Subject: Retirement and Taxes Comment: Fellow Citizens, As a father of a child with Down's Syndrome, I am concerned about providing for his long-term care. The current taxation system makes it difficult to do that as the following scenario may demonstrate: Having owned a business for six years, I will not forget the year that my taxable income was zero but my Social Security tax was thousands of dollars. If I had operated my business with sufficient debt writeoffs, I would not have had to pay any Social Securdity taxes. Having operated without borrowing, I paid a much higher tax. The moral, to me, was that the Government code encouraged being a debtor rather than a saver. Secondly, to pay that debt for the Social Security taxes, I had to borrow money, paying interest, to meet the Social Security tax debt. So, again, the moral? I had to borrow money in order to pay into my Social Security retirement so that I could get my money back. That struck me as absurd. It seems to me, if I ran an investment company using the Social Security operating principles, I would be charged with carrying out a Ponzi scheme. If I had been able to invest the Social Security taxes in a total stock market index fund, like Federal employees and Congressman may, I would have been able to gain an average return of 10%. This could have benefitted my handicapped son to a great degree and would have lessened the chances of someone else paying higher taxes to support him when I am gone from this earth. My research shows the total stock market has averaged 10% for over 200 years if you consider 25 year rolling periods--and, that includes the Great Depression years. I.e., buy and hold is the way to overcome the down years of the market. To me, rather, by contrast, the whole tax system encourages a welfare-type dependency on the Government. So, my coping actions have been to reduce the amount of income I earn so to come in close to the 10$ taxation category. Hopefully, that will work out even though the argument can be made that I should pursue a higher paying job or a different profession than teaching. I still spend close to 100 hours using tax software to get the taxes done correctly. I teach high school mathematics and have a Master's degree--so it puzzles me regarding the amount of time I spend. Is it possible this time waste is the result of difficulty in interpretations of tax code explanations? Thank you for the opportunity to voice one citizen's opinion. It is my prayer that we will encourage local community organizations to care for the needy amongst in order to reduce the bureaucracy that manages the assistance for the least among us. Paul Stewart Antelope, California |