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 announces that he will use several hundred million dollars of the stimulus to pay down the state's budget deficit. Sanford's salary is paid for from the South Carolina budget. Sanford went to Argentina to see his mistress on the dime of the South Carolina taxpayer. Which, if true, means that all money spent by anyone paid by the government counts as stimulus money. In other words, Jeff Seemann is also claiming that President Obama spent the stimulus on cigarettes. This, by the way, is not the first time Seemann has had any run-ins ...

You know what's sane and normal? Having trouble letting go when a loved one dies. You know what's not so sane or normal? Dressing up as a deceased parent for years in order to collect social security benefits and rent subsidies. Irene Prusik passed away in 2003. But Thomas Prusik-Parkin kept on collecting her benefits for years. This had to take some planning: he started by fudging the numbers on her death certificate so she wouldn't be listed as dead. After that, it was just a simple matter of, um: donning a wig, nail polish and dresses to impersonate his dead mom and collect $115,000 in Social Security and rent subsidies. Prusik-Parkin really exemplifies the idea of giving people a "hand up, rather than a handout." He had to work hard to earn the government benefits of two people. In addition to the creepy cross-dressing disguises, he sued himself for selling his house to himself, and filed a fake affadavit from a fake relative to support the claim. All that, and he still got evicted! The New York Daily News has the whole bizarre story. Oh, and one other thing: today, it came out that he kept the casket in his living room. Which you'd ...

Californians pay the highest sales tax in the nation. Their top-bracket earners have the second-highest income tax rate in the country. The middle class to upper class — those making $48,000 to $1 million — are right up there among the most highly taxed, too. California's gas tax, at 35.3 cents per gallon, is third-highest in the nation. Corporations face the highest tax rates in the West. California is famous for having high taxes, but they're still a subject of perennial debate. Outside of California, the facts are pretty stark: state residents take home less of their paychecks than almost anyone else, and more gets taken out of the after-tax money they spend. Add that to the generally high cost of living, and the situation looks pretty awful. But one of the reasons Californians can stand it is that their state is not too shabby in the spending department. Great schools like Caltech, Berkeley, and Stanford mean that the state has a well-educated population with an emphasis on technology. Add that to the state's formerly red-hot property market, and you can see why they were spending so much: they were making lots of money, too! As with all high-tax situations, the real question ...

Think back to the summer of 2000. The NASDAQ had, well, NASDAQ'd, all of Silicon Valley was nursing a collective hangover, and the rest of the country was getting back to normal. Imagine if, in the midst of all that, someone had gotten a clever policy idea: now that nobody is starting new startups, we could just gather together smart 22-year-olds, give them thousand-dollar office chairs, five thousand-dollar computers, and million-dollar stock options packages, and we could pay for it all with taxpayer money! Okay, that's crazy & but it's less crazy than using tax credits as down payments on a new house (first mentioned on Taxrascal in this real estate crisis, redux, post). At least during the dot-com bubble, people were excited about starting new companies. The real estate bubble involved people excited about other people paying too much for dirt. What's worse is that this has some support, from people who should know better: "It is a very attractive offering, and basically it addresses one of the hurdles that keeps more people from buying a home - getting help with the down payment or paying closing costs," says Bob Meighan, a vice ...