As I do my daily social media surfing I am finding a disturbing trend- anti tax sentiment and one group or another thinking they should be exempt from taxes. We Americans are not among the highest taxed countries and despite the rhetoric, the wealthy do pay the great bulk of taxes.
Seniors seem to be the most vocal looking for tax exemption. Many feel they should be exempt from property taxes and of course, paying taxes on Social Security benefits.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Roth conversions lately, and I’m seriously considering pulling the trigger on one this year. But before I make any moves, I wanted to get some feedback from those of you who have been through the process.
A little background: I’m in my mid-50s, still working, and in a relatively high tax bracket. I have a mix of retirement accounts – mostly in a traditional IRA and a 401(k).

I came across an interesting tax return the other day while volunteering at a local AARP TaxAide center. This is my 7th year doing free tax returns and I’m still learning. In this case, I didn’t prepare the return; I was the quality reviewer and did the outtake with the client. The client was a retired single woman in her mid-70s. Her income was modest and she didn’t have any fancy or complicated investments. What made her case interesting was her near obsession with making sure that she paid zero tax for the year,

CAUTION: Read the following with the understanding there are exceptions. There are people who through no fault of their own reach old age in poor financial shape, who were overwhelmed with misfortune and simply had little chance of success in their later years.
THIS IS ABOUT THE MAJORITY of the complaining over 65 population who are in the place they are, not from misfortune, but from inaction, poor decisions and a tendency to live in the moment and ignore the future. 

If we want to shrink the federal government budget deficit, lower inflation and fix Social Security, there’s a simple solution: We need to nudge folks to stay in the workforce for longer.
The more people who work, the more goods and services the economy will produce. That means demand is less likely to outstrip supply, pushing consumer prices higher. It should also mean more income and payroll taxes, helping to fund government programs.
By contrast, the solutions for inflation and government deficits that are usually discussed—raising income taxes,

A recent Wall Street Journal article presented the stories of a number of professional and volunteer tax preparers who are still going strong well into their 80s, 90s, and beyond. In my seven years supporting AARP’s TaxAide program I’ve worked with dozens of volunteer preparers in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who are extremely knowledgeable and quite sharp. I would trust them with my tax return.
The article could have been greatly improved by interviewing some HumbleDollar’s tax experts,

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beware-of-e-filing-your-tax-return-legal-trouble-for-error-privacy-risk-cyberattack-96d31111?mod=e2tw
I am not advocating for either method of filing your taxes but everyone who files their own taxes should be aware of the information contained in the above referenced article.

TWO THINGS HEAVILY influenced my financial life. The first was my short stint after college as an internal revenue agent with the IRS. The second was getting married and having five children.
Result: I’ve spent most of my adult life as a tax-averse junky using retirement accounts to get my high, so much so that there’s a risk our retirement-account withdrawals will put us in a much higher tax bracket than when we made our contributions.

Recently the IRS has begun offering everyone the opportunity to sign up for an account. It let’s you make payments, including payment plans to cover those taxes you expect to pay in the future not covered by with-holding.
 
I signed up right away to prevent a scammer from creating an account using my SS# and potentially filing a fake return.  I’m certain my # is available on the Dark Web (like the other 95% of Americans) so the easiest protection I could think of was opening the account and locking it down with 2-factor.

The United States is 26 thousand billion dollars in debt. The United States spends two thousand billion dollars a year more than its revenue. 
If we generate any real, sustainable, savings many people are calling for them to be spent … on seniors and veterans. Congress is trying to cut taxes and limit the increase in the deficit to only a few more trillion dollars over the next ten years. 
The Social Security Trust is heading for insolvency as is the Medicare Part A Trust.

Following is a link to an article that I saw on CNN this evening. I don’t want to get political but it raises some interesting concerns.
I filed our taxes a couple of weeks ago and found out today that our refund has been approved by the IRS. I’ll be happy to see it in our account.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/economy/doge-irs-data-tax-filers-risk

ONE OF MY FIRST employers allowed me to buy savings bonds through withholding from my weekly salary. It seemed like magic. Ever since, automatic payroll deductions have been an important part of my financial life.
My payroll deductions expanded to include my health insurance and my 401(k) contributions. It just felt good to me, kind of like the practice of regularly giving 10% of your income to the church.
On the other hand, payroll deductions are also how we pay taxes,

I get frustrated sometimes. Okay pretty often, even oftener these days. 
The root cause of much of my frustration is reading the nonsense posted on social media and readily passed along as 100% fact and apparently driving a great deal of public opinion. Today’s political climate is making things much worse.
Social Security is a favorite target. 
What people claim, for example – Congress stole the trust money, actuaries didn’t consider some people die before collecting,

In late 2021 and early 2022, I sold our core bond holdings in our taxable account and invested the proceeds in I-Bonds as part of a strategy to build an income bridge to allow me to defer taking my SS.  This provided the stability of a known inflation-adjusted income stream that had yielded an average of 6.6% per year until we began redemptions this past year.   Given what occurred with bond funds in 2022 (and almost double-digit I-Bond interest for a brief time),

If I save on an after-tax basis in a 401k, (plan permitting) the earnings, upon distribution, are taxed as ordinary income and subject to RMDs. However, withdrawing my after-tax contributions only count toward the RMD until they are exhausted. If I save after-tax in a Roth account, the earnings are tax-free with no required withdrawals.
There are earnings limits on contributing to a Roth, but no income or account balance limits on Roth conversions. 
Roth distributions are excluded from MAGI and thus substantial income may not count toward IRMAA premiums,