Killer Tax

One of the most insidious taxes the geniuses in DC ever created is the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). As with almost everything our rulers in DC do, this monstrosity accomplishes the exact opposite of its intended goal. Rather than nail the evil rich fat cats, it more often hits lower income people. Here is an excellent article on it from the current Forbes magazine.

For those who want to see the AMT fixed, please check out this group. They have my full support and admiration for tackling this beast.

KMK

Taking Undue Credit

Is it just me or is the current commercial for the United States Postal Service the stupidest thing they have done in a long time? It shows a high school student opening a college acceptance letter and then claims that the next four years are courtesy of the United States Postal Service. Come on! The postman delivered the letter. That’s it. I’m sure that makes all the difference in the world whether or not someone is accepted to college. It’s not as if the mailman took the SAT or is paying for the tuition.

If the geniuses at the USPS want to claim credit for all of the good news they deliver, why shouldn’t they receive the blame for all of the bad news and bills that are put into our mailboxes? That makes just as much sense as their idiotic commercial.

KMK

QuickBooks Help

The technical assistance for QuickBooks from Intuit can get fairly expensive. A very handy free resource for answering all kinds of QuickBooks questions is this free users group. It is populated by users, as well as QuickBooks experts who are willing to answer questions, for free.

While browsing through the question boards, I came across someone who has addressed a very big shortcoming in the QuickBooks program, how to transfer data between QuickBooks files. This program does it by running a QuickBooks journal through Excel and converting it into the format that can be imported into another QuickBooks file. Why Intuit didn’t do this on their own escapes me; but I’m glad to see that an outside programmer has filled the gap. I can already see it as saving us a ton of time in merging company files for clients who set up separate QuickBooks files for different businesses instead of just using one file and using the Class function to separate the businesses.

KMK

Oscar Dodges A Bullet

As a life-long movie buff, I will again be avoiding the annual Hollywood circle jerk this Sunday. The only part of these telecasts worth watching was the first five minutes of the Billy Crystal shows, when he had his hilarious movie spoofs. I literally can’t stomach the sight of Caryn Johnson; so I won’t even be checking any part of this year’s show. I don’t know what to say about someone so out of touch with reality on this planet that she still claims that her idol, Bill Clinton, never did the nasty with Monica.

I couldn’t help wondering how different the entire Academy Awards would be if 68 years ago, they had chosen Arthur Andersen to count their ballots instead of Price Waterhouse. With AA’s current reputation for creative accounting, it would sure make all of the winners & losers very suspect.

KMK