With today’s forthcoming signature by the President, the nation enters a frenzy of wealth transfer over both the next few weeks and the next two years. What does the tax bill do? Here is a fairly simple breakdown.

• The bill affirms the tax rates. They are: 10% (for couples with income up to $17,000), 15% (for a single person, $34,000), 25% ($82,400), 28% (up to $171,850), 33% (up to and $379,149) and 35% (more than that!); that last bracket would have gone up to 39.6%.

• Self-employment tax goes down from 12.4% to 10.4%.

• The Social Security payroll tax stays down at 4.2 percent, from 6.2 percent — for annual income up to $106,800. Except for the self-employed! They pay 10.4%.

• Continues the reduced taxes on dividends and capital gains: Those rates are 0% for people in the 25% tax bracket or lower; they are 15% for those in higher brackets.

• The tax on transfer of wealth after death (by which we mean wealth that isn’t put into put in foundations or other instruments) will remain at 35% — of all money beyond $5 million (or, essentially, $10 million for giving and/or inheriting couples). Which is to say, all money up to $5 million may be passed along tax-free, so estate taxes affect fewer than .2% of Americans.

• The “gift” tax remains at 35%, beyond an exemption of $13,000 a year and $10 million over a lifetime. The GST tax (inheritance that skips a generation) is taxable above $5 million beginning in 2011.

• There is a tax credit of $1000 for each child in the household, plus a little somethin’ extra now in the “Earned Income Tax Credit,” for people who made very little money in the year.

• All income levels may now convert individual retirement accounts to a Roth IRA at the extended lower tax rates, and split the taxable proceeds between two years, if they perform the conversion by the end of 2010. Additionally, up to $100,000 of an individual IRA may be given tax-free to charity.

• Teachers may have a deduction of up to $250 for out-of-pocket expenses!

And a few other things that point out that, as BusinessWeek put it, it’s a great time to be rich.

by Abe Sauer

Percentage of Germans who would “welcome a Führer.” **

Percentage of teens who say they’ve uploaded nude photos of themselves. **

Percentage of doctors who claim they would close their doors rather than accept cuts to Medicare. **

The adult illiteracy rate in America in 1986 (Today’s rate: 14%). **

Percentage, in early 2008, of Americans who believed Obama was a Muslim (currently at 18 percent). **

Percentage of Americans who believe Obama was not born in the United States. **

Year-over-year increase in online holiday shopping. **

Percentage of people who admitting to driving drunk in the last year. **

Approval rating of Vice President Dick Cheney at the time he left office.

Share of mobile data accounted for by YouTube. **

The current unemployment rate in Clark County, Washington. **

Percentage of time Fox News argues Bush spent on vacation in the first months of his Presidency, as opposed to others assertions of 42 percent. **

Percentage increase over 2009 of unmarried couples choosing to cohabitant. **

Percentage who thought Rod Blagojevich was doing “a good job” so “fuck all of you.” **

Abe Sauer knows the numbers.

Hey, R.E.M. has a new song out. It’s called “Discoverer,” which is a cool word, from a new album, called Collapse Into Now, due in March. I haven’t paid much attention to R.E.M. this century, but, man, they used to be so awesome. And on first couple listens at least, I really like this. With those high-chiming guitars and its shout-along chorus, this would make for a fine work song.

by Jeff Hart

God cradled me in one burly arm, my cheek pressed to His nipple. It was the size of a satellite dish. Blown by a gentle breeze, the downy blonde hair on his forearm tickled me. Endless blue sky stretched out around us. Fluffy oblong clouds gently bobbed upward, inevitably drawn by some divine magnetism into formation around God’s face, preventing me from gazing directly upon Him.

“THERE THERE, ROYCE MULLINS” said God, and though His voice exploded in my ears like fireworks, I still found it soothing. “YOUR TROUBLES ARE AT AN END.”

“Ok,” I replied, gazing out into the infinite. I reclined into the pliant flesh of God’s forearm.

“WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW OF YOUR PURPOSE ON EARTH, MY CHILD?”

“Eh.”

“OR OF MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING?”

I shrugged.

“Sure,” I said. “Lay it on me.”

A vibration rumbled through God’s body, jostling me. From below came the blaring of coronets. God reached his free hand downward, into his diaper, and produced a Blackberry. The red light of an incoming message turned the sky around us pink, like a sunset, flashing on and off every two seconds.

“SORRY,” said God. “BBM.”

I looked up to find the clouds parted. Self-help guru Wayne Maker’s face stared down at me, smug understanding etched across his chiseled features, his bleached teeth a terrifying stand-in for the pearly gates.

“THIS IS IMPORTANT,” said Wayne, indicating the Blackberry with a jerk of his square, dimpled chin. I could feel myself slip off his forearm as he turned his wrists to operate the device, thumbs pounding against keys like thunder.

I fell.

“MORE DIVINE VISIONS CAN BE EXPERIENCED ON MY WEBSITE,” he bellowed after me.

I careened downward toward New York City, surrounded on all sides by pieces of Chinese garbage. Half-eaten noodles slapped against my face. Burning comets of banned capitalist literature sailed past me, ashes from their tails searing my eyelids, their final destination perhaps a beach on Coney Island. The city raced up to meet me.

I landed in Long Island City, fell to my knees in the parking lot of a seedy motel. A distant red light blinked its way across the night sky, perhaps another incoming message to the colossal Wayne Maker. More likely, an airplane.

Paul Fennel lay on the ground next to me, half propped up by the motel room door frame, his poorly fitting white shirt ruined by a widening bloodstain. Yossarian had shot him right through the heart, as if the Virtue’s burn had been more than just a rash left by a hustling new-age hooker, a bull’s-eye. I held Paul’s hand, I think. It is hard to remember for sure.

“Thanks for keeping up your end of our arrangement,” Yossarian was saying.

He stood over Paul and I, bemusedly gazing down at his handiwork. Meanwhile, his precise hands made quick work of the gun he’d stolen from my office, opening it up and emptying it of bullets. Yossarian pocketed the rounds and dropped the gun in front of me. He put his hands on his hips. Yawned.

“You’ll want to be getting out of here, Mr. Detective,” he said. Gone from his voice was the undercurrent of malice. We were old buddies now. “Law’s likely on the way.”

I searched the sky for justice, for a flaming ball of trash. It didn’t come.

“I don’t suspect we’ll see each other again,” said Yossarian, stepping back. “Be bad for you if we did.”

I knelt there as Yossarian disappeared into the night. In the distance, there were sirens. The denizens of these kinds of motels are savvy enough to count to one-hundred after a gunshot before calling the cops. They’d given me a head start. I picked up the gun, my gun, and staggered to my car. I did not look back at Paul Fennel.

I drove.

Eventually, I slept.

I woke in the early morning on the steps of The McCarren Trump. Behind the glass doors of the tower, a doorman not paid enough to roust layabouts kept a sullen eye on me as I shook feeling back into my sleepy limbs. I spotted my car double-parked a half block away, sharing a scraped paintjob with an adjacent hybrid. The trunk was open, the latch likely broken when Yossarian had forced his way in. Patting down my pockets, I realized that I’d left the keys dangling in the ignition. I figured that here was as good a place as any to abandon the car, unfettered of another responsibility.

Although I hadn’t had a drink, my head swam with that fuzzy hangover feeling. There were chunks of the night I couldn’t remember. For instance, I wasn’t sure why I’d decided it was a good idea to curl up in the lap of The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. Instead, I remembered snatches of a fevered dream where a colossal Wayne Maker clutched me to his breast, a gunshot Paul Fennel floating nearby, empty-eyed Chinese cherubs dancing through the blood red sky around us. It’d been a bad night, of that I was sure.

The skeptical doorman opened the door a crack when I approached. I asked to see Dot and, after a quick call upstairs, he waved me into an elevator.

It’d been a couple years since Dot was more than just a voice on the phone for me. She hadn’t changed much, just the color of the streaks in her cropped black hair. She was Japanese, a distinction I find important to make. Short, lithe but broad-shouldered. She appraised me with nonchalant brevity in keeping with our phone conversations. I could tell she’d never quite grasped the yawning age difference between us until now.

“Wondered how long you’d sleep out there,” she said.

Dot kept her place dark to cut down on the glare. It was a labyrinth of technology, a couple dozen monitors illegally patched into various feeds from around the city. One streamed the front car of The Rudy, the rollercoaster up and running again, looping round and round Times Square. Another tapped into Trump’s security feed, aimed at the front entrance, where the doorman now stood staring down the block at my abandoned car. She’d been watching me sleep.

In the corner, neglected in the web of cords, was a single potted plant, the kind that didn’t require much light.

I tossed open the curtains and looked out at the concrete expanse of The Trump McCarren Plaza. The franchises were opening up, slump-shouldered Brooklynites unlocking metal gates.

“You know, I remember when this used to be a park.”

“I bet you do,” she replied.

Dot closed the curtains and stood in front of me.

“You’ve got blood on you,” she observed.

“Not mine.”

“How bad?” she asked.

I handed her my gun.

“I need that to disappear.”

Dot wrapped the sleeve of her sweater around her hand and took it. She used the weapon to point down a hallway.

“Go take a shower,” she ordered. “Leave your clothes outside the door.”

I did as I was told. Afterward, Dot outfitted me in a suit finer than anything I’d owned. It was a little small. I didn’t question the origin. She made coffee and we drank it in the glow of her monitors, now filled with movement as the city came to life.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

I started at the beginning with John the Bulldog and ended with Yossarian crawling out of the trunk of my car. I told her about Paul Fennel, explaining the boy as best I could, describing the adjustable strings of God’s plan, and my role as the knot.

“I should tell you something,” she said, when I finished, “but it won’t make you feel any better.”

“Is it about man’s search for meaning?”

“The kid,” she began, “Paul, he came to me about a week ago. Found me on the internet. Told me a similar story to what he told you, that he needed help reuniting with his girl, this Virtue. Had a couple hundred bucks squirreled away. Seemed like a loser, not the kid, although yes him too, but the case.”

Dot looked away, searching her monitors for something.

“So, I referred him to you,” she continued.

I nodded, dumb.

“I figured it was something you could handle.”

“I guess you were wrong.”

“I didn’t think about it until after, when you had me run him. I found some of the reports, from the military, about his discharge. He was a mess. I tried to get you to drop it, Royce.”

Dot reached into her desk. She handed me a bus ticket.

“On the phone last night, you sounded so,” she trailed off. “I haven’t heard you like that in awhile.”

“I made a mess of it,” I said.

“Yes,” she answered.

I stood up. I handed Dot back the bus ticket.

“You should get out of the city,” she protested. “Let the heat on this die down.”

“Come on,” I replied. “Where else would have me?”

I picked up the ignored plant from the corner of Dot’s room, leaving an empty circle of dust on the floor. The edges of its leaves had started to turn brown.

“I’m going to take this,” I told her.

Outside, I walked down the clean sidewalks of McCarren Plaza, kept on east until I picked up a trail of Chinese garbage. I followed that trail as it grew, overwhelming curbs that Mayor Kelly’s emergency sanitizers hadn’t yet seen fit to clean. I found a neighborhood where the brownstones had begun to crumble, where there wouldn’t be a camera-feed worth the trouble for Dot to patch into. Despite the loaner suit, too nice for this part of Brooklyn, nobody on the streets looked at me funny.

I stopped into a bodega. I purchased a fresh pack of cigarettes for myself and a bottle of water for the plant. There was an old lawn chair outside and I settled into it. I started to work my way through the cigarettes. I sat there, letting the neighborhood know I was open for business, not thinking about Paul Fennel or what it meant to be unfettered.

I figured it best not to dwell on things.

Jeff Hart lives in Brooklyn. His other writing can be found over at Culture Blues.

Photo by Fabio, from Flickr.

Do you know what is apparently happening in New York City right now? “Forget Socialites. Social Mediaites are at the new people to pine after. And the new dream? Let’s just say it has a lot less to do with moving from the midwest to Manhattan for a chance to schlep uptown in stiletto’s [sic] to fetch coffee for a Conde Nast editor. The new ‘it’ job is clearly a chance to manage Dennis Crowley/Lockhart Steele/Kevin Kearney and co.’s facebook fan pages.” Okay, for starters, updating these people’s “Facebook fan pages” is not actually a job, so it can’t even be an “it” job? For seconders, and I really do say this with some love for the people involved, but really, has any micro-bubble in history had its head forcibly shoved so far inside its bubble’s own asshole? (And yes, I am totally including the housing bubble in that.) The good news! If bloggers and web designers become microcelebrities, with fun gossip blogs following them around, will they all end up addicted to meth and racism like real celebrities? Because that would be terrific entertainment for the coming decade. But anyway, you should know, young aspirant, who apparently wants to update people’s Facebook pages for a living: “There are four people that you should meet and get to know if you are hoping to break out into this new media club in NYC.” Four! You should meet them! They are named! The new dream! This new media club!

by Awl Sponsors

Are you old enough to remember doing research without the Internet at a real (not virtual!) library, or having to carry quarters so you could make a pay phone call in an emergency? It wasn’ t all that long ago, yet it feels so foreign to us now. Some time in the future, you might entertain a child with stories of how tough your childhood was because you couldn’t get to the cloud.

OK, so you didn’ t have to walk uphill in the snow both ways to go to school like your parents did, but without Windows 7 and the cloud, times were still pretty tough. If you wanted to talk to your friends or compare history notes, there was no such thing as HD Chat to discuss tasks and share files simultaneously. And if you forgot the disc (remember those?) with your work presentation at home, you certainly couldn’ t access your PC using Remote Desktop to grab the file.

Oh, and remember when photos were something your mom kept in an album on the coffee table to embarrass you, not the cool and carefully edited shots of you hanging out with the cast of “ The Big Bang Theory” thanks to Photo Fuse.

People like to say the old days were much simpler, but who are we kidding?! Growing up on the cloud is pretty awesome!

Another important anniversary: It was 25 years ago that Gambino crime boss Paul Castellano was whacked outside of Sparks in midtown, ushering in the John Gotti era. Man, the days take forever, but the years go by like that.

It wasn’t so long ago that the Chargers were coached by Marty Schottenheimer, a man who looked like an extra from a control tower scene in Top Gun and probably slept in aviator shades and who barked into his headset with such ferocity that you could actually watch it melt over the course of a game. When Schottenheimer was fired because He Couldn’t Win The Big One, he was replaced by Norv Turner, who was at the time almost a joke — a thwarted, dad-faced would-be offensive guru who kept coaching teams with crummy offenses. At the time, I wrote about him as a tragic figure of sorts — a fraudulent genius who was, like so many of us, waiting fearfully to be discovered as such. But then ol’ Norvis actually won some playoff games in San Diego, and now he’s accepted as normal — just another NFL coach who, while stuck with his own struggles Winning The Big One, is at least no longer either punchline or joke. The same could presumably happen for crazy-faced 49ers coach Mike Singletary someday, and I might eventually look back and be like “years ago, I compared Singletary to a crazed bear running around your campsite, and thought it was weird that he wore a four-foot wooden crucifix around his neck and blinked only three times per hour.” That is certainly possible. But I wouldn’t bet on it. I would bet, instead, on the Chargers (-9). The coin is going with Singletary and his crummy Niners. The coin may have seen the future.

Photo by Jon Oropeza, from Flickr.

Well here’s another great Christmas song. Kanye West, who as you know has been on something of a hot streak, has assembled a large group of hip-hop carolers for his lovely tribute to the holidays in Harlem. Big Sean, Cam’ron, Cyhi Da Prynce, Jim Jones, Musiq Soulchild, Pusha T, Vado. But young singer Teyana Taylor steals the whole thing (but in a good way, not like the Grinch), making the hook sound like the kind of yuletide classic we’ve been roasting chestnuts to for years.

More reasons to have a drink with dinner! Take it away, Science:

For many people, a glass of wine helps make food feel like it’s going down more smoothly. But drinking alcohol with a rich and fatty meal causes food to linger in the stomach longer, found a new study — leading people to feel fuller over a greater period of time. The findings offer new insight into the complicated and multi-faceted ways that alcohol interacts with digestion and appetite.

I am not a scientist, but my research in this area has also shown that having alcohol with dinner makes both the meal and the people you are eating it with immensely more tolerable. The more you etc.!