Andrew Kay Passes – Helped Accountants Abandon Pencil Pushing
This is more reminiscing than a technical article, so please forgive me if I am a bit off on some of the details. Our first Kaypro came with two disk drives that took 5 1/4 inch “floppy” disks. The operating system was called CPM and had something called virtual memory architecture. The CPU (I’m not sure that is the right term, but that’s what we called it) had only 64k. So when it was feeling overburdened it would save things temporarily on the disks. This could be a little disturbing sometimes because things had a way of disappearing from large spreadsheets. One thing that I have retained from my Kayrpo days is a suspicion of very large spreadsheets.
New Hampshire Supreme Court Declines More Power In Tuition Credit Case
Standing is probably the primary way that potentially unconstitutional tax benefits are defended. The concept is that you need to show that you specifically are being harmed. If you think that something is just unfair, you should write to your legislature. We will soon see whether standing will work to protect the federal tax benefit that allows the mega-pastors of the mega-churches to exclude from their taxable income housing allowances that can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
What is probably most interesting about the Duncan decision is that the New Hampshire Supreme Court had to first engage in a great act of self abnegation, before it could dismiss this case on standing. The New Hampshire legislature had amended the state statutes in order to create a notion of “taxpayer standing”, which is what the plaintiffs in the case were invoking. The statute read in part:
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Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.