Last Comments on Las Vegas, and a New Rant

As you've no doubt figured out by now, we enjoyed our little vacation in Las Vegas. Just to finish off the commentary on the topic, here are a few more observations...

1. I'll never get used to the sight of men and women lining the sidewalks snapping decks of advertising cards to get your attention. The cards advertise "Girls Who Want to Meet You!", and can be at your room in 20 minutes. I'm not sure I'd want to meet any of them. Related to the card-snappers are the trucks which cruise up and down the Strip with the same message on their sides and back.

2. Don't gamble, and if you do gamble, don't do it on the slot machines. We were told by our Hoover Dam tour guide that the slot machines have a 78% profit return to the house. Yes, that was 78%. You can see slot-zombies all day and all night long just feeding bills into the machines and pushing the buttons like hamsters pushing the bar for a treat.

And finally,

3. If the airline boarding pass you receive at check-in has the letters SSSS printed on it, think of everything that can possibly cause you grief at the security checkpoint, because you have been "randomly" selected for extra screening. We had to do some fast talking to get the unsmiling TSA security drones to believe that Agnes's bookweight was not a blackjack, but a legitimate reader's tool.

Okay, enough about Vegas. I have a stack of things a foot high to blog about, and here's the first one...

Those of you who are my overseas blogging friends may never have heard of the Alternative Minimum Tax, or AMT, but it's one of the less-endearing features of our archaic, bloated, and incomprehensible tax laws. The AMT was introduced by the Tax Reform Act of 1969, and was intended to target high-income households that had been eligible for so many tax benefits that they owed little or no income tax under the existing tax code. The original, perhaps laudable, intent of the AMT was to ensure that high-income people who could claim large numbers of exotic itemized deductions were forced to pay a fair share of taxes. However, because the AMT is not indexed to inflation, more and more middle-income taxpayers find themselves subject to this tax each year. Most people never realize it until they, their tax preparer, or the IRS discover it when the tax return is prepared and they learn that their tax liability is as much as several thousand dollars more than they expected.

The AMT is on my mind because each year inflation pushes the tax value of my income higher, to the point where, on paper, people like Agnes and I now earn as much as the high-income taxpayers who were targeted by the AMT in 1969. If Congress doesn't act soon to index the AMT to inflation, or to factor into it the tax cuts instituted over the years, we stand to get hit with a very large tax bill at a very bad time. And we all know how quickly Congress moves to do anything important, especially when it's concerned with things like Iraq, the California wildfires, and Idaho Congressman Larry Craig's wide stance in airport restrooms.

As I've said here before, I don't mind paying taxes. What I mean, though, is that I don't mind paying taxes that are fair, reasonable, equitably-shared, and appropriately spent by my government. Unfortunately, in the case of the AMT, the first three don't apply and the fourth is a joke.

I'd write more, but the subject is just too ... uh ... taxing. I think I'll do something more fun than thinking about taxes. Maybe my dentist has an open appointment today for a root canal without anesthetic.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo