Jeanne Sahadi of CNN Money.com reports today that, In 2009, roughly 47% of households, or 71 million, will not owe any federal income tax, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Some in that group will even get additional money from the government because they qualify for refundable tax breaks. The ranks of [...]
Tags: Politics of Taxes · Tax Policy
Gerald Prante of the Tax Policy Blog in What is a Tax? poses but doesn’t exactly answer this question: Is a financial cost imposed by government for not having health insurance a tax? Prante says that not all payments to government are taxes and uses the example of a taxpayers purchase of an item from [...]
Tags: healthcare reform · Tax Policy
Tax researchers, planners and return preparers should have a thorough understanding of how the tax laws are structured. I found this outstanding primer on the organizational structure of the Internal Revenue Code and the Treasury Regulations at the Georgia State University College of Law website. INTERNAL REVENUE CODE Congress and the Treasury use organizational terms to direct [...]
Tags: Taxes 101
The Daily News reports that Joe Francis, the founder of the soft porn juggernaut known as Girls Gone Wild, entered into a plea bargain that may allow him to avoid additional jail time: “Girls Gone Wild” founder Joe Francis avoided further jail time by pleading guilty yesterday to filing false tax returns. In the agreement, Francis [...]
Tags: Tax Crimes
It isn’t often that I side with the IRS’s interpretation of a tax code provision; however, this case compels me to do so. Several bloggers have written about the IRS’s recent decision to deny a taxpayer a charitable deduction for the value of a home he donated to the local fire department which was then as part [...]
Tags: Deductible Expenses
At year end tax professionals generally advise their cash basis clients to accelerate expenses and defer income. However, this strategy only makes sense where a taxpayer’s marginal tax rate will decrease or remain relatively constant. Experts are predicting that Congress and President Obama will raise tax rates either by the end of this year or sometime next [...]
You know the left is salivating over this one. The Associated Press reports that a census worker was hanged in Kentucky with the word “fed” scrawled on his chest: The FBI is investigating the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery. A law enforcement official says the word “fed” was scrawled [...]
Tags: Politics
