New Dividend Tax Cut’s Impact on 401k Withdrawals – It’s always been the case that income earned within tax deferred retirement accounts doesn’t benefit from the lower capital gains and dividend rates that are available for income earned directly by individuals.

IRS has posted the latest draft of the 2003 Schedule D. What makes this year’s form different than most others is the need to separate gains and losses that happened from January 1, 2003 through May 5, 2003 and those that occur from May 6, 2003 through December 31, 2003. The tax rates are lower for the gains in the second part of this year.

This shouldn’t be too difficult for normal full cash sales. It will be the trickiest to keep straight for installment sales. You will need to provide your tax preparer with the total principal payments received from 1/1/03 to 5/5/03 and what is received between 5/6/03 and 12/31/03.

Rolling blackouts in Toronto are making our web and email services very sporadic. Patience and persistence are the operative words right now.

Bush Is A Big Government Conservative

The Nevada Tax Debacle

IRS Grants Tax Relief to Power Blackout Victims – They are allowing an extra week (to August 22) for those people who were affected by this mess. Luckily, I was able to get the last of the 80+ extensions I prepared into the mail today.

IRS Announces Application Fee for Offers in Compromise – I’m of a mixed mind on this decision to charge people $150 to submit OICs. On the one hand, there are people who abuse this program by submitting really idiotic offers. Charging a fee should reduce some of those. However, in all of the OICs that I have worked on, the clients were already being unfairly screwed over by IRS. Making them pay even more money to have their case reviewed by upper authorities at IRS seems a bit like adding insult to injury. In a way, this would be similar to your local police department charging you to report a crime.

There are all kinds of reasons why you would select a certain financial advisor over others. I’ve heard dozens of strange theories; many of them making this sound very reasonable.

California tax-weary residents say ‘no mas’ – Just a few reasons why it earned the name of the People’s Republic of California.

Kerry hints at reform for Social Security – Coincidentally, this is exactly what I have been predicting for decades as the fate of Social Security. Means testing will be instigated to determine who is worthy enough to receive any benefits. Anyone determined by our rulers to be evil rich will not be paid anything, regardless of how much had been paid in during their working lives. For anyone who thinks this will just be used to freeze out people in the income levels of Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, just look at where our rulers have established the similar threshold for taxation of SS benefit. Any single person with adjusted gross income over $25,000 is considered evil rich. For married couples, that level is $32,000 AGI. I have long said that such a plan is the only way to keep the SS system alive for much longer.

That’s why it always amazes me to either see people intentionally flushing money down the SS rat-hole or not taking the very easy steps to reduce or eliminate those taxes paid in. Holding on to $10,000 to $15,000 per working year can allow a person to accumulate a very sizable net worth, which will be a thousand times more useful for their retirement years than the promise of benefits from the SS Ponzi scheme if you can prove yourself to be a worthy pauper. What’s even more disgusting is the majority of professional tax practitioners who just merrily let their clients continue to piss away all of that money and don’t help them arrange things to keep it for their own use.

Woman Beats IRS in Court Over Income Tax Protest – More on the FedEx pilot who avoided prison for not filing tax returns, but who will still have to pay the taxes, interest and penalties. As Judge Andrew Napolitano says, she was lucky to have such idiots on the jury to let her skate. There’s no guarantee that other tax protestors will be able to count on the same lucky draw. However, considering that some people consider juries to be principally comprised of people too stupid to get out of jury duty, the odds may not be that bad.

FYI: Our power here in the Ozarks has been working just fine. However, all of our websites and email are hosted by MyHosting.com, (provider of the Mail2Web service) which happens to be in Toronto. They obviously don’t have backup generators up there, because all of their and our sites have been unusable during this power outage.

Huffington Paid Little Income Tax – One of the pifalls to running for high office is the requirement to open your normally private tax returns for public scrutiny. Arianna Huffington has long been a walking talking example of hypocrisy on so many levels. Her crusade against tax breaks for other businesses, while she takes advantage of every one possible for herself, is just one more example. The LA Times has more details on her finances.

Warren Buffett Adds Muscle to Schwarzenegger’s Campaign – Arnie doesn’t seem to be too concerned with pleasing true conservatives by the choices he is making in his support team. Buffett, as I’ve mentioned several times, is also a rich hypocrite, who supports the Marxist principles of central government wealth redistribution.

Webb OKs Harrison Abstract’s Assets Sale – There won’t be any real money left over, after paying the mortgage; but it is a step forward in cleaning up this mess.

(Courtesy of Dribble Glass)

Turning lawyers into government spies