Interesting choice of words by this cartoonist. While the word “reform” really means to form again, its common usage in this country is to signify an improvement. Sticking the taxpayers for $1.2 billion of new taxes isn’t an improvement in the minds of those of us who believe in smaller less costly government. It’s only an improvement for those who see the role of government as to run and control all of our lives in every way possible.

Victory for Small Businesses in Alabama

IPI Salutes Alabama Voters for Rejecting Riley Tax Increase

Voters To Governor: Take a Hike

Alabamians defeat $1.2B tax hike

Alabama Voters Crush Tax Plan Sought by Governor

Alabama Voters Reject Tax Hike

Riley hears message; cuts coming

Alabama Voters Reject Record Tax Hike – Good news from the South. That has to make Alabama much more attractive to people in high tax places, such as the PRC. It was amazing to see the governor and his spokespeople actually complaining that their state has the lowest tax burden in the country and how they needed to raise taxes high enough to move into the middle of the list. It was if they were discussing something like education scores, where being at the bottom is a bad thing to be embarrassed about.

New, colorful $20 bills to hit street in October – Greenbacks wil now be referred to as peach-backs as our real life currency morphs into Monopoly money.

Decision day on tax plan in Alabama – It’s not often that the little people can vote directly on tax hikes. Those decisions are normally made by our rulers.

Taxes for God? A bit of a stretch in Alabama

The Senate Minority Leader is anti-tax; at least, for himself. – Little Tommy Dashole is a typical liberal hypocrite. He’ll raise everyone else’s taxes every chance he gets, while stretching the rules to save on his own personal taxes.

Hint of Higher Taxes Could Terminate Arnold’s Campaign

JFK Used Audits to Silence His Critics – Another trait emulated by Bill Clinton.

Alabama voters decide Tuesday on $1.2 billion tax increase

Jesus Christ Tax Collector? – The Alabama governor believes that the Marxist philosophy of soaking the evil rich came from the Bible.

Why is it that, the more things get screwed up in DC, the more our rulers are rewarded? What kind of incentive is that for them to even try to fix things? Any real world private company operating that way wouldn’t last long.

New Lotto millionaire is 91 and says he lacks nothing — except maybe a wife – He made the proper, obvious, choice to take the lump sum of $10 million rather than the 30 year long payout of $16 million.

Tax Relief Did Not Cause Budget Deficits

Your Tax Dollars at Work. Rep. Jim Nussle takes on wasteful and fraudulent spending.

State budget crisis a taxing worry

Wake-Up Call on Spending

The “Party of Reagan”? – The current incarnation of the GOP is looking less and less like Reagan’s.

Old Wine in New Wineskins–Tax Seduction in Alabama

Threat to Term Limits Is Seen. An advocacy group acts to block what it sees as a plan to weaken state restrictions. – Mandatory term limits are necessary to ensure turnover in elected office and prevent the ruling elite (career politicians) from becoming even more like the royalty our founding fathers tried to protect us from.

Schwarzenegger woos key corporate donors. He vowed to ‘not take money from anyone’ – Arnold’s seems to have a good grasp on typical Kennedy hypocrisy.

Voter wrath now veering toward state Legislature – Tossing all of the rulers out of Sacramento would be a good way to start improving things out there. Most of the legislator slots could be filled from the crowd of gubernatorial candidates.

The simmering Social Security problem will boil over soon.

As I’ve always explained, the popular belief that everyone cheats on their taxes and underpays is 180 degrees off the mark. Most people don’t claim all of the legitimate deductions to which they are entitled, resulting in grossly overpaying taxes.

Financial data can be captured with a good bookkeeping system, of which QuickBooks is the easiest and most efficient.

Non-cash transactions are a little trickier to keep track of. I am constantly seeing people claim zero on their tax returns for non-cash donations. They always tell me that they did give things away, but didn’t keep track of it. What we end up doing is using guesstimates, which I am sure are grossly understated.

For several years, there has been a company that has produced a workbook called ItsDeductible to help people track their non-cash donations and assign proper values. A few years ago, they added a computerized version. H & R Block has even come out with its own version of this kind of program, Deduction Pro, selling to the public for the same $20 price.

I haven’t done a side by side comparison of these programs to know first hand which is superior. Both of them appear to produce the official IRS Form 8283 for non-cash donations, which can then be given to the user’s tax preparer.

However, the It’s Deductible has been around much longer. It was also recently purchased by Intuit, which has plans to integrate it with its Turbo-Tax programs. According to the latest news, there are no plans to have It’sDeductible integrate with Intuit’s professional tax prep programs (Pro Series and Lacerte) for the 2003 tax program; but I am hoping this can be done for 2004 because we use Lacerte for all of our tax returns.

ItsDeductible does have volume discounts for tax professionals to buy ten or more copies at a time to give or resell to their clients.

Special offer for our tax clients: We have long been trying to get more of you to computerize your records. If any of our clients are willing to use the computerized ItsDeductible to keep track of your non-cash donations for this year (2003), I will buy a bunch of them and give you the program on CD for free. If you use it properly for 2003, I will also provide you with a copy of the 2004 program, and so on. Any of our tax clients who are interested should send me a request to the top secret (currently spam free) email address that we have provided you to use in communicating with me.