Fake Tax Cuts, Terrifying Foreclosure Videos, Dog Taxes, and More

We’re all bracing for the next debate, but the taxosphere is rolling right along. Today brought in still more outraged comments about the bailout/stabilization plan/boondoggle-upon-a-boondoggle-upon-a-boondoggle. There’s a lot to catch up on in today’s tax blog posts:

• Karl Okamoto at Conglomerate notes that the new bailout bill ends a tax loophole for hedge fund managers. Could be good news, but since I’ve never heard a hedge fund manager’s fees quoted in terms of after-tax income, this might just mean that investors will learn to pay the two point five and twenty-five.
• Russ Fox of Taxable Talk has the start of what promises to be a fascinating series on Obama’s tax proposals. It’s a bracingly cynical look at the way things work in Washington (one would expect a Chicago politician to know this kind of thing already). Basically, Fox’s thesis is that the only parts of Obama’s plan that could be enacted are the harmful ones, and the best parts are the most difficult to actually get into law.

  It’s a brutal, point-by-point deconstruction of the Obama tax plan, complete with some well thought-out predictions of the longer-term effects of Obama’s policies. What’s great about this is that it’s less partisan than you would expect. Someone who respects and admires Obama could read this and come away thinking that it’s too bad some ideals can’t be written into law until they’re supported by the entire population; a more conservative viewer can read this and see further evidence that Obama’s plans and promises are unrealistic. We’ll just have to see what he says about McCain’s plan next.

• Kay Bell at Don’t Mess With Taxes hosts the 41st Tax Carnival. There’s a great variety here: lots of broader posts on the economic situation, and a few that go into the deeper details of individual filings.
• Paul Caron, also known as Taxprof informs us that you can now buy the IRS’s 2006 tax data by zip code. For data junkies interested in taxes, this is a dream come true. For the somewhat-overlapping group of intellectually curious people who don’t like to spend money frivolously, the cost — $25 per state, or $500 for the whole package — is a nightmare.
• Mitchell A Port, the California Tax Attorney, has a great list of links for small-business tax issues. Given the current state of the economy, many people are thinking of starting their own company — quitting your job isn’t such a big leap when you’re worried about losing it anyway. So this is a timely guide to avoiding tax headaches in the future.
• For the technology-oriented DIY crowd, Clever Dude has a neat project: build your own debt scales, using only a little bit of CSS and HTML. This is not as hard as it sounds to the uninitiated — basically, it’s an advanced form of copy-and-paste, but it gives you a chance to display your financial progress in graphical form.
• The Digerati Life presents a sobering video on foreclosure, with commentary. Not the most cheerful film I’ve seen, but it’s good to know how these things work. Foreclosure is one of those risks that’s so terrible we don’t like to think about the details, but if nothing else it puts the numbers in perspective.
• Linda Beale at A Taxing Matter points out the absurdity of Congress rejecting $700 billion in spending — unless it comes with $100 billion in tax cuts. This illustrates the fundamental problem of forming policy: that the easiest way to negotiate is to make collectively stupid decisions that benefit a small group. If you ever find a policy that you simply cannot explain, ask yourself: how many people would be willing to spend $100,000 to make this a law — and how many would be willing to spend that much money to repeal it? For something like sugar subsidies, ethanol, and now wooden arrowheads and wool research, this algorithm produces very enlightening results.
• Lubna Kably of Talking Tax offers a collection of the weirdest taxes around the world. I’m voting for the Netherlands Dogs-Per-Household tax as, by far, the weirdest. There’s no way this didn’t start as a practical joke.