Rick Perry for President hits a hurdle with his optional flat tax

Locked in a competition with Herman Cain to see who can propose the most crazily unrealistic tax reform that panders to the delusions of the Republican base, Rick Perry delivered a speech in South Carolina Tuesday in which he outlined his plan for (kind of) scrapping the current tax code and offering taxpayers the choice of an optional 20% flat income tax.

At the CNN debate in Las Vegas, during which Perry seemed to awake from his stupor while Herman Cain took fire over apples and oranges, Perry promised a tax reform plan that could compete with the pizza mogul’s 9-9-9 plan. “I’ll… Read more…

The rich and famous who’ve avoided the taxman, at their own peril

Who pays taxes and who doesn’t? It’s a question that seems to occupy our country, what with people debating President Obama’s proposed Buffet Tax and Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan. But if who should pay more taxes is a question up for debate, here are some people who definitely didn’t pay their fair share.

The IRS consistently goes after celebs for unpaid taxes, in the hope that they might serve as a cautionary tale to us regular folks. Celebrity travails, the theory goes, will scare us into paying our taxes. At the very least it injects a little variety into the usual tabloid fodder.… Read more…

Tea Party politics buoy Herman Cain’s bid for President, but questions remain

No dearth of material has been published in recent weeks about the bad math in Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan. It would effectively scrap the current tax system and replace it with a 9% business flat tax, a 9% individual flat tax, and a 9% national sales tax. Did he steal it from Sim City? Is it the price of a pizza? The work of the devil? We can only guess.

What is pretty clear, however, is that Herman Cain’s plan would mean a significant tax increase for the roughly 30 million low-income Americans… Read more…

After Denmark’s fat tax, many Americans are wondering, “Should we have a fat tax?”

The taxosphere is all abuzz with the news that the government of Denmark recently imposed a so-called ‘fat tax’ on its citizens in an attempt to discourage Danes from consuming fatty foods.

The fat tax increases the price of any food containing more than 2.3% saturated fats by 16 kroner ($2.90) per kilo (2.2lbs). To give you an idea of what kind of real effect the fat tax will have, it will increase the price of a burger by about $0.15 and a small package of butter by about $0.40.

Contrary to what many people assume, the fat… Read more…

Free checking ends as banks up fees in response to new federal regulation

Hey there Rascals, here’s a piece of financial news that’s not strictly tax related but definitely relevant for anyone with a checking account. According to this article in USA Today, about ⅔ of major banks are ending free checking. This is a move that’s been looming on the horizon for about a year now, but the banks are finally making good on their threats.

Here are some numbers for you on the rapid demise of the free checking account: Only 45% of non-interest checking accounts are still free, as opposed to 65% last year and 76% in 2009. And… Read more…

Obama’s new deficit plan is as high on populist rhetoric as it is on taxes

The conservative’s dilemma

The American conservative has reached a certain crisis of conscience. With the American economy caught between a rock and a hard place, he must sail cautiously the dangerous waters of economic stalemate and double-dip recession fears, charting a delicate course between two equal and opposite dangers.

On the one side stands taxes, to which he is ideologically opposed, not so much because he objects to funding the government, but because he believes the government’s role should be a small one and because he fears the money, which he could put to work, will just be wasted. On… 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…

Rumors of a scandal swirl as the bankrupt corporation owes taxpayers $535 million

Four months ago, there was President Obama, intrepid stimulator of the economy, sage creator of jobs, fount of hope and change, summoner of transcendence and transparency in governance, on a visit to the Solyndra plant in Fremont, CA, inspecting solar panels on the factory floor, shaking the hands of construction workers–in hard hats and reflective vests!–and addressing the beneficiaries of his stimulus and the innovators leading the world in the green energy technology revolution. He closed his speech at Solyndra, the recipient of a $535 million dollar loan from the U.S. taxpayer, with a ringing endorsement of the company and its work:… 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… Read more…

The Obama Jobs Speech Proposes a Solution and Sparks Tax Debate

President Barack Obama’s jobs speech to a joint session of Congress last Thursday night seemed to provide a blip of hope against a backdrop of unrelenting economic malaise, political gridlock in the capital, and the recent news that job growth had ground to a halt in August, the worst performance since September 2010. In an uncharacteristic display of executive leadership, President Obama abandoned the conciliatory, above-the-partisan-fray tone that has characterized much of his Presidency as well as the sweepingly inspirational, and conveniently vague, platitudes that swept him to electoral victory and, sounding confident and even mildly combative, delivered his plan to get America working… Read more…