My daily email for April 26, 2016. Join an email list you’ll actually be glad to hear from, and get my free eBook Bernie Sanders Is Wrong as a bonus, by clicking here.
No one published a book on the financial crisis, including the bailouts, before I did.
My book Meltdown, featuring a foreword by Ron Paul, came out in February 2009.
It was a smash hit, spending ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Brief digression: people think this means I sold “millions of copies.” I wish. Not even close. Not even in the same universe. You are overestimating your fellow Americans, who do not read nonfiction. If a nonfiction title sells 20,000-30,000 copies, the publishing industry considers it a minor miracle, and you a superstar. Most nonfiction books sell fewer than 2,000 copies.
My Politically Incorrect Guide to American History has sold over 200,000 copies, which is an absolute monster, but which, again, most people — who don’t know the real conditions of book publishing — would likely find disappointing.
I sometimes compare this to being accepted at the University of Pennsylvania or the University of Chicago. These are top schools, but the average person, who knows Harvard, Yale, and maybe Princeton, figures you just got into some state school.
I had to kill myself to get that book written, edited, and published by February 2009. My publisher — who rejected the idea of the book the first time I ran it by them — decided that since a lot of people with much more name recognition than I had would be releasing books on the crisis, the only way mine wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle was to publish first.
So I was given a month to write it.
A month.
Well, even though nonfiction books — even “bestsellers” — sell miserably, I did well that year. The success of the book pushed me into a higher tax bracket. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that.
So the quarterly estimated payments I made to the IRS were too low.
I remember thinking, in April 2010, that I might get a refund of between $3000 and $5000.
Ha.
I owed another $37,000 (on top of what I’d already paid in quarterly payments).
I mention this because on today’s episode, entrepreneur Ryan Daniel Moran discusses the video he made showing the check that he — a member of the hated 1% — had to write to the U.S. Treasury.
The myth that upper-income earners don’t really pay much in taxes — totally laughable, given that the top 10% pay 70% of all income taxes collected, and the top 1% pay close to 40% — was smashed by that one check and that one video.
Naturally, the haters, who consider themselves entitled to Ryan’s money, were out in force.
But the video became something of a sensation, and my good Supporting Listeners asked me to get him on the show.
And that’s what I did. Have a listen:
Tom Woods
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