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Show 1 1 Park Record Thursday, April 13, 1989 Page All Aimdl Sod Hit fl3nxe ooo A taxing situation BY TOM CLYDE I spent the past weekend doing my income taxes. I always do them myself. The excuse I give for doing my own instead of hiring an accountant is that I believe it is one of those obligations of citizenship to fill in our own tax forms. If you do your own, you have to work with the tax forms long enough to realize what a mess we have. I firmly believe that anything as universal as taxes ought to be universally comprehensible. They are not, but they ought to be. Doing your own taxes also helps maintain a healthy disrespect for Congressmen. Con-gressmen. All through the year, I get these false expectations expecta-tions that the federal government will do something substantive on some problem. Then April comes and I am reminded that it is useless to hope for meaningful leadership on anything to come from Congress. The organization that created (and recently "reformed") the income tax cannot be expected to solve anything. It's a wonder they can dress themselves. The best we can hope for is that they do no further harm. I favor longer paid vacations for Congressmen. It's a bargain in the long run. Of course the real reason I do my own income taxes is that I keep my financial records about the same way I keep house. Sometimes the snow blower, rather than the vacuum, seems like the appropriate tool for cleaning. I've got all the receipts but they are scattered from the glove box of the car to the freezer. They get closed in magazines, or used for bookmarks. One of the records I needed was folded into a little wad that leveled a table leg. I know exactly where it was. Another one has a grocery list on the back of it. That's not the kind of thing you can reasonably dump on the desk of an accountant on April 14. The maddening thing is that you can't complete any one form without having completed all the others. And they don't make any sense. After several hours, with the sun pouring in the window and the couch calling, the instructions got kind of strange: "Take the amount on line 24 of Schedule J of Form 4567, and divide it by the square root of the barometric pressure on the day you received the income. If the result is less than the current temperature out there on the deck, go get another cookie." If the amount turns out to be greater than zero, try to remember that day back in December when you tossed a couple of bills in the Salvation Army pot. Could those have been $100's instead of $10? Yeah, they were probably $100's alright, and there must have been at least six or eight of them. How does that affect the bottom line on Schedule Q? There are all kinds of credits available in filling out the forms, but I never seem to qualify. All of those credits are designed to encourage or discourage certain behavior on the part of taxpayers. tax-payers. They are bribes in reverse, the kind of, ldgic one could expect from Congress. Mostly, they encouragelyuipXhey could use credits to Influence In-fluence other behavior. Maybe there should be a credit of a few bucks for being a registered voter, and even a little more if you actually voted. There probably ought to be a credit for those brave few who have actually tried to understand the Central American situation. At the very least, their subscription to "The New Republic" ought to be deductible. - Some of the forms have loaded questions right at the top, before they even get to the numbers. One asked if I was claiming deductions for an office of-fice in my home. I have an office in my home, but I was not about to check a box that asked "Do you expect us to believe any of this crap about an office of-fice in your home? Check here if you want your return audited by a ninja accountant from hell." There was another one that had a box to check if you have an investment in something that is required re-quired to maintain a "tax shelter number." That means "Check here if you are committing major fraud." Fortunately, my money is all tied up in canned goods, so I don't have to worry about that one. The form with the grocery list on the back gave me an idea. The government wants to know an awful lot about how we all make our money, but when it comes to asking how we want it spent, the forms are pretty thin. What I'd like to see is a form where taxpayers had a chance to draw their own federal budget. It could be a simple form, Form SL (for Shopping List) with a lot of government functions listed in general categories. Then all we would need to do is write in the percentage of our tax payments we wanted allocated to each one. Let's see here. How many F-16s do I want? What about missiles? Are there enough back there in the cupboard or do we need to re-stock? What portion por-tion of the federal budget ought to go to defense, to welfare programs, to social security payments to old poor people (or social security payments to old rich people), to national parks, environmental protection, to overthrowing third world governments govern-ments and installing dictators who are friendly to the CIA. You get the point. I guess there would have to be a catagory for general government operations, such as the IRS, and probably an allocation to Congress. They would get paid from the deficit on my form. The only good Congressman Con-gressman is a retired Congressman. It would be interesting if these taxpayer suggestions sugges-tions were averaged and became binding. We would probably start seeing ads from obscure government departments pleading for support. "Give to the Federal Boll Weavil Eradication Commission," might replace "Please don't squeeze the Charmin" on TV. It sure would be interesting in-teresting to see how the average citizen would spend his or her tax dollar. Water projects probably would not fare well among taxpayers in the East. I've always wondered why the people of New York should help pay for a water supply for Salt Lake County, but they do. They also help buy new buses for Park City. Ci-ty. If transporting skiers from condos to the ski lifts is not a federal problem, I certainly don't know what is. I'm not sure it would make it on my , Form SL, though. My list would be pretty short. " As iongras- thtiederai gaverrinjent ;as:a.' mechanism in place where they get to hear from every working American at least once a year, we ought to put it to some use beyond the annual tax shakedown. It's our money, I dort see why we aren't given a better opportunity to help decide how to spend it. Snnmminmnit ttn SunmminmSit Coke babies focus of group the aspen times As part of their drive to decrease drug use in Aspen, the Aspen Substance Awareness Project and Community Communi-ty Health Service have formed a task force whose primary goal will be to educate pregnant women on the dangers of cocaine for their unborn children. Although some women think the placenta shields a fetus from environmental dangers like drugs, in fact it acts much more like a "sponge," say task force members. In the case of cocaine, an unborn baby will convert the drug to an even more potent substance which it then swallows as part of the amniotic fluid. "Even one use of cocaine during pregnancy puts the child at risk," according to a task force fact sheet, and may increase the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome for infants by at least ten times. Cocaine causes a baby's blood vessels to constrict and the heart to beat more rapidly which may cause sudden increases in blood pressure and stroke. It also can cause miscarriage and premature delivery. The groups created the task force in response to finding fin-ding three babies who showed symptoms of drugs in their systems over the last six months. The syptoms include in-clude low birth weight, irritability, and breathing and feeding difficulties. Two of the mothers also only sought prenatal care for their babies in the last few weeks before giving birth, added Dr. William Mitchell of the Aspen Valley Hospital where the children were born. He said the women were educated, but probably fell victim to what he calls "creeping incrementalism" where each may have observed a friend who used drugs yet gave birth to an apparently normal baby. "So she figures it's okay to use them too," he said. The task force also plans to discuss the impact of smoking marijuana, although the effects of that drug are not as well known. So far, it has been connected with low birth weight infants, irritability and deficient visual functions. County may fight first, then pay Commissioners in Pitkin County, which may be pegged pegg-ed as partly responsible for a $4 to $5 million environmental en-vironmental clean-up in the Aspen area by the federal EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), are considering consider-ing doing battle before they ante up. But, their attorney, Tom Smith, is advising against it. Smith said that the county has fought the EPA for five years over its findings and conclusions regarding the toxicity of old mine tailings dumped in the Smuggler Mountain area about 100 years ago. The tailings contain lead and cadmium, both considered hazardous metals. Despite the debate, the county has won little ground, said Smith. "It's not just an uphill battle getting the EPA to back off this, it may be impossible," he said. "What people don't realize is how difficult it is to beat the EPA in the Superfund game." Ironically, although Pitkin County originally told EPA about the mine tailings, it is being considered by the agency as one of 13 PTP's or potentially responsible parties par-ties for funding the clean-up costs. The plan to make Smuggler safe by EPA standards includes excavating as much as two feet of tailings and replacing them with clean fill. Funding that clean-up may be one reason the county is considering a legal and political battle first. As Commissioner Commis-sioner Herschel Ross said, the county could find itself charging a mill level "going out to infinity" if it is stuck with a large portion of the millions it will take to follow through on EPA's plan. Feds may move griz The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering a grizzly transplanting effort to keep Yellowstone's population of the endangered bears from getting too similar genetically. Although Chris Servheen of USFWS stressed there are no problems with the grizzlies in Yellowstone yet, the population is small and isolated from other bears. The nearest other populations are in northern Montana and orthern Idaho, but the bears don't move that far. "We've never had a marked bear move the whole way," Servheen said. "We're never going to be able to connect Yellowstone with anywhere else. It's been disconnected for about 60 years." The Yellowstone area supports several hundred grizzlies, but the bears have been only able to breed with each other for several decades now. Eventually, that inbreeding in-breeding could cause physical problems such as lower than normal birth rates. . The USFWS is considering a program of transplanting sub-adult female grizzlies very slowly perhaps no more than one per decade, but Servheen said several years of research are still needed before the program could get underway. tit a Punch Brunch! and enjoy a complimentary dinner! Its easy! 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