YOUR INCOME: The easiest way to reduce your tax burden is to reduce your income. Quit your job. Sell your business. Declare bankruptcy. As a long-term solution, though, this method has its downsides.

LOSE MONEY: In theory you can lose as much money as you make, so long as the making is real dollars and the losing is paper money. Big corporations do this somehow. MyHumor.org needs investors.

DEPRECIATION: Depreciation is a real scam. Everything you own decreases in value over time. Businesses get to deduct depreciation as a real expense, but people don't. Lobby for personal depreciation, the older we get, the lower our tax percentage.

DEPENDENTS: If you believe animals have the same rights as people, take your dog as a deduction. Getting your dog a Social Security number, however, will be difficult.

AVOID BEING SELF-EMPLOYED: Before the advent of income taxes, being in business for yourself as a doctor, lawyer, blacksmith, or whatever were noble professions. You didn't work for "yourself", you offered your services to mostly happy customers. But the federal government doesn't get payroll deductions from traditional small businesses, so they have created the disparaging term "self-employed". When you try and get a loan, just write down "self-employed" on the line for employment, and watch your borrowing capacity vanish. "Self-employed" is translated as "audit the rascal" in IRS lingo.

INCORPORATE YOURSELF: Corporations get lots of breaks you don't as a human being. For instance, corporations get to write off health insurance costs as a business expenses, but self-employed people get screwed. If you can't figure out what it is you as a corporation would do, don't worry. Many of the top corporations can't either.

KEEP YOUR BOOKS IN PESOS: Instead of using US currency as the basis for your business, use pesos. No one knows what a peso is worth or which countries are currently using them. The only sure thing is that it will be worth less tomorrow than yesterday.

Government Joke

A man walks into the market followed by his 10-year-old son. The kid is holding a quarter between his lips. As they walk through the market, someone bumps into the boy and the coin goes straight into his mouth and lodges in his throat. The boy immediately starts choking and going blue in the face, and the dad starts panicking, shouting and screaming for help.

A middle-aged, fairly unnoticeable man in a gray suit is sitting at a coffee bar in the market reading his newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee.

At the sound of the commotion, he looks up, puts his coffee cup down on the saucer, neatly folds his newspaper, and places it on the counter. He gets up from his seat and makes his unhurried way across the market. Reaching the boy (who is still standing, but only just) the man carefully takes hold of the kid and squeezes him very firmly. After a few seconds, the boy convulses violently and coughs up the quarter, which the man catches in his free hand.

Releasing the boy, the man hands the coin to the father and walks back to his seat in the coffee bar without saying a word.

As soon as he is sure that his son has suffered no lasting ill effects, the father rushes over to the man and starts effusively thanking him.

The man looks embarrassed and brushes off the father's thanks. As he is about to leave, the father asks one last question:

"I've never seen anybody do anything like that before - it was fantastic! What are you, a surgeon or something like that?"

"Oh, good heavens, no" the man replies "I work for the IRS."