Family News: Farms and taxes

I spent yesterday doing my income taxes.

I had most of the information but not all the W2 forms for small bank accounts etc. so if they audit me, because I didn't include the interest form from the bank to prove I "earned" $26 interest, I will have to get them from the USA.

If they want to simplify taxes for us old folks, all they have to do is say don't report under x amount of money.

Actually, my income is low so I pay no taxes, so theoretically don't have to file a tax return, but have automatic withdrawal from my pensions since they started before Lolo died, and we paid taxes back then. So now I get a refund, so I have to file to get the money.

Another way for tax reform is to stop taxing overseas income for expats. Every year there is a headline about Americans giving up their citizenship, as if this number (usually in the low thousands) is meaningful.

But a lot of folks just don't want to double pay taxes on their overseas income. DUH.

then there are legal problems if you own a business overseas.

Here in the Philippines, non citizens can't own land or business. Traditionally this is gotten around by marrying a local lady, which is why most of the Manila families who run the place have round faces and a fair complexion from their Chinese businessman ancestors.

Nowadays, a lot of US expats who married local ladies while in the military retire here and they run a business, again in their wives name.

Why not just become a citizen here? Ah, but they have a rule that if you become a citizen you have to give up your previous citizenship. So let the wife own and run the business, and if she passes, well, the kids will run it for you too.

Since I am a US citizen, that means I can't own any land here. But luckily under the law, you can't throw a widow out of here house even if she is not a citizen, so I am covered there.

One exception to the Philippine law is that our "balikbayan", returning Filipino citizens, are considered citizens, which is how Lolo, a US citizen, managed to invest much of his savings to buy back the family's rice fields that were "bought" (read "confiscated and given away") by the farmers under land reform 30 years ago.

The farmers got richer thanks to land reform, and sent their kids to school, and now have grandkids living in Manila or overseas, who don't want to go home to work the land, so a lot of the older folks are selling the fields, and we have first dibs.

The only problem? There is a limit on how much land any person can own. Families pool their resources and get around this by putting the land in the name of their kids, grandkids, and cousins, etc. etc.

and so we end up hiring farmers to work the land, often from Joy's home island in the Visayas...and for our rice business, we have arrangements to buy the rice of the nearby farmers and give them seedlings, seeds, manure, minerals, etc. to make sure they are growing it organically, not to mention helping them with the irrigation fees and threshing.

yes, the old water buffalo has been replaced by a handplow (a large roto tiller) and we thresh grain in the fields with our thresher after cutting it by hand... but now the harvesting is being done with machine too...

as for the waterbuffalo: we had two, but one died in an "accident" so we ate him. We still use them in certain fields and for vegetable crops, and to pull the thresher into wet fields where the jeep would get stuck.

So farming is evolving slowly.

I saw an "eco tourism" film on her island, about how wonderful it was and how happy and content the folks were living their traditional lifestyle.

Guess the film didn't ask how many of these content farmers had kids or relatives who left (and sent money home to pay school fees etc). And of course, the eco tourism people didn't even mention the NPA (communist militants) in the area, fighting for a better life, at least on paper.