Tax Lawyer's Blog

Joe Kristan raises some excellent questions for tax increasers in It’s Okay to Feed Them to Piranhas, They’re Rich:
Anybody who wants to increase taxes on “the wealthy” should first address these questions:
- What rate do you want to see the “rich” pay? If it’s not the proposed 39.6% (or 43.4% under Obamacare), what is it?
- Is there [...]

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Paul Krugman, Rachel Maddow and others on the left have been spouting the pro-tax talking point that America’s roads are in a state of ruin.
But is it true or is it just another example of left-wing Chicken Littlism?
Well, I ran across a Slate article by Jack Shafer titled Paved and Confused: What Paul Krugman and [...]

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Paul Krugman, the intellectual leader of the government-expansion crowd, says that those who believe that government bureaucracies are bloated, wasteful and inefficient are destroying America’s infrastructure.
How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, [...]

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“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter– it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
- Mark Twain -
If we don’t confiscate all of the wealth of the super rich the deficit will increase next year. Anyone opposing such confiscation of wealth, therefore, wants the deficit to [...]

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Alan Berube writing for Brookings thinks its a good thing that poor people can no longer get refund anticipation loans (RALs) (emphasis is mine):
Last week’s… positive EITC development was IRS’ decision to suspend availability of the “debt indicator” next tax filing season.
This indicator, provided to tax professionals, enables preparers to identify whether or not the taxpayer’s [...]

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Chris Good of The Atlantic has written an interesting column titled The Laffer Curve: The Most Powerful and Ambiguous Idea in Tax Politics:
A couple years ago I was interviewing Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, about economic policies and the 2008 election, and, as he told me repeatedly that lower taxes would yield higher [...]

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“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
- Vladmir Lenin -
Professor Richard Lavoie of Akron University laments that patriotism is more aligned with the anti-tax, small government movement than it is with high-taxes and big government:
The existing research suggests that patriotism may be a weaker tax compliance [...]

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Somethings are so perfect you just have to quote them.
Christopher Beam of Slate posed a question yesterday in a post about whether or not the Bush tax cuts should be extended:
When is a tax hike not a hike?

His answer?
When it’s a tax un-cut!

Excellent, Christopher.
Related Post:

Truth and Taxes: Not Extending the Bush Tax Cuts is a [...]

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Instead of admiring the successful and trying to learn from them, we delude ourselves that their successes were obtained either by dumb luck or nefarious means.
Catherine Rampell of the New York Times takes on the White House for damning the successful in Are the Rich Just Lucky?
Here’s the entire post:�
Christopher Bergin, the president and publisher of Tax Analysts, [...]

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Kay Bell reports that Theresa Heinz Senator John Kerry will pony up the Massachusetts’ use tax due on his $7 million yacht:
OK, Sen. John Kerry is tired of all the yacht tax questions.
Kerry announced this afternoon that he’s paying all Massachusetts taxes due on his new $7 million yacht even though it’s docked in Rhode Island, where he [...]

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