Graduate School Taxes

Education taxes in the United States can seem complicated, especially since the standard tax forms and publications aren't the easiest to navigate, and often schools and employers don’t provide general help even when the majority of their students will have very similar situations.

If you keep the basic concept of an income tax in mind, though, it should become easier to figure out:

Any and all money you receive from someone else is taxable and must be reported as such unless otherwise specified¹.

I will go through the 4 most common income categories for a graduate student, with the assumption that that the reader has never filed taxes before, and provide information on free tax filing programs.

Disclaimer: I have no formal tax training. I’m just a moderately intelligent graduate student who has dealt with this for a few years and read the relevant documents.

Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt

I never really paid attention to the whole Casey Anthony case until today, but this comment from the defense attorney Jose Baez struck me:

We should all take this as an opportunity to learn to realize that you cannot convict someone until they've had their day in court. We have the greatest constitution…If the media and other members of the public do not respect it, it will become meaningless.

This is an unfortunately common problem. The whole point of "beyond reasonable doubt" and "innocent until proven guilty" is to make sure that potentially innocent people aren't railroaded by overzealous prosecution, especially when it is defined by emotions and gut feelings rather than by evidence. Especially when the prosecution usually has the upper hand in getting it's story out to the public.

Casey Anthony and her family are screwed up, there's no question about that. But that doesn't automatically mean she is guilty of all the crimes she was charged with, and the jury decided that there wasn't enough evidence for a guilty verdict on the most serious counts.

We should all be thankful for that: just because society may disapprove of you and considers you to be a horrible person in general, you are still going to be treated more or less fairly by the judge and jury. The system isn't perfect, but isn't the attempt to remove prejudices from the decision something to admire about our legal system?

She may be actually guilty of the crime. We in the public have a right to an opinion on that matter, if we care enough to have one. But please, be sure you know the difference between thinking something is likely true and knowing that something actually is true. Understanding this distinction is what makes the difference between civilized disagreement and a lynch mob.