{"id":47,"date":"2004-04-14T10:13:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-14T10:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=47"},"modified":"2025-04-25T01:48:35","modified_gmt":"2025-04-25T01:48:35","slug":"a-modest-proposal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=47","title":{"rendered":"A Modest Proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was thinking about what and commented about why the government withholds our earnings to pay taxes for us.<\/p>\n

said
\n“I think the IRS started withholding because people would not be able to pay their taxes if they just got a bill at the end of the year.”<\/p>\n

said
\n“It’s something about our “gotta-have-it-now” American consumer mentality. If we don’t have our taxes systematically deducted from our paychecks, we’d blow all of that money on frivolous things during the year (NOT living Foolishly!) Also, we like the idea of getting a big check back at the end of the year because it’s like Christmas in April. I know it’s wrong, but that’s just the way we’re programed in this society.”<\/p>\n

I agree with both of them, of course.<\/p>\n

But what if there were a middle ground?<\/p>\n

What if we set up the equivalent of a mandatory 401(k) or IRA for taxes? Every paycheck, the amount they usually withhold for taxes would be put into a tax-deferred account that we couldn’t withdraw from, but we could earn interest on, or perhaps even invest in stocks, bonds, etc? The stocks and bonds would probably be a bad idea since the time horizon is so short (1 year at most). But at least money market or CD interest could be garnered.<\/p>\n

At tax time, the money gets transferred to the IRS, and then it works like normal. If you’ve got too much, you get some back. Too little, write a check.<\/p>\n

Bingo. No shopping sprees that leave you hanging around tax time, but no zero-interest loans to the gov’t.<\/p>\n

I’m giving Kerry a call right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was thinking about what and commented about why the government withholds our earnings to pay taxes for us. said “I think the IRS started withholding because people would not be able to pay their taxes if they just got … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[529,475],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-the-world-at-large"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3702,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/3702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}