I wanna withhold your hand, hand hand...

President Hussein, God bless him, wants to be seen to be doing the common drone a solid, and so, he has come up with a feel-good plan that all of us wage-slaves can actually see. So during this past Tuesday's State of the Regime address he displayed uncustomary grace and bi-partisanship, and allowed that we would all see more money in our take-home pay starting the week of April 1st.

April 1st, historically, is associated with the day that someone tries to pull the wool over your eyes. It is universally known in fact as "April Fools' Day".

And with good reason.

Y'see, here's what he said... Effective that week he would lower the withholding of payrolls so that you would see an extra on-average $13.00 per check.

Here's what he didn't say. The tax table is not being changed.

Uhm....

What does this mean? I'll tell you. It means that if you, like myself and many other former proud Americans, like having a decent tax return at the end of the year, you can forget about that. They'll do what they do best, and give you a trickle during the year instead of a lump sum at the end of the year. So in effect, you'll likely owe money, or at the very least not get as much money back, next year.

Ohhhhh... you probably think I'm just parroting what was on Rush Limbaugh today, don't you? And you'd have good reason to do so, for while I have had this in the back of my mind, it was the caller calling in today who jogged me to double-check. I called the IRS to confimr my suspicions. After being hot-potato'd around for a while they finally coughed up an answer... indeed that is correct.

Now, how can I claim to have come up with this all by my lonesome? Simple. You know how President Hussein has been comparing himself to all manner of former presidents? Well in that speech he evoked one that I think most people would not have made the association with, George Herbert Walker Bush.

Yup, somewhere in the early 1990s G.H.W. Bush did the exact same thing. I listened to his state of the Union address and went into work the next morning and told my boss under no circumstance would I authorize any change to my withholdings. He said I was an idiot and paranoid (it's okay, my wife says the same thing about me.... I'm used to it...) but he agreed and did not change my withholdings.

The next April my co-workers were all bitching becuase they owed taxes, and I reminded them with a not-terribly popular "I told you so". I'd already received my decent refund by that point.

Politics indeed makes for strange bedfellows... Hussein and Bush the elder... who'd have thunk it?

Now to be honest, in the end this is all kind of a shuffling game. I'm not the kind of person who sits by my second-story window and pokes his head out and screams "IT'S MY MONEY AND I WANT IT NOW!!!!". I'm the kind of person who wants to control that money. By leaving it in the hands of the government until the end of the year I let them play with it and get it all gooey from candy-hands, and then they make more money off of it, and then give it to me after they've gotten it all sticky and wadded up. But at least then I get a real amount and I can have the satisfaction of having the Government do me a legitimate solid, instead of a $13.00/week soul-sapping driplet.

You do as you see fit, but for me, not having to give my government anymore money at the end of the year is the name of the game. They have enough, thank you very much, and if they don't they can just bloody well stop spending it.

I'm Dr. Calamity and I approve of this message.