Hah! This is a happy post. I finished my initial tax preparations over at Turbotax last week and groused for discovering I didn’t have “enough” medical/dental expenses to exceed the standard deductions AND wound up owing “Uncle” Sam money on top of it. I decided to hold on filing so I could budget the payment, set it aside, and tried to forget about it.
In today’s mail, I received a straggling 1098-T (tuition payment) and sighed for wondering what this would do to my return. Got home from the morning errands and decided to grit my teeth and see to adding it.
Imagine my surprise to find that there are several credits for people attending or returning to school! Not only this, instead of owing roughly $400, I am now expecting a refund of almost $2,000!
Part of me yet grouses for the notion of income taxation at all (Don’t get me started on the legal definition of ‘income’ and how your renumeration for working is NOT part of that definition. Since I’ve given up politics and the apparently idealistic notion that legal definitions shouldn’t be abused by our government (or its non-accountable agents aka the Internal Revenue Service) and the idea that I can enact the Sisyphisian effort to push this little pebble of fact up the stupendously enormous mountain of conditioned culture and past the jaws of an all-too-predatory agency and government). But the other part, the part that prefers a life of something other than a fight every day, all day long, every time I turn around, for the rest of my life, it is happy for seeing that there are at least SOME concessions in the system (even if they only serve to keep people like me, who would otherwise have no motivation whatever NOT to take up the fight, from doing so).
Ultimately, it seems I am saved by schooling. An unexpected and rather nice surprise.