Birth and Taxes

The worthwhile cost of making money and children

The following piece is one in a series of letters to my prospective granddaughter.

February 10, 2025

Dear Baby,

It’s tax season. In the early weeks of the new year, a steady stream of paper finds its way into our mailbox: W-2 forms. 1098 forms. 1099 forms. A few others (stray documents from your aunt and uncles also find their way here). I clip them together and put them aside until my annual visit to my accountant, whereupon I hear about the baseball exploits of his son, as I have since he was a toddler (now he’s in college). Coloring book renditions of superheroes paper his office wall.

I’ve always kind of liked paying my taxes—I’ve regarded them as a patriotic duty. I’m an institutionalist at heart and believe in the value of government. Actually, I also made a point of withholding more from your grandmother and my paychecks than we needed to, though this was not a matter of patriotism but rather a forced savings plan, because we then got big tax refunds that we used to help pay school tuitions (kinda dumb, because it amounted to an interest-free loan to the government). But I stopped doing that at some point when wrangling over the federal budget led Congress into repeated threats and realities of temporary government shutdowns. My fear was that this gamesmanship would result in those refunds getting delayed or lost. I regarded it as a calcification of our nation’s political arteries.

These days I fear we’re getting to a point where paying taxes is increasingly regarded as a fool’s game, not because people are losing their virtue—avoiding taxes is human perennial behavior—but because that deterioration in the machinery of government is getting worse. We have a president who regards taxpayers as suckers, and who himself has paid little to no taxes for years at a time. I don’t know how fast the decline will proceed, but I do find myself worrying about the world in which you will be coming of age. This won’t be the last time you hear me say that.

Anyway, last night was the Super Bowl, the closest thing we still have to a national holiday. I was home as I usually am these days, failing to exercise enough energy or social skills to attend a Super Bowl party. This year’s game, between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, was a bust (Philadelphia jumped out to an early lead and won in a rout, 40-22). I skipped the halftime show—it featured Kendrick Lamar, outside my demographic and yours—and instead used the time to figure out what kinds of books, travel, and subscription deductions I could legitimately claim to chip down my minor, but in 2024 surprisingly substantial, writing income. Turning words into money has always been one of the great satisfactions of my life. And so has producing four taxpaying citizens, one of whom is your father. May you soon enter their ranks and experience its satisfactions.