Most Recent Posts
President Trump Needs My Three Bucks To Make America Great And I’m Letting Him Down
As the month of November is closing down, I'm going to be letting my buddy Donald down - again. It's really not right for me to call the President of the United States...
Hovindology Update
The latest news in the Hovindology/Hovindicator world is rumors of Kent Hovind's divorce from Mary Tocco. My view is that Hovindologists should pretty much leave the...
Stunning Tax Court Victory Against IRS In Horse Case
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Taishoff. I spent the day in Manhattan and managed to arrange a lunch with him at a little French place where I had Le Burger. I managed to grab the check and Mr. Taishoff nodded approvingly as I wrote his name on the back of the credit card receipt before starting the long walk to the statue of George M. Cohan who did not have to concern himself with such things.
Citigroup Ready For Sharp Earnings Hit If Tax Cuts And Jobs Bill Passes
So Citigroup is ready, but it is not clear that anybody else is. If President Trump does get a bill to sign with the big corporate rate cut and the deemed repatriation, analysts in the future will have to put an asterisk next to 2017 earnings when they are looking at trends. It will be interesting to see how shocked everybody is when the earnings reports come in.
I expected that the tax cut would have a favorable impact on Apple’s earnings to the tune of over nine billion dollars, but I was only thinking about its deferred tax liability. Apple has $232 billion in untaxed foreign earnings and will get hit with some percentage of that from the deemed repatriation, if the bill passes. Why did I look at Apple? Well its ticker AAPL is first in the alphabet. I will leave it to my readers to work their way through the rest of the S&P.
Colonel Retread The Best And Worst Memoir I Have Ever Read
The Recollections of Colonel Retread 1942-1945 Carlton Ketchum Hart Books 1976 I don't know what it tells you about an author when you pick up a personally...
Will Destruction Of Johnson Amendment Destroy Charity?
President Trump made a down payment on his promise with an executive order. Unless you apply the “truthful hyperbole” standard that then developer Trump recommended in the Art of the Deal, the executive order did not destroy the Johnson amendment. Arguably it did not do anything at all to it. Section 5201 of the House version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is much more robust.
Under the provision, this language, known as the Johnson amendment, is qualified so that an organization exempt from tax under Code section 501(c)(3) would not fail to be treated as organized and operated exclusively for its respective non-profit purpose for engaging in political speech, assuming such political speech is made in the ordinary course of the organization’s business and the associated expenses of that speech are de minimis
That hardly puts the Johnson amendment on the eve of destruction, but it does address the concern that generated the fairly silly protest known as Pulpit Freedom Sunday which fell on October 2 this year. The idea is that preachers would give politically oriented sermons, record them and send them to the IRS – daring, nay double daring the IRS to come after them. Given all the attention given to Pulpit Freedom Sunday, it probably worked up to a triple dawg dare.
Tax Cuts And Jobs Act – House Bill Invokes The Culture War With Unborn Child Definition
A gift to an unborn child is considered a present gift and not a future gift. Here is a tax court decision from 1940 on point.
The term “life in being” is part of the Rule Against Perpetuities originally and has to do with the maximum term of a trust under common law. If the child is ventre sa mere (or in utero) at the time of the gift, then the child is “in being”. As Lord Chief Justice Willis (you remember him don’t you?) said:
” An infant en ventre sa mere, or in the mother’s womb, is supposed in law to be born, for many purposes. It is capable of having a legacy, or a surrender of a copyhold estate, made to it. It may have a guardian assigned to it, and it is enabled to have an estate limited to its use, and to take afterwards by such limitation, as if it were then actually born. And in this point the civil law agrees with ours.”
Tax Cuts And Job Acts – Senate Bill Favors Jobs And Gigs
My tendency is to think that the traditional employer-employee relationship, much as I might mourn it, is doomed. Arguably, its origin in the laws about masters and servants might mean that it will ultimately not be missed. The dystopian nightmare would be that as inequality explodes, some form of indentured servitude will be instituted for people without property. If you want to be really disturbed read Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters by George Fitzhugh which was published in 1857.
What is falsely called Free Society, is a very recent invention. It proposes to make the weak, ignorant and poor, free, by turning them loose in a world owned exclusively by the few (whom nature and education have made strong, and whom property has made stronger,) to get a living. In the fanciful state of nature, where property is unappropriated, the strong have no weapons but superior physical and mental power with which to oppress the weak. Their power of oppression is increased a thousand fold, when they become the exclusive owners of the earth and all the things thereon. They are masters without the obligations of masters, and the poor are slaves without the rights of slaves.
House Bill Repeal Of GST Would Defuse A Ticking Time Bomb For Trust Fund Kids
You can’t beat the GST by having your trust have a 1,000-year term in Colorado. The law indicates that when the last of the children pass, there is a termination for GST purposes. At that point the grandchildren get promoted to non-skip persons and the trustees can start distributing to them without incurring GST. When the last of the grandchildren die, there is another termination and the great-grandchildren are promoted. When the last of them dies, there is another termination, and so on.
IRS And Scientology – Everything You Want To Know And More
The long struggle between Scientology and the IRS was put to rest with a 1993 secret agreement, that was later leaked. The IRS refused to confirm the leaked document, but there is little doubt about its authenticity. I thought the agreement was pretty benign, but Scott Pilutik thinks I got it wrong. I find it ironic that the agreement is similar in length to the Treaty of Westphalia.