Taxes

It has occurred to me on several occasions that Slothmud does not have Taxes. But imagine if it did? The IRS (Immortal Revenue System) would have an entire manual full of tax codes.

If you mess up, you could get audited by an IRS and possibly wiped for cheating on your taxes. It would also require a new set of terminology, but I'll do my best to translate it to the U.S. tax system definitions.

For example:

• You are taxed for every head you take while in a chop group. This is called the capital gains tax.
• You are taxed for all the gold you during your normal exp runs. This is called dividend tax.
• You are taxed at a higher rate for gold that you get while cycling island gold. This is called Alternative Minimum Tax.
• You are taxed for all items shipped and received to your alternative characters. This is called the Generation Skipping Tax.
• You must pay an additional tax for every alternate character created over the 40th character. (This is known as Brad's Tax).
  

Of course, there are ways to reduce your tax burden and these calculated via deductions.

• If you are evil, or in DoT, you only get to take the standard deduction.
• If you bought a house or mansion, you can deduct depreciation on the house, but only if one of Brad's characters has ever been there (This is a common deduction).
• However, you can't deduct the house if you are storing someone else's equipment in the vault as this then qualifies as a commercial property and is subject to different tax law.
• If you are not in a clan, you can consider yourself self-employed and take a small deduction.

Unfortunately, this is just a small sampling of the entire tax code. In order to effectively file you'll have to pop the manual of course and get the 'filing tax' skill learned up to 95%. You'll need to buy a software program like TurboTax. This wouldn't be affiliated with the character Turbo, but they probably would have paid him for the trademark.

In any case, it's not a pretty world to consider. But as the old saying goes, "The only two certainties in life are death and taxes." At least the first half holds very true with Slothmud.