Chipotle Mexican Grill abruptly changes its tipping policy. The Tax Rascal is on the case.

Early in the spring, a strange thing happened at Chipotle Restaurant. The tip jar vanished. This brought a noticeable measure of consternation to the many devotees of the fast casual restaurant’s terrific, gloriously calorific burritos. The tip jar, you see, was a medium of communication, a locus of not so subtle allusion and inference. As in, I the generous buyer, made your tip bigger and you, the seller, added one more dab of velvety sour cream, boosted my sweet chili corn salsa content, supersized my share of verdant guacamole, swelled the portion of spicy barbacoa, in short made my burrito plumper.

Chipotle Restaurant’s removal of… Read more…

How Osama Bin Laden dead may affect taxes

The initial reaction to these headlines is easy to guess. What, no? What is the connection between Osama Bin Laden, his death, and taxes, really? Oh come on, seriously, this is just another blatant attempt to surf the news, isn’t it?

Well, without venturing too deeply into chaos theory, with its butterfly wings flapping there and tornadoes starting here – indeed can we legitimately apply the so-called butterfly effect, which presupposes a “small” change producing “large” differences in outcome, to an event as momentous as the September 11th attack to which Bin Laden is tied, his death being, in the end, a mere footnote to the monumental event? – it is still… Read more…