"When one is self-employed you do owe self-employment taxes which are essentially the employee and employer portion of your taxes," said George Yin, a tax professor at the University of Virginia Law School and formerly Chief of Staff of the U.S. Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation. "If that is what they are referring to than yes, there are some people who serve as consultants and don't necessarily understand their obligations to pay self employed taxes. My guess is that it is not an infrequent error."As for the housekeeper issue, does anybody else have the feeling that all these housekeepers wouldn't be as big a deal if they weren't Latino? I'm smelling a bit of prejudice with these never-ending "oh my God, the cleaning lady did x, y and z." I simply don't care. And my shrinking 401k cares even less.
UPDATE: Some readers noted that I shouldn't have just assumed the cleaning lady was Latino. True enough. Though in Washington, DC, I don't know one who isn't Latino - that's all I've ever seen. In Chicago, interesting enough, every cleaning lady I've seen over the past several years has been Polish. Anyway, guess I was just assuming DC. And I suspect if the cleaning lady was Polish, we wouldn't be hearing nearly as much about these stories.
