Tax Lawyer's Blog

Well, you can’t claim President Obama is a tax cutter any longer.
Per Paul Caron, the President signed a bill into law yesterday that will increase taxes on corporations doing business overseas:
President Obama yesterday signed H.R. 1586, which creates a $10 billion fund to prevent teacher layoffs and provide a temporary increase in the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage, funded with corporate international [...]

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House representative Jerold Nadler (D-NY) wants to tax the guy behind the tree as long as the tree isn’t in his district.
Wall Street Journal editorial, The Blue State Blues: Taxing the Rich, Except in My District:
One irony of the tax increase that arrives on January 1 is that the it will hit residents of high-income, Democratic-leaning [...]

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Inc. reports that four Democratic senators - Ben Nelson, D-Neb.; Mark Begich, D-Alaska; Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; and Evan Bayh, D-Ind – sent a letter Monday to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman expressing their concerns about the new 1099 reporting rules:
“The new requirements may place a hardship on small businesses by creating an extra paperwork burden,” the senators wrote. [...]

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Politico reports that over the past 14 years the U.S. government has paid out nearly $1 million a year in settlements to congressional employees who have been harassed by Congressmen:
For privacy reasons, the details of all these cases — including the names of the victims and the alleged harassers — are almost never made public. [...]

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It’s not only Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson who thinks the new expanded 1099 reporting requirement is a bad idea.
Eric Blackledge and Thala Taperman Rolnick, CPA, tax issue chairs of the National Small Business Network, sent a letter last month to the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee requesting changes in the expanded 1099 reporting requirements contained [...]

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Kay Bell reports that the extension of the homebuyer credit was passed last night in the Senate:
If you went to be last night freaking out that you wouldn’t be able to claim the first-time homebuyer credit, here’s some welcome wake-up news.
It’s official. You now have three more months to finalize your home purchase.
With the tax credit’s [...]

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While others have been waxing mournful about the passing of Senator Robert Byrd a chap named S.M. Oliva of the Mises Economics Blog had this mean-spirited observation about the self-proclaimed King of Pork (emphasis mine):
Robert Byrd, the president pro tempore of the Senate (and former Ku Klux Klan chapter leader), finally managed to die this morning at the age of 92. Byrd, [...]

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A few days ago I wrote that the IRS considers BP payments to Gulf Coast fishermen who have suffered losses as a result of the oil spill to be taxable income:
This is not a difficult call. The tax code has long considered payments made to individuals in the form of  compensation for lost wages or as [...]

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Going broke can make you do some stupid-ass things.
Here’s Joseph Henchman of Tax Policy Blog:
As they say, necessity can be the mother of invention. From the Associated Press via the Silicon Valley Business Journal:
When the vehicle is moving the license plate would look like the ones we’re used to now, but when the vehicle stops [...]

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I don’t know if it’s more shocking that a U.S. Congressman suggested that a BP executive kill himself or that the Congressman who suggested it wasn’t Alan Grayson.
Here’s the story from the New York Post:
BP’s top US executive should take the honorable way out of the Gulf oil disaster — and commit ritual suicide, a congressman told [...]

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