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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bridge Player who wrote (101797)	2/23/2005 1:15:15 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793750

Your question is almost entirely hypothetical. The example is entirely hypothetical. The point of a hypothetical question is to root out some abstraction as tidily as possible. I can see where folks might have thought I was looking for a different kind of answer. income is what the IRS says it is "Income" for purposes of income tax is, indeed, whatever the IRS says it is. My question was what does "income" mean in the context of a survey for a jury pool, for example. The court has no interest in what you paid the IRS. In that case, and in the other cases I mentioned, "income" is used as a proxy for some other information that is desired. The attorneys would want to assess your social class as an indicator of where your sympathies might lie. A survey from a product manufacturer would be trying to determine the appropriate demographics for its marketing. A real estate agent would want to know if he was wasting his time showing you a house. A prospective father in law would want to know if you could provide for his daughter. My interest was in how to answer the question of income in a non-IRS context. Quoting the figure at the bottom of last year's tax form may be very misleading, particularly for those who do not have earned income and whose income may vary dramatically based on date they might have "cashed in" this or that. Whether you got last year's food money from the sale of long held stocks (with a big capital gain) or the cash in your mattress (no gain) may matter to the IRS but it doesn't matter to the parties who just want to gauge how well off you are. I think I have satisfied my curiosity and I thank everyone who helped. I'm thinking that the best answer would be some figure that's a general indicator of how well off you are, which could vary dramatically from your "income." Either that or "none of your business." <g>