Most Recent Posts
Paul Caron’s Day By Day IRS Scandal Has Jumped The Shark – Part 1
The numbering starts on Day 5 (May 14,2013) with a collection of posts including a video of President Obama throwing his purported minions under the bus. On Day 27, the precedent is set that will allow the scandal to continue indefinitely as a TIGTA report on conference spending becomes part of the narrative. The Treasury Inspector General For Tax Administration is one of the many Inspector Generals in the federal government. The thing about internal auditors is that if they don’t find something, they think they are not doing their job. Every TIGTA report will henceforth have a shot at becoming part of the scandal narrative.
Boston Bernie Backers Probably Not Bashing Bruins
Of course what fans care about is whether their teams are winning or in the case of Boston fans also whether the New York teams they hate are losing. The people promoting the high state income taxes are bad for your hockey team theory might be disappointed how last season went. At the top of three divisions were teams from really bad tax environments (New York, Montreal and Anaheim). If you took the trouble to correlate goals scored with friendliness of the tax environment, you would find the relationship was inverse.
If I was going to construct an ideological explanation for that apparent anomaly, it would be that people who are heavily influenced by the local tax environment in spite of individual excellence, might not be great team players.
In the end despite the warning of Americans For Tax Reform. Boston fans can rest easy for now about the Bernie backers promoting the millionaire tax. It really might not be such a hot idea, but the all important fate of our professional sports teams probably does not hinge on it.
Bernie Sanders May Have Drawn Crowd Over 30,000 In Boston – Not Much Tax Talk
Karen Higgins, President of the National Nurses Union spoke about “breaking the class ceiling” and Bernie being for education not incarceration and the that he would be the President of the 99%. Jimmy O’Brien President of the Boston Carmen’s Union spoke about a move to privatize parts of the MBTA. They were followed by Jillian Brownsford, a nursing student at UMass-Boston and environmental author Bill McKibben, who took off his hat to show us he was as gray as Bernie.
Rand Paul Suffers Setback In Foreign Reporting Lawsuit
Gabriel Zucman in his The Hidden Wealth of Nations-The Scourge of Tax Havens makes the case that as much as 8% of the world’s financial wealth is squirreled away in tax havens. The estimated number is $7.6 trillion. His basis for making the argument is one that an accountant has to love. When statisticians draw up national balance sheets investments by foreigners in that country are counted as liabilities and investments by the country’s own citizens in other countries count as assets. It turns out what we used to call the “big balance sheet in the sky” is out of balance with more credits than debits.
Zucman believes most of the assets are hidden to avoid taxes. He estimates the avoided taxes worldwide annually to be $200 billion. At any rate Zucman’s proposed solution to the problem, a “worldwide registry of financial wealth” would probably make the brains of the plaintiffs in the Crawford case explode.
President Obama Could End Special Tax Treatment For Two Twenty Guys
As a political analyst, I make a good tax preparer. Nonetheless, I’m going to say that President Obama killing carried interest by regulation seems like great politics. The attack on carried interest is one of the key populist pieces of both Bush and Trump’s tax proposals. Here is a chance for the President to pull the populist rug out from under them.
The regulation that Professor Fleischer proposes is drafted so that its effect would be fairly limited. When I discussed the idea of using regulation back in 2011, there was concern by some experts that such an approach could create too much uncertainty.
Trump Tax Plan Would Increase Deficit By Over $10 Trillion
For perspective, according to this site projected federal revenue for fiscal year 2015 is $3.2 trillion. So on a lazy math basis, we could call it a third. You know the old joke about a billion here a billion there, pretty soon you are talking about real money. Doesn’t work that way with a trillion. A trillion is real money all by its lonesome.
Trump’s Plan Inverts Traditional Tax Planning Makes Carried Interest Moot
Trump’s scheme would seem to make it so everyone will want to be an independent contractor and that ordinary business income will be the most favored type of income. Whatever he thinks, the transition to this system will not be simple. Right now the IRS fights with S corporations that pay meagre or no salaries to avoid employment taxes. Now we will add a 10% income tax spread to the mix. What the policy rationale is for taxing an independent contractor at 60% of the maximum rate for an employee is a mystery to me.
The other question to ask is who will want to defer business income with a 401(k) or the like, since the payout might be taxed at a higher rate than the deduction yields in savings.
A Slick Estate Planning Trick And Intimations Of Mortality
Although they are figured on the same cumulative unified tax table gift taxes are actually lower than estate taxes. Quite a bit lower. Let’s talk large estates where the unified credit is not that significant and likely was used up with gifts in the past. $100 million passing through an estate at the current top marginal rate of 40% leaves $60 million for the heirs. Prior to death that same $100 million could support a gift of over $71 million and the resulting gift tax of nearly $29 million.
Noted Catholic Historian Not Surprised By Dorothy Day Reference In Pope Francis Speech
The other day I included in a tax post on the IRS and church endorsements of political candidates, the fantasy that Pope Francis might endorse his biggest fan among the...
Yogi Berra’s Sayings Worked Their Way Into Tax Decisions
As is my habit when the prominent pass, I had to check whether he had been involved in tax litigation. I didn’t find anything and my Thomson Reuters Checkpoint is pretty comprehensive and my research skills are pretty good. After all, tax blogging is 90% good research; the other three-quarters is creativity. Nonetheless, Yogi Berra has influenced the tax world through his wisdom and is likely the most quoted baseball player in the body of tax material.