I received the last of my tax documents late last week, and I finished my tax forms Sunday night. I put them away so that I could stew over them for at least one day and thus hopefully avoid a hasty submission that I might need to amend later. Yesterday, after a final review, I e-filed them. I owe the IRS a few grand simply because I suspended some 401-K and IRA distributions last year and then proceeded to make estimated quarterly payments for this past year based on a reduced income. Alas, I have had to make good on my under-payments. TANSTAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (the flag of the Lunar colonists in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert Heinlein) comes to mind.
Every year, at tax time, I reflect on how fortunate Susan and I are to have enough – enough to live the life we want and enough to meet all of our obligations. There are many who have far less than we and others who have much more. Not all of them have enough. The billionaires mostly do not have enough; they want more. There are exceptions like Warren Buffet and MacKenzie Scott, of course. But most of them aspire to accumulate more because they do not feel that they have enough. Theirs is a form of poverty different from that of displaced persons in war-torn regions.
The people of Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and other regions, I imagine, do not have enough peace, enough security and safety, enough clean water, enough food, or enough opportunity. They truly do not have “enough” in the way that I understand the concept. The Oligarchs, Russian, American or otherwise, do not have enough for different reasons. I do not actually understand why they do not have enough. I simply have the intuition that it must be so, or they would not strive so in order to attain even more. Jeff Bezoa does not have enough. Neither do Elon Musk or Oleg Deripaska, I suspect.
I’ve sent the IRS what I owe. I am fortunate that we have enough.