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…

Rasmussen named me as one of the Top Twenty Blogs for Accountants, which is an honor, even as dead last. I hope any new readers coming here from that enjoy their poke around and learn something.

California’s Proposition 19, known ever so formally as the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010 is being championed by a lot of people because it would have massive tax benefits. And it will–just not the ones you expect.

The biggest tax benefit of Proposition 19 would be the cut in law enforcement, not the revenue from those who like to pass to the left. In fact, that revenue is projected to be pretty small, since it’s all sales tax based. Even at a higher “sin tax” rate, it’s only projected to bring in $500 million annually. Nothing to sneeze at for a state as in debt as California, but nothing that will save… Read more…

Last week congress passed H.R. 946 into law, generally known as the known as the Plain Writing Act. What this is will hopefully do is make sure that government documents can be understood by the average person. Fewer acronyms, less jargon, more straight talk.

Great, right? Finally some governance for the people, by the people, and understood by the people. But, like many federal government laws, it has some flaws.

First, it’s ridiculous that this law even needed to be enacted. For those of us who are fans of smaller government, we want less laws (and more common sense) not more laws that legislate common sense. Of course people should be given forms that make… Read more…

The smell of fall is in the air, which means the smell of rising panic over the tax extension deadline is approaching! For those of you who had the foresight to miss the April 15th deadline, but fill out the extension form, your time is almost up!

And for those of us who work in the tax biz, it’s our time to contemplate the value of a tax extension. Me? I’m all for them. I think people shouldn’t be penalized for missing deadlines, nor do I think the government should be allowed to slam you with high interest fees the second your taxes are past due.

The thing that always fascinates me about extensions is… Read more…

It may have given a needed boost to the middle class last year, but the Making Work Pay credit also caused a lot of headaches. And since we’ve allegedly been out of this recession for a year, it’s about time we stopped giving handouts to taxpayers.

What’s more enjoyable is that, in any other year, there’d be a stink raised over this. But with midterm elections and everyone raising a bigger stink over the Bush Tax Credits, everyone is too busy protesting what’s happening to other people to realize what’s being taken away from them.

The lack of these tax credits and their fast injection of cash into the economy will probably hurt Obama and… Read more…

Imagine, for a second, that you’re a smoker, which, if you’re a smoker, should be easy. You’ve triumphed over brownish teeth and the lingering stench of stale smoke. You’ve bravely ignored the highly increased risk of lung cancer in the noble pursuit of having something to do with hands while you drink.

What’s your reward? Finding out that people are overwhelmingly in favor of making your addictive and potentially deadly habit MORE expensive.

67% of voters favor a $1 tax per pack of cigarettes, according to a report from the Robert Wood Johnson foundation. Voters far prefer this tax to budget cuts or other tax increases. The report indicates that states could raise up $9… Read more…

Do you like to pair your quintuple-cheeseburger (The High Five!) with a soft drink big enough to swim in and loaded with enough fizzy additives to clean limestone?

Are you a lobbyist for a large soda company that long ago traded your chance for any sort of spiritual salvation for piles of stress and increasingly redundant money?

Are you perhaps a lawmaker who long ago became jaded and no longer harbors any delusion about helping people?

If you answered “yes” or “huh?” to any or all of these questions, there’s good news for you out of Washington: The soft-drink industry has doused plans to tax their sugary concoctions. Mere months ago, it… Read more…