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Most Recent Posts

Senate Tax Cuts And Jobs Bill Caters Less To Billionaires Than House Bill – Does More For Jobs

The House bill does nothing for people making less than $260,000 (joint returns, lower thresholds) when it comes to business income.  And above that, it discriminates against people who actually work in the businesses and many service providers who don’t require a lot of capital.

The Senate bill is much more generous to those further down the food chain.  The Senate bill is probably a little simpler than the House bill.  Rather than creating a special maximum rate on a certain class of income (25%), it allows a deduction of 17.4% on pass-through income.  Arguably that is equivalent to a rate of around 33% on top bracket people, but it benefits everybody who has flow-through income.  Even the service providers like doctors and accountants get the break if their taxable income is below $150,000 ($75,000) for singles.

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Not Everybody Gets A Pony From Santa Trump This Tax Cut Christmas

Some commentary will indicate that the act favors the high income, but I see a different theme here.  The really big cuts – the corporate rate reduction, the maximum rate on business income of individuals and the repeal of the estate tax and GST seem to favor those who get wealth without working – the New Gentry or the Entitled Children (I think I might have a poll as to which of those to use).  Many people who provide services without using capital don’t get the new preferred rate.  And some of those revenue gainers are directed at people who might be quite well off, but are still working for their money.  I’m thinking the deferred comp, entertainment expenses and rules that make it more painful to pay high salaries.

This is quite a bit different than the tax reform push in the seventies and eighties.  There was a hands the cross the aisle kumbaya moment between Ronald Reagan and Bill Bradley when they commiserated about the very high rate that they had had to pay – Bradley for playing basketball and Reagan for playing the Gipper. Prior to the big rate reduction in 1986, there was a maximum tax on personal service income that made the maximum rate on income you worked for 50%, while the coupon clippers still had to pay 70%.

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Republican Tax Cuts And The New Gentry

Actually I think, we may and it looks to me that the Tax Cuts And Jobs Act is meant for them,  It’s really amusing because a more accurate title might be The Tax Cuts For People Who Don’t Need Jobs Act. I use the word “need” advisedly.  Many of the New Gentry have, what you and I might call jobs.  And they might work very hard at them and be well paid.  What they actually have though are careers.  Careers and jobs look very similar from the outside, but they are different.  A career is something you do to contribute to society and have a sense of affirmative purpose.  It might be a sacred calling or perhaps a frivolous pursuit.  A job is something that you do to feed your family.

A good job is clean work with no heavy lifting that pays well.  Those jobs look a lot like careers.

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Everything You Need To Know About The Tax Cuts And Jobs Act

My reaction to that is “Twenty bucks a week, whoopty doo”.  Don’t get me wrong,  I have a rule that my kids are not allowed to use the word “only” in association with any amount greater than four dollars, but still.  Imagine Joe Median saying to himself “Thank you, President Trump, now I can finally take the kids to Disneyworld. ” And then he realizes that a thousand and change would maybe pay for the tickets for three days and he lives a long way from Orlando and does not have any relatives he can crash on.  OK OK you want to know what is in the bill, not my thoughts about the Magic Kingdom.

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Waiting For The Tax Cut Shoe To Drop

But, no.  I had to go back to my youthful ambition and become a writer of sorts.  So I have been obsessively watching for little tidbits and at 8:00 AM on November 2, 2017, am already on my third cup of coffee, because a draft bill is promised to drop at 9:00 AM.

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Manafort And Gates – That’s How They Got Al Capone

Manafort And Gates – That’s How They Got Al Capone

As it works out, in the 12 count indictment seven of the counts are for failure to file FBAR.  For Manafort it was 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. For Gates it was 2011, 2012 and 2013.  You may read in some stories, like this one in the Washington Post, that Manafort and Gates are facing a combined potential of 150 years in prison.  If that were true the FBARs would account for 70 of those years.  That is not, however, how sentencing actually works.  The United States Sentencing Commission has a manual on how to compute guideline sentences.  It is a fairly complicated process involving the determination of an “offense level” that is then cross-referenced with a criminal history.  There is a chapter on how multiple counts enter into determining the offence level.  That is also complicated, but, bottom line, it is not additive.  Of course, Manafort is nearly seventy years old, so even a much more modest guideline sentence might intimidate him.

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IRS Scandal Ends As It Began With An Apology

IRS Scandal Ends As It Began With An Apology

Although the matter, of course, has a prehistory a report of Lerner’s apology is what Paul Caron, the indefatigable scandal chronicler, counts as Day 1 of the IRS Scandal. It really does seem that it is ending where it began with essentially the same apology. The Wall Street Journal reports that Edward Greim one of the lawyers in the Norcal case said that they would be getting a “seven-figure” amount, although he declined to name a more exact number.  Split 428 ways, that might not amount to very much per group particularly if some of it gets applied to attorneys fees.

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Tax Court Expects Better Tax Judgment From Submarine Skipper Than CPA/Lawyer

What really impresses me about Mr. McNeill is his first career. He graduated from Annapolis in 1962 and served in the Navy until retirement, at the rank of commander, in 1981.  His most notable assignment, to me anyway, was command of USS Tautog  SSN-639.  I have this fascination with submarine skippers and devour their memoirs, a topic which I never expected to work into this blog, but here it is.  Tautog was a Sturgeon-class fast attack submarine.  Command of a nuclear submarine and command of the Naval Nuclear Power School convince me that Commander McNeill had an awful lot on the ball.

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