CSotD: Humpday 2026 Is Particularly Taxing
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Today is Humpday, but it’s also Tax Day, and so since there are cartoons that will be out of date by tomorrow morning, we’ll take a hybrid comedy/politics look at the day.
Matson seizes on a familiar approach, but while his “filing status” section is pretty much as seen before, his check-offs are specific political criticisms that rise above the usual hating of taxes and hating of tax forms.
There’s nothing wrong with taking a well-worn road as long as you can bring something fresh to it.
However confusing taxes may be, Moondog and Dear Leader are correct that, until the reforms in the early 20th Century, we financed the government through tariffs rather than income taxes. However, it only takes about 10 minutes of research to realize how badly that system worked if you weren’t one of the captains of industry at the top of the pyramid.
The “Gilded Age” described those favored few, while a whole lot of other people struggled, both the farmers who paid much of those tariffs and the urban poor who made up “the Other Half” of whom Jacob Riis wrote, and for whom the social activists of the era dedicated themselves.
It’s all well and good to celebrate the Astors and Vanderbilts and their ilk, but they weren’t typical and it didn’t work then and it’s even less likely to work now.
Which brings us to this
Juxtaposition of the Day
The new “No Tax on Tips” regulation isn’t going to work as nicely as the fellow in German’s cartoon expects, and Buss isn’t being overly sarcastic in declaring it something of a scam.
First of all, it’s only a deduction, and if you’re making enough in tips that they matter, you probably aren’t paying much in income taxes anyway, so, while every bit helps, it won’t save you a bundle.
Trump’s DoorDash stunt was particularly deceptive on a couple of bases. First, there are no DoorDash deliveries to the White House, which is a ridiculous idea strictly from a security standpoint.
And the woman who made that delivery is from Arkansas, only she’s been trotted out before and testified before Congress as someone from Nevada, but she isn’t from DC, and you can’t write off commuting miles. At four bucks a gallon, I wouldn’t want to live 1200 miles away and be delivering burgers in DC, but all a delivery person in their own car could write off would be the drive from McDonald’s to the White House.
Furthermore, DoorDash drivers are self-employed, so even if she can deduct her alleged $11,000 in tips on her federal income tax, she’d still have to come up with 15.3% Self-Employment Tax (FICA) on them as earnings. And, as The Guardian reports in its analysis of this stunt, she’d still have to pay Arkansas income tax on them, if they really existed in the first place.
“No one is claiming it was a real delivery,” DoorDash’s Julian Crowley wrote on social media, according to the Guardian, to which I’d like to hear Samuel Jackson thunder, “Yes you DID!”
I’m not religious, but I think there’s a special place in Hell for those who lie about money to working-class strugglers, which most food delivery folks are.
Special place in Hell? As Wiley points out, there isn’t even a special place for them in Leavenworth.
Speaking of things a lot of average folks don’t realize, getting an extension on your taxes amounts to about what you see here. All it really gives you is another six months to do the paperwork; you still have to come up with the money by midnight tonight, or at least come up with a sum of money very close to what you’ll owe.
Which suggests that, even if you don’t get everything properly filled out, you’ll have to have figured things out pretty well, and if you’re not psychic, you’d do well to at least pencil in a few things.
I suppose that if this comes as news to you, your day is suddenly really ruined. You can get the necessary tax form here, but you’d better cancel whatever else you had planned for today.
When I was in the newsroom, one of our mandatory annual stories involved hanging out at the post office as it was closing at midnight. Looking back, it strikes me as kind of sadistic.
At two weeks, this strip is kind of old for CSotD, but I dug it up after becoming increasingly frustrated with how I strongly suspect AI is destroying Google.
I don’t mind the little AI summary at the top of a search, because much of the time I’m just trying to find out at what temperature to throw something in the oven and how long to leave it in there. But lately I’ve found that, if I’m looking up anything even vaguely obscure, it’s no longer there.
Instead of getting a combination of popular and obscure suggestions, I’m only getting the popular answers, which is to say that somehow Google is turning into Bing, which is to say, a search engine based on what you’d find if you did one of those late night comedy street interview segments, in which they go out on the sidewalk in search of stupid people.
Which is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentional editing, proving that if you seek stupid people, you will surely find them. Finding actual information, meanwhile, seems to be getting harder, and perhaps, like actual licorice, it just isn’t popular enough to be worth making available anymore.
Alas, there’s no shortage of real princesses. “The Princess and the Pea” is a fairy tale that contains no fairies and isn’t a folk tale either, but was written by Hans Christian Andersen.
It begins “Once upon a time there was a prince who wanted to marry a princess; but she would have to be a real princess,” and you should stop right there, because he’s an idiot.
If I’d written it, the Queen would put a pea under all those mattresses, and then when the princess complained in the morning, she’d say to her son, “You owe me, kid.”
We read our boys this story instead:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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