Staying Solvent

Writing checks might be a little old fashioned in these days of electronic transfers, but you still wouldn't expect it to be fatiguing. But when it's tax-time and the checks are going to The Government it seems the mental strain wears at you. Especially when you're sending off a little more money than what the winners' share was for winning the World Series in the late 1950s.

I don't care if it was over 50 years ago, I'm not supposed to be in a position where I'm sending The Government anything closely resembling what Mickey Mantle collected. I certainly don't feel the joy of winning the World Series. Yogi Berra has not rushed out from behind home plate and given me a bear hug.

But there I was last night, writing out four checks. Two each to the federal government, and two to the state government. Taxes for 2008, and estimated payments for 2009.

And four envelopes to mail the suckers. It seems the estimated money goes to a different post office box than the tax money for last year. I couldn't help thinking of an Ogden Nash poem I read that he wrote late in life (he passed away in 1971) that appeared in The New Yorker. I can't find the poem, or even know the title, but it is classic Nash: elongated lines that rhymed. The poem had to do with the IRS, and how after all they put us through they should at least "blow us to a stamp." Something like that.

So, there I am, sending off the winners' share of a 1950s World Series and have to use four stamps to do it.

But, at least I'm paying my taxes. Which of course makes me think of Frank Costello at his Senate confirmation hearing (Senator Kefauver was chairing a committee to confirm Frank was a gangster) who answered a question by telling the assembled: "I pay my taxes."

This of course was meant to separate him from Al Capone who was famously convicted of not paying his taxes and spent the rest of his life at Alcatraz.

Frank, therefore was like us: he paid his taxes. And how that's changed. Now the people who don't pay their taxes are at their own confirmation hearings being considered for something other than being inmates.

But really, four stamps?

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