The Republican contest staggers towards its first showdown in Iowa

Imagine if you will a latter day Rip Van Winkle awaking from a three month slumber only to be coarsely thrust in the front row at the latest of these endlessly recurring Republican debates.

Having shaken the cobwebs from his befogged head and readied it for the battering, he would surely be astonished to find that during his absence the former speaker of House, the dishonorable Newt Gingrich, had, if only for a short spell, managed to float well above his competitors in polls nationwide.

True, our Rip would have been spared the far-fetched, frankly bizarre drama of the intervening months. He will have thankfully… Read more…

President Obama introduces his deficit-reduction plan

Mr. Obama tries a combative stance on for size

Who knows what might have caused the president to shift gears? Perhaps it was because he was twice rebuffed by the permatan Speaker of the House, the right honorable John Boehner of Virginia, during the course of the budget talks in July. Perhaps it was Mr. Boehner’s very public smack down, the next month, of Mr. Obama’s request to present his jobs bill to a joint session of congress on the 7th of September.

That last one surely must have stung. Especially as the proposed date was unceremoniously pushed forward because it happened to clash with a scheduled debate of… Read more…

Warren Buffett Urges Congress to Stop Coddling the Super-rich

Not days after the Rascal’s better than evens prediction that the debate on taxation would burn brightly through next year’s November elections, here is Warren Buffett with fresh fuel for the flame. Mr. Buffett, lest you forgot, is currently the world’s third richest man, with an Everest high fortune assessed at $50 billion.

In his most recent op-ed in this past Sunday’s New York Times, Buffett once again urges Congress to tax the mega-rich, including of course himself. The Sage of Omaha, as the Berkshire Hathaway investor is known, has made that same pitch on numerous occasions in the last few years. But his… Read more…

The 2012 elections will be all about taxes like them or not.

Tax mavens looking forward to next year’s general election are feverishly sharpening their knives. Because, make no mistake about it, taxes will figure grandly at the coming feast. The recent, Kick the can debt ceiling agreement has made this unavoidable. By their intransigence on precisely the issue of taxation, the members of the Tea Party have contrived to make taxes and spending the main item on the electoral menu.

And it is not solely the matter of whether to tax or not to tax, but whom to tax, how to tax, and at what rate. The 2012 elections, with 33 senate seats at… Read more…

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… 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… Read more…