Taxes

University of Texas Accounting students in Austin are helping out underprivileged area residents with their taxes. Students in the Accounting Practicum class work with the Community Tax Centers for a semester to help some of Austin's most vulnerable with the complicated process of figuring out their taxes.

Students will become IRS-certified through the class and also learn some important practical skills by working directly with members of their local community. This is a great deal for the students...but it's even sweeter for those who get the help. The IRS says that $31 million in tax refunds were unclaimed just last year...

This is a pretty amazing opportunity for everyone involved. I'm super excited to see UT Austin doing things like this...and wouldn't it be great if we could see this sort of education applied across the board, in other subjects and levels? I think I'd be enjoying High School Algebra more if I had the chance to use some of what I learned in real world situations.

I thought this would be a great story to share. In many states, standardized testing and teaching for the test have become synonymous with public (High School) education...But programs like this one on the college level are inspirational and I hope more educators and legislators will recognize the value of practical education and what damage 'teaching to the test' can do.

The Daily Texan (campus newspaper for the University of Texas at Austin) had a great quote about taxes from a Marketing Junior in the class named John Poynor. He said his experiences in the course reaffirmed his appreciation for his country: “As much as we dislike paying taxes, it is a small price to pay to enjoy the freedoms we receive in return.” You don't get that kind of realization in most Accounting classes. This experience, in which students have the chance to actually get out and work with real people, makes a world of difference.

Here's a video featuring the students.

While some in our country want to curse taxes they have to pay many are thanking their lucky stars for those returns they'll get back in a few weeks.

The Republican Party has taken this day to protest taxes, and often times you hear the GOP pontificate about how unnecessary they are.

But on this day, I invite you all to participate in a different kind of event than the Tea Parties across the country. Instead I invite you to think about what things in your life, paid for by tax dollars, that you are grateful for. In the video above, many young people express why taxes are meaningful to them, or why they pay even if they don't believe in what its going to.

For me it was a first - I had to pay. Not because I made a lot of money, but because I am self-employed. While I have to say it hurts, I know I'm paying for my country. I'm paying for students who can't afford to go to college so they might have a chance, I'm paying for free lunches, I'm paying for my dad's salary, for the health care of the 9-11 Firefighters who breathed the toxic air on that awful day. I'm proud to pay taxes because its the right thing to do.

If you're on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, or any other social network - think about updating your status telling others what you pay for. And tag it with #teaparty.

For example: I pay so even Tom Delay can get a fair trial #teaparty.

Just wanted to make a little post about the upcoming nationwide "Tea Party Movements" tomorrow.

My journalism adviser is bringing me and a few other students to cover the protests and speakers in town, so I hope to offer some firsthand insight, photos, and possibly video on Thursday. Should be rather amusing, to say the least.

For now I'll give you guys some links:

• Official Tax Day Teaparty Website
• New American Tea Party Website

Recent right-leaning editorials have picked up a new theme that may surprise you--their great concern for future generations and how today's policies will affect them. Check out this quote from the Rome Sentinel (Feb 9) in reference to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan:

"It is not too late to stop the ill-designed bill in Congress that, financed as debt, is more a generational theft act than a stimulus bill. Larded up as it is, the "stimulus" bill is still a "porkulous" bill even after the so-called concessions to moderates.

"The bill, more than 1,000 pages long, is a perverse form of thrusting unnecessary debt on our children.

"Congressman Michael Arcuri and Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand cannot escape responsibility for what will become known as The Generational Theft Act of 2009."

Did the GOP call it generational theft when they sent young Americans to fight and die in Iraq under false pretenses? What about when the national debt nearly doubled in the last 8 years? They certainly didn't call it generational theft when they opposed higher environmental standards to ensure a healthy earth for future generations.

Is the GOP aware that this bill aims to help "our children" by investing in them?

A 2007 Tax Foundation report by Chamberlain and Prante found that "[o]ver a lifetime, government spending follows a U-shaped pattern with large education and welfare spending in youth [aged 25 and under] and large Social Security and Medicare payments in old age."

I think it's reasonable, as a tax-paying adult between the ages of 26 and 54, to assume the "burden" of repaying an older generation for being your fiscal steward in addition to providing more and more opportunities for future generations to become the most wise, peaceful, and equal generation of its time. This type of behavior is ideally seen at the national-level and at the family-level.

Millennials will face new challenges when caring for the Baby Boomer generation as they near towards retirement. What they don't need are unnecessary financial burdens that make it difficult for them to succeed early on in their adult lives. Young people are already saddled with a "burden", and the GOP needs to recognize and respect that reality.

Imagine for a moment that you are trying to traverse a hill. The hill represents how much taxes you expect to pay over your lifetime. One end of the hill is the start (the beginning of your life), the top of the hill is middle-age, and the other end of the hill is, well, six-feet-under. At both ends of the hill, you pay relatively little in taxes, and the top of the hill is when you pay the most in taxes. This is what tax-paying looks like throughout the course of one's life. For some generations, traversing this hill was made easier (but not faster), because the government helped invest in the well-being of the tax-payer very early on in life.

This is not the case with Millennials. The rising cost (PDF) of college and beyond has not resulted in a proportionate increase in services or resources. When you place this fact of rising costs into the context of rising college attendance, the effect is magnified. The share of young people that have attended college has increased 21 percentage points from the 1970s to the present (PDF, pg. 5). What's more is the fact young people with post-graduate degrees on are on the rise, too. What all this amounts to is a more difficult (but not slower) journey over the hill. It's almost as if Millennials have to carry a heavy backpack (read: student debt) and still keep pace with everyone else. Now add to that the fact that the end of the hill for Millennials is much farther away than it is for previous generations due to longer life expectancy.

That's why the higher education provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan are so important, allowing for students to access money from the government at a more reasonable rate than private firms offer; increased work study money means that already busy students who need money can earn it while gaining valuable skills in a student-friendly work environment. The bottom line is that the stimulus plan lightens the backpack of debt that young people are carrying very early on in life, so that their fiscal stewardship can be just as good as previous generations.