-By Warner Todd Huston
This story has so much to hate, it’s hard to figure out where to start. It has sports, it has a nice guy (not to be hated) and it has the idiots at the IRS… or maybe just speculation from a newspaper about the idiots at the IRS.
Anyway, some of you that follow sports might have seen that baseball great Derek Jeter made his 3,000th hit at Yankees Stadium in New York a few days ago. A fan named Christian Lopez caught the thing and after the game, this nice young fellow gave the ball back to Derek so that he’d have a memento of his big achievement.
Now, this is part of the story that is not to hate. This young fan did not have to give back the ball. Further more, this ball could have been worth quite a bit of money on the odious sports collectibles market. By being a nice guy and giving the ball back to the player he might have gipped himself out of a bunch of money.
So, in the other part of the story not to hate, the Yankees ball organization gave the young man around $32,000 worth of free stuff because he was nice enough to give the ball back to Jeter.
And now all the stuff to hate…
The IRS might be coming after Mr. Lopez for up to $13,000 in taxes because the Yankees gave him the freebies.
Cripes, just leave the poor guy alone you bloodsuckers! It isn’t like thousands of people are getting away with skipping out on taxes in similar instances. This was one guy that did a nice thing. Don’t penalize him for it. Leave it to government to make people wary of doing a nice thing.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.