It’s that time of year again…

…certain whaling captains may be eligible to deduct expenses for paid in 2005 for Native Alaskan subsistence bowhead whale hunting activities.

…if you drove to and from volunteer work, you can take the actual cost of oil and gas or 14 cents a mile. But… related to Hurricane Katrina after August 24, 2005, this amount is increased to 29 cents a mile (34 cents a mile after August 31, 2005).

And time for FairTax, too…

The FairTax is a non-partisan proposal (HR 25/S 1493) that abolishes all federal income taxes, including personal, estate, gift, capital gains, alternative minimum, corporate, Social Security, other payroll, and self-employment taxes, and replaces them all with one simple, visible, federal retail sales tax. The FairTax dramatically changes the basis for taxation by eliminating the root of the problem: Taxing income. The FairTax taxes us only on what we choose to spend, not on what we earn. It does not raise any more or less revenue; it is designed to be revenue neutral. The FairTax is a fair, efficient, and intelligent solution to the frustration and inequity of our current tax system.

FairTax FAQs are well worth checking out. Then call your representatives!

Funny that I should run all of this together in one post, but such is life these days.

First, I’ve been meaning to blog something for the last couple of days. I’ve got plenty of things to post, but the one idea that keeps screaming at me is that there’s nothing like a heavy dose of wedding planning to screw up what used to be a perfectly good blogging practice.

Then this showed up in today’s Daily Reckoning email…

…imagine a typical householder. We saw him just the other day, courtesy of a Fed study. He has a house, but he has almost no money. He has no pension, no stocks, no bonds, and no savings. Nada. Zilch. His real hourly earnings are either flat for the last several years, or actually going down, depending on whose numbers you believe. He can barely pay his mortgage. He cannot seem to pay off his credit cards. When the week’s bills are paid, he has less money left over to spend as he pleases - according to Elizabeth Warren’s calculations - than he did during the Carter administration.

Now imagine that his house suddenly doubles in value. Is he really better off? What can he do but borrow against the inflated value of the house. When he borrows, the air holes grow smaller. He’ll have an even harder time paying his bills. He can barely breathe as it is. Being a fatter cat makes him feel good about himself, but it doesn’t really help.

Somehow it’s all about Money and Illusions, except the wedding is actually shaping up pretty nicely. Think Appreciative Prairie-style Catholic Buddhist Open Space Hippie Solstice Drum Circle and if that doesn’t really mess you up, you might just have some sense of what is actually goin’ down this June.

We’re supposed to be in a booming economy, but an awful lot of folks seem to be getting left behind…

The median family has about $3,800 in the bank, do not have a retirement account, has a home worth $160,000 with a mortgage of $95,000. No mutual funds, stocks or bonds populate their investment portfolios. They make (jointly) $43,000 and struggle to pay off their $2,200 in credit card debt. That means 50% of Americans are in worse shape than the above. And… 67% of the people aged 50-64 saved less than $10,000 last year. Over 40% saved less than $1,000. –Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances, via John Mauldin

And left in the dark — by government stats on inflation, GDP and debt biased upward over the last 40 years. If the CPI was still calculated the way it was when Jimmy Carter took office, Social Security payments would be 70% higher that they are now.

Add spiraling healthcare costs and you get a really ugly retirement picture. Clearly something’s gotta give. Maybe a lot of us are going to have to give a lot more attention to health, personal resourcefulness, income — and community approaches to basic human needs.