Have you paid your taxes?

Notice anything different?

I did.

I got done with preparing my taxes kind of late, and I filed them electronically. (Just the feds. For some reason that's free but it costs $19.95 to electronically file my state taxes.) For years I've been doing my taxes electronically using a commercial program. I'm not convinced that it does a better job than I would do by myself, but it seems to be faster, and it gives me a chance to spend some quality time with my computer, so that's how I do it.

One of the things that my tax program had this year is a two-year summary. It gives me the chance to compare all the pertinent facts about this year's tax return with last year's, and I learned some interesting facts.

Pretty much as long as Obama has been president, we've been hearing the wingers complaining about how Obama is raising our taxes. It's gotten even worse since they started working on health care, and since they passed it it's been pretty extreme.

So I thought I'd be interested to see what happened to my taxes. We're making more money than I ever thought we'd make; as a friend used to observe, sometimes our checking balance threatens to skyrocket into the three figures. I think it's a good thing that two people working in the public sector, and doing socially beneficial work can make a living, but we're far from rich.

But wait, what happened to our taxes this year? Did they go up, the way the teabaggers have been telling us?

Actually, now that you ask, they did not. In fact, our income went down a little bit and our taxes went down by a lot. I can tell exactly why this is, and it is due in large part to changes in the law pushed through by resident Obama. So even though we're squarely in the middle class, and we work hard for everything we have, the result of over a year of Obama's presidency has not been that he's been in our pockets, taken everything we have, and left us wearing barrels to work.

What about you? Did your taxes go up this year? Down? Stay the same?