Can You Guess What Time It Is?

TAX TIME!!!

     I'm not one of the lucky ones to get a big refund but, I am one of the lucky ones that now has a job.  I will be preparing taxes for Jackson Hewitt Tax Service again this year.  There are a lot of changes this year and I have been studying my butt off.  This is the perfect time to share some tax trivia.

     Alabama has a 10 cent tax on a deck of playing cards.  The "jock tax" is levied on athletes who earn an income competing in a particular city or state.  California first levied this tax on athletes from Chicago in 1991, after the Chicago Bulls beat the LA Lakers in the 1991 NBA Finals.  Talk about sore losers.  Fountain soda drinks in Chicago are taxed at 9%.  If it comes in a bottle or can, then it's only taxed  3%.  Peter the Great taxed beards.  There was also a tax on souls, hats, boots, beehives, basements, chimneys, food, clothing, birth, marriage, and burial, to mention a few.  In the UK everyone under the age of 75 pays a TV license fee, about $127, for color TVs and $42 for black and whites.  If you are legally blind, you pay half. (helps pay for state run networks like the BBC)  The first income tax ever was in England, 1404.  The first property tax in the US was for land, houses and slaves, 1798.  The first US income tax started during the Civil War, 1862, to help raise money needed.  The 16th Amendment, ratified in 1913, established the first permanent US income tax.  There are over 7 million words in the tax law and regulations.  That beats the Gettysburg address, the Declaration of Independence, and the Holy Bible all rolled into one.  (269+1,337+773k)  The easiest form, 1040EZ, has thirty-three pages of instructions.  21% of paper returns have errors while e-file returns have only 0.5%.  In 2003, 78% of returns received refunds, totaling 205 billion, an average of $2073 per return.  The first e-file (electronic transmission of a tax return) occurred on January 24, 1986.

I would like to take credit for these interesting facts, but I can't.  The owner of the Jackson Hewitt franchise I work for, Mr. Carl Kelley, shared these tid bits with his employees.