Kurko, Oktombro 5, 2008

Did you know that hookers also need to pay taxes? It is true and if you do not believe me then I invite you to ask your local escort if she pays her taxes or not. For my part I have only just begun to earn enough income to warrant forking over a share to the taxman and I have to say that I am feeling more than a little bit of resentment concerning his cut. This resentment has nothing to do with the actual process of paying taxes. If my line of work were legal here in the States then I would be more than pleased to give the government its percentage. Instead the resentment comes from the fact that my profession is illegal under this particular government despite the fact that the government is funded by my income just as much as it is funded by the income of anyone else. If they want to take my cash then they should also make it legal for me to earn that same cash, because under the current system escorts are pretty much paying the police to arrest them should they ever catch on to what it is that we do for a living. It all seems somewhat backward to me and if there were a way to get around all of it then I think I would go down that road in a heartbeat.

But the Internal Revenue Service has eyes in all of our traceable expenses and so I am sure that they would catch on after awhile, even if it took them several years to do so. It was taxes that took down Capone after all and, although I do sometimes have a pretty inflated view of myself and my place in the world, it would take a miracle for Loveless to stand a better chance than Capone when it comes getting away with tax evasion. Though it is not such a financial hardship in the end. For the most part I just set aside about fifty percent of my earnings into a savings account which I do my best not to touch until after tax season is finished. That way I know I will have far more in savings than I will end up paying out to the Great White Pimp and so I will not have to worry about being audited. Beyond that I will be hiring a tax attourney to handle my deductions for me since I will be filing taxes as an 'adult entertainer' and so deductions will include things like clothing and travel expenses as well as the occasional hotel bill. I had to figure all of this out this week because it occurred to me that I had never paid taxes before with the exception of the one or two years when I was working as a research interviewer for one of those telephone survey companies, cold calling people to ask them personal questions about their health.

Those were some good times.

Of course the real reason why I am writing about taxes is not to discuss the Internal Revenue Service or the hypocrisies of a pimptastic government which refuses to legitimize my work despite being more than pleased to profit from it. The reason that I am writing about taxes is because it is just one more slice being cut from a pie which is already being eaten by far too many people. The first person to take a cut from my earnings is the agency and their cut is the biggest cut of all, coming to about fifty percent unless a client chooses to give me extra. After my income is split in half another percentage is then given to the credit card company and this percentage comes out to just a little bit over one thousand dollars USD each month. Then there is the cut taken by the White House and after all of this I am left with an income that, though quite substantial when compared against most working folk in this nation, is nowhere close to what it should be when compared against the income of women who are in the same profession. Now there is nothing that can be done about the credit card debt except to declare myself bankrupt and that is never going to happen because I refuse to ruin my very solid credit score, which is 797 for those of you who might be curious. There is also nothing which can be done about the taxation to which I must now submit myself, which means that the only thing which can be dealt with is the agency and their percentage. I would miss working with Elizabeth and I would also miss having someone else handle my own phone calls, but business is business and there is no room to lose a considerable chunk of change because of nostalgia, though I have not made a decision just yet. More thought must be put into it. In other words this entire piece about taxes and debts and percentages has just been one longwinded way of stating that it may be time to go independent again.