On Friday morning as I sat in Panera, I thought forward to that afternoon when we were to get our taxes done. I wasn’t worrying. Linda keeps copious records, and we have a terrific finance guy who knows all the ins and outs of the tax laws. Still, tax time is time to think about your finances, and I got thinking about all the money I spend at Panera over the course of our personal fiscal year. On Friday, I spent $3.62 for my coffee and bagel. Now that’s a little low for a typical day, so I decided to go with $4.00 as a mean amount. I don’t go to Panera everyday but I do go often so I decided to opt for 300 days of the year. At 4 dollars per day for 300 days, I provide Panera with $1200 per year! Holy $@^$&@$##!
What if this figure somehow came up in the discussion with our financial guru? How would I explain such an expenditure of funds? I could say that Linda never has to buy anything for me for breakfast, which would be true. But she still has to buy coffee and eggs and bread and the other foodstuffs that could go into my morning meal. What I needed was a good solid tax dodge to give not only explanation but purpose to my Panera expenses.
My first thought was medical. I could claim I need caffeine for my health. Just this week a Blue Ribbon scientific/medical panel declared coffee, in fact 4 cups a day, as wonderful for a person’s physical well being. Not only that, but another Blue Ribbon scientific/medical panel vowed that their studies proved that high cholesterol isn’t harmful at all. What a great week for breakfast foods. I saw in the findings of these two panels as a way to declare Dark Roast coffee and egg and cheese on cibatta bread as medications. Not just medications, I might add, but PREVENTIVE medications!
Still, I worried. I was pretty sure that before I could begin to make a case with the IRS, that two new Blue Ribbon panels would announce findings completely to the opposite of the ones I was using. Also, everyone knows that for a medication to really make it into the pharmacoepia, it has to cause terrible diseases and conditions to other parts of the body, and those diseases and conditions have to be included in any commercial advertising the pharmaceutical. That way, you can tell your doctor about them when you go see him or her to tell them just exactly what you want them to prescribe. This would require so much research on my part and probably a lot of fabrication. What to do?
Then an even better idea came to mind. Somebody should pay me something for writing this blog, its impetus being my morning visits to Panera. If I could get someone to pay me a few bucks--and send me a W-2--I could declare my Panera breakfast as business expenses. This is not impossible. I published a book online with Amazon this year. It sold about 20 copies. And Amazon sent me a W-2 for the miniscule amount I made. So I have to find a corporate Sugar Daddy to jump on board. Yes, indeed. I will make that my goal for the months ahead.
I felt a lot better about my Panera expenditures, then. But I do worry about using “IRS” in the title of this post. With all the subtle tracking equipment the IRS employs to search the web, will some agent out there find my financial plans to be subversive to the intent of the tax code. If so, then listen: I’M KIDDING! THIS IS A JOKE! LOL! DON”T TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY, O.K.? Thank you. I hope IRS is one of those meta expressions.--Greg Ellstrom
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