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…

Your typical leveraged buyout kingpin lives in a swanky Park Avenue apartment, or maybe a hollowed-out volcano in the South Pacific. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get some good old-fashioned tax dodging and company buying-out, right in the middle of Utah.

Husband and wife team Lester and Jeanette Mower liked the idea of trading companies for fun. The weird thing is that the confusing part is the legal part: they would create new businesses, merge them with existing public companies, and sell the stock. That meant a blizzard of paperwork, lots of legal fees, and transactions with dozens of banks and brokers. That’s the complicated part.

Next comes the simple part: once they sold… Read more…

South Carolina governor Mark Sanford got into the headlines (and some hot water) for trying to turn down Federal stimulus payments earlier this month. Now, he’s famous for a different reason: in a rambling press statement, he admitted to having an affair with a woman in Argentina. Could this be a serious blow to stimulus opponents?

One commentator, Jeff Seemann, thinks so. Seemann claims that Sanford used stimulus money to pay for the affair:

The state of South Carolina is granted 2.8 billion dollars in federal stimulus money.
After originally rejecting the money, the SC Supremes smack Sanford down and force the state to accept the money.
Sanford later

… Read more…

Many people (the Tax Rascal included) have gotten up painfully early today to cast votes in this historic election. It’s a common argument that the voting process is flawed because voting happens on a day when most people would be working — so Democrats argue that it punishes students and blue-collar workers, while Republicans claim that it helps out welfare recipients. Both sides also argue that civic participation has value, regardless of who wins. So should we have a tax credit for voting?

The opposite idea has already been tried, and thoroughly discredited. One popular technique in the segregated South was to require a poll tax. This flat fee charged to every voter discouraged the… Read more…

While yesterday, most people were (rightfully) concerned about the 777-point Dow crash, many stories were largely ignored, or at least, barely mentioned. Here is a list of those stories that you probably missed yesterday (in no particular order):

1. Canada Gets Hit by a Hurricane

Hurricane Kyle went through parts of Maine and hit Canada, bringing heavy rain and wind.

2. Ron Paul says it how it is: corporatism – not free markets led to crash

3. For the past 2 weeks, people in Tenesse, George, & North Carolina have limited access to gas

People in these states are getting ever more aggravated as they… Read more…

Tax evasion is usually less exciting than it might sound. Often, it just amounts to shuffling some papers to create fake losses or shift profits — or, more often, ‘forgetting’ to do the paperwork that might cause a taxable gain.

Not so with the case of Igor Olenicoff and Brad Birkenfeld. Everyone in this deal tells a different story (one thing every version has in common is that the narrator is innocent), but it looks like it went something like this:

Birkenfeld was a middling banker at a very well-reputed bank, with exactly one great client. Igor Olenicoff was a billionaire with office space and apartments in Vegas, Arizona and Florida —… Read more…