This is where I was going with this and she seemed to completely omit that from her answer to me. It does say that you are basically choosing to pay tax on the current SSA required income for the year when using the optional method. Plus, there is the requirement that you NET at least $400 in prior years because they want you to be steadily be working as a self employed person to use this option. Where in the tax law does it say that I have report or take every single deduction available to me if I wanted to make sure my net for the year was above that $400 for the next year? It seems unfair to lose the ability to elect to pay the taxes and earn the full work credits for a year because you had to take all the deductions and your NET ended up being $276 for example. The SSA states that they don't care if you don't owe income tax to the IRS, they say you can still report income and pay SSA taxes in their literature so it is confusing.
