Taxes (money is always an easy link to math)

Coming up in about a month is Tax Day (April 15th).  Although mostly requiring only arithmetic math, taxes are one of the things that all of us are faced with having to calculate at some point . . . of course Certified Public Accountants hope that you will go to them to do your taxes.  For the most part taxes are calculated as a percentage of the money you have earned over the last year.  It is required that you pay taxes throughout the year (usually taken care of by your employer) and so  in many cases you may get money back since the government doesn't make you pay taxes on all the money that you made . . . through standard deductions.  As people do more with their money through investments, businesses, houses, charitable donations, retirement funds etc. taxes tend to get a little more complicated since there are special tax rules for a lot of these conditions.  The tax rules are setup to mostly make sure that each person properly declares all his/her income, but the rules also try to protect people from getting taxed more than once for the same money (double taxation).  Also there are certain tax incentives which help encourage certain activities such as energy/resource conservation, health care, education and investing which helps strengthen the economy.