1. My Ferrari can't be serviced for over two weeks 2. Business class ran out of champagne 3. The A/C broke down in my limo from the airport Life is a disaster
Just having a laugh mate I was biatching today when I was fitting the racing seat to the 355 and I suddenly realised life is funny, that I WAS whinging about fitting the seat
1. That poor car 2. What kind of poof drinks champagne? 3. Wind down the window you lazy bastard! Problems sorted.
Judging by the way you drive, you should call it the uncomfortable seat, rather than the racing seat.
I had an interesting experience today, that helps to explain why the USA has a massive govt debt problem. The collar of my blazer came apart yesterday, bloody Italian rubbish, it was only 15 years old and I've worn it constantly. So today I went to Nordstrom and bought another one, asking the shop assistant to throw the old one out for me. "Don't do that", she said, "take it to the Salvation Army and they'll give you a tax deduction voucher for $500". I said, you can't be serious, it's falling apart. But I was intrigued, so walked the 3 blocks to the Salvo centre and presented my jacket at the counter, making sure I pointed out the wear on it. Sure enough, she looked up the new value, then wrote me out a $500 voucher, which I'll give to one of my staff here, as I'm not a US tax payer. The average professional person here pays around 40% tax. So the US Govt in effect just paid $200 for my piece-of-junk jacket. In any other country, you donate clothing, here the government pays you to do it. Another big win for the left
Win for the left? Seems like another great tax scam for the rich from where I'm sitting. Wonder if DT has a dedicated staff member to trade in his used jackets? iRS tables for 2016 tell me a single person with a taxable income of $91,150 would pay just over $18,558 (20.35%) federal taxes.
*shakes head* The charity I'm involved with in Aus has a chain of Op Shops. We take donated clothes and resell them, what we can't sell gets packaged up as rags and sold to China. The profits from all of this are part of our income. We struggle to make 10% profit, even with volunteer labour. We have to rent a warehouse, shops, pay insurances, etc, etc. I'm guessing that at some point in the past, such charities in California (don't know if this thing applies in all states) suffered from a lack of supply, so they lobbied the govt to provide an incentive for donations, the argument would have been "you give a 100% deduction for money, you should give a 25% deduction for used clothes". The immense stupidity of this is that the 10% margin the charity makes is less than the cost to the taxpayer. The US govt would be better off simply giving cash to the Salvos. Centre-left govts everywhere implement ideas like this, with good intentions of course, but it's almost always a bad value outcome for the taxpayer and, because of the ever-ready-for-a-sensation media, nobody would be brave enough to try and shut it down.
Surely this cannot be true? I'm sitting on a fortune in my wardrobe. My old clothes go to my rag bin for use on the cars. If not suitable, they go to the Blind Society. I should put some of my old clothes on eBay and post to California.
Interesting hypothesis, but do you even know which government implemented this cockamamie idea? As you say, little benefit to the charity, big benefit to some non-needy folk. I was a volunteer for Lifeline shop and best earner was in fact 100% cotton rags; teams of ladies would cut off all buttons, zips, seams from discarded clothes etc to make soft cotton rag which were sold by the bag to tradies.
Interesting reading here https://www.irs.gov/publications/p526/ar02.html#en_US_2015_publink1000229745
Yep, just like our tax code, it's a catalogue of nonsense piled on nonsense over many years. Not a right wing conspiracy, just the end result of generations of politicians and bureaucrats thinking that more regulations will make the world better. I've just been staying in an apartment in the Mission district of SF. Must be thousands of black men living on the streets, in filth and squalor. This is what they get, generations after President Johnson's "great society" in 1964. But "minority" america still votes democrat...
Your experience with the jacket doesn't gel with anything in the IRS code (where you can only claim FMV, which they seem to assess based on Goodwill's listed prices; unless the value is over $500 and it's independently appraised); is this some local or state initiative you've stumbled into? Hard to pin anything on a particular party in the U.S. when the leadership, congress, and senate are so rarely aligned. Maybe that explains more about the disfunction than any ideological triumph by either side?
