I just finished my taxes today, which is surprising because typically I am foaming at the mouth waiting to get my W-2s and get my taxes in during the first week in February. Everything seems delayed now. I hop in the car to mail them – Yes I said mail them because TurboTax wasn’t able to file them electrically. One of the forms we used was a new form because it was COVID related. Then I hear the classic “if you owe back taxes…” ad on the radio. The ad goes on talking about how if you owe back taxes you might be able to settle for less than you owe. I am thinking, “Hey, what the hell, I want to settle with the IRS to pay less than I owe.” I yell. “I’ll pay 50% of the taxes that I owe. Give me back my money USA!” Am I a sucker for paying taxes on time?
Then I come home and turn on the news and they talk about how few people are paying rent. Am I sucker for paying my rent? Can I simply tell my landlord I can’t pay rent because it is too expensive. While I haven’t lost my job (yet), rent in Long Island is crazy expensive, I can barely afford it.
Are we all suckers? Sometimes I think we don’t live in a capitalist society but rather a suckerist society. Scammers are just out there scamming the vast majority of hard-working, do-good, puritan-influenced Americans. The scammers are even scamming the money out of poor people’s pockets as we try to give them relief: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2020/06/scammer-getting-unemployment-benefits-your-name
I was speaking with another professor at Adelphi and they were asking for advice. They said they had a situation where their students asked for an extension on their assignment. The faculty member gave the extension. Then one student contacted the professor the after the assignment was due and said, I am sorry I didn’t get to the assignment. I am health worker, and I got called in to work. The professor asking for the advice wanted to give the student a zero. They had already given extra time and student told them after the deadline.
I gave the whole mumble jumble COVID tumble excuse for the student and told them to give that student a break. But are we just being suckers? Is that student taking advantage of the professor when trying to ask for more time? Probability.
As a faculty member you do hear so many things that are incorrect or even absurd from students. Things I know for certain are false. I always think back to my friend. In his college years, if you added up the number of times he told a professor or boss that a grandparent died over his four years of college, you’d think he had 400 grandparents.
I do start by assuming that my students are telling the truth. Though I do feel that I am sucker for it. Where is the point where we stop this madness and call students out on missing assignments, etc? Start giving them zeros when they miss deadlines?
Its a muddy question. I give a lot of work in my classes. Students do miss assignments. I tend to be somewhat forgiving as long as they don’t miss a lot of work. I try to see if the student is trying to learn, asking questions, etc. And then try to base my decisions on that.
Tax Fraud. Up to 17% of people do some type of tax fraud. But only a handful of people do it bad enough to be in real trouble with the IRS.
So COVID has had a small event on people not paying rent (1-3%) (https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/nmhc-rent-payment-tracker/), but not that big of an effect considering that 20% of the people were not paying rent in the first place. 20% of the people aren’t paying rent!?!?!?! I was worried this was fake news so I dived in a bit. I didn’t see anything that was off, but maybe I need to dive in deeper.
matt wright research lab 