All Is Not Fair in Love and Taxes

Is anything?

On Sunday a new friend offered a wildly different angle on a question I had not expected to come up. Especially after learning about his job.

Is it fair how much we pay in taxes?

I had spent the past weekend with my teenage daughter at a soccer tournament.

Over two days, the kids play matches for 210 minutes…for 280 minutes if they are very good and lucky…and 350 minutes if they are very, very good. The rest of the time is about hanging out with teammates.

The parents are stuck with one another.

I was fortunate to spend time with some good people I might otherwise never have gotten to know. It was a great distraction, actually. Mom had passed away a couple weeks before, and the emotion was still raw.

This friend works for a venture capital firm counted among the largest in the world. A senior leader. He manages teams of financial analysts that run the numbers on each deal the company might allocate a bit of its billions to.

These teams build models for each target company, the target market, and pretty much everything else. Some models look at the flow of the US population, purchase drivers, and commodity prices. Others tackle equity markets, banking trends, and adjacent industries. In sum total they attempt to explain how the world works in 1’s, 0’s, and dollars.