Taxes and other depressing things

Happy Easter! And welcome back to the real world! After that long workless week that should have been devoted to prayer rather than the beaches, here we are again slowly trooping back to the salt mines. Talk of a blue Monday, this has got to be it.

First item on my agenda today is finalizing my income tax return. For the first time in my life, I had to ask an accountant to do my returns this year. It has become too complicated for me to do alone. All that input and output stuff simply drove me nuts.

As if the mixed emotions of shelling out more of my hard earned money to help avert a fiscal crisis for my beloved country wasn’t draining enough, I also had time on my hands to obsess about problems big and small, real and imagined. In other words, the holiday break was no season of joy!

It didn’t help that the week before Holy Week, members of my family were either in California or Boracay. I thought I would welcome the serenity of a quiet house all to myself. All that solitude only made me think of how life could turn out to be, if I make it as old as my parents did.

Then, there’s one more... it has become increasingly difficult to try to look cheerful as people give me their best wishes for another year past my 50-plus years. Birthdays are no longer what they used to be. The thought I have to endure one tomorrow, is somewhat unnerving.

At this age, birthdays remind you of your mortality, how much closer you are to boarding time in the waiting lounge called Life. You now worry about every little ache and pain you feel, wondering if it is a sign of some catastrophic illness. People console you by saying that you are older but you are also wiser, and they are probably right. But you wonder, like the country, "what have I got to show for the passing years?"

Well... that brings me back to my income tax return. What I have to show for it is a tax payment that is, as usual, more than what immediate past presidents of the republic and maybe the present as well, have paid. Yet, I don’t see myself rich, definitely not in the same financial league as these politicians.

As I review my tax return, I feel cheated that I am paying an unfairly larger share of running this government than people who are living lives of the rich and famous. Most likely these are the same people misappropriating my tax money, money I could have used better myself. It is always painful to think that you worked three or four months last year for the government’s upkeep, when you could have gone on vacation instead.

But here I am, doing my civic duty like a good citizen. You can’t think of evading your taxes at a time when a fiscal crisis threatens to make life in these islands even more unbearably harsh. That our officials misspent our taxes is another issue altogether. BIR Chief Willy Parayno is right to urge us to pay our taxes properly.

But I really want to see my country’s top officials, specially those who are obviously living lives I could only dream of, to pay more than I am paying naman. That goes for FPJ too, who I understand, paid less than a million last year. And yes, please make it easy for ordinary citizens like me to pay our taxes, and give us the benefit of the doubt that we are filing honest returns, unlike some famous people we know.

Three more days to go before the deadline to file our income tax returns. If that thought does not give you a running start this blue Monday morning, that thought of having either FPJ or Ate Glo for six long years in Malacañang and Juan Ponce Enrile and Ernesto Maceda in the Senate, should do the trick.

Paco War Zone

One other reason why I had been somewhat depressed these days has to do with loose ends regarding the estate my parents left us. The legal work is all done, thanks to a sister who did all that before she herself passed away. But part of the inheritance is the real property where our old house stands in Paco, Manila. No one in the family wants to live there now so we allowed some nuns to use it for the meantime that we are waiting for real estate prices to get decent. As it turns out, we were waiting for Godot.

The value of real estate in this part of Manila has gone to the dogs and maybe for good reason. Peace and order in the area has deteriorated so much that according to our old neighbors there, gang wars erupt almost nightly and drug addiction is high. They had written manifestoes addressed to City Hall but the Mayor’s office told them the Mayor does not control the police. But it is difficult for them to believe that Lito Atienza is helpless, specially in his own district.

What made matters worse for me is that for some reason, miscommunication perhaps, the nuns vacated the property prematurely the other week. When they did, a gang of thieves pounced on whatever they could get from the house that the junk shops would buy. They took everything from bathroom fixtures to iron window grills. We consider ourselves lucky that they didn’t dismantle the roof.

I guess we had it coming. We shouldn’t have waited this long to sell it but believe it or not, we were hopeful about the economy turning up and with it, the price of real estate like this one. If only those who raided the old house used the proceeds to buy food for their family, it wouldn’t be so bad. But I am sure they used the money to buy illegal drugs.

All I can do now is to appeal to Gen. Ricardo de Leon, who heads the National Capital Region Command of the PNP to order the Western Police District to take a look at the peace and order situation in Zamora Street in Paco, Manila. This appeal is the least I can do for my old neighbors in the area who are at a loss on what to do with these nightly street battles. I have also asked Julius Babao of TV Patrol’s Hoy Gising to follow this up to make sure we get action and results.

I saw a video footage of one of those battles captured by a news team of ABS-CBN and shown on TV Patrol last week. It is simply terrible. It is painful to see the old neighborhood go to pieces like this. The neighborhood had been lower middle class even when I was growing up there, but it was habitable and people cared for and looked out for each other.

The neighborhood tough guys didn’t bother us in the old days. That’s probably because my late mother, whose medical practice catered to the poor in the community, probably saved their lives when they were kids. I could still see traces of neighborly concern today as some of our old neighbors helped my brother-in-law secure what remains of the old house last week.

If General de Leon can take a look at the peace and order problems here, and if Mayor Lito Atienza can then follow up with political solutions to the problems that have made my old neighborhood a nightly war zone, then maybe I can conclude that bad as things may be, we can still work together to make things better for all of us.

Escort Service

Now, here’s Dr. Ernie E.

The owner of a Ford Escort took his automobile to a service station for minor repairs. He paid by check.

A couple of weeks later he arrived home from work to find all his clothes piled up on the sidewalk in front of his house and his wife quite upset. He went inside to what had come over her but she gave him the silent treatment until he found out why she was so angry.

She had opened the bank statement that had arrived in the mail and noticed the canceled check for the car repairs.

On the memo line were the words "For Escort Service."

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]