I often feel a little bit peeved around this time of year. You know how it is: There you are enjoying the arrival of April, with the lovely weather and the flowering trees and the feeling that the year has finally got going, and then along comes the Internal Revenue Service and demands that you write it a large check. “Gosh,” you’re halfway through remarking, “look at that charming family of ducks waddling through the grass,” and then BANG! — all of a sudden, you’re out a whole bunch of cash that you’d really rather have spent on your family.
Yes, yes, I know that old saw about taxes being the price we pay for civilization, but I’ve often wondered a little about the definitions that are being used, and, if I’m being perfectly honest, I’ve started to suspect that I’d be okay if we had a touch less civilization if this is what the bill looks like. This year, though, I feel unusually great about paying my taxes, and for that I have to thank a 49-year-old American named Joel Lambdin, who, thanks to President Biden’s remarkable generosity with other people’s money, was recently given $250,000 from the Treasury as a reward for being a financially illiterate dilettante. As Business Insider reports, Lambdin left graduate school in 1998, but, since then, he has chosen to make almost no money. “The only way he could make a significant dent in his student loans,” Business Insider notes, “was by switching careers.” Lambdin “didn’t want to do that because he loved working in music.” So he didn’t.
Comments