Congress Raises Executive Minimum Wage To $565.15/Hr – This parody from The Onion makes as much sense as any other attempt by socialists to arbitrarily mandate any pay rates against the natural forces of the free market.

I also liked this from their News Briefs section

Ad Campaign For New $20 Bill A Success

WASHINGTON, DC—The U.S. Department of the Treasury deemed the new multicolored $20 bill a raging success Monday, thanks to its $30 million advertising campaign. “Due to our print and TV ads, people across the nation are choosing our $20 bill when they need to exchange currency for goods and services within the United States and its territories,” Secretary of the Treasury John Snow said. “We couldn’t be happier. Americans agree that the Series 2004 U.S. currency is the legal tender for all debts, public and private.” Due to high demand for the bill, the Treasury has already ordered second and third printings.

IRS Found Tolerating Poor Tax Preparers – IRS may not be collecting all of the penalties they have assessed against tax preparers; but they are going after (albeit quite slowly) some of the tax pros who are promoting scam tax protestor arguments, such as ex IRS agent Joe Bannister, who has been using the same kind of idiotic claims that income isn’t taxable and the 16th Amendment wasn’t properly ratified, as dozens of other tax protestor scammers. He gets no sympathy from me as he tries to raise funds to fight his disbarment by IRS, which he is calling a lockout.

Things have been progressing well as we assist clients in their use of QuickBooks for more accurate and efficient bookkeeping. For most of our clients, I am able to work with their actual data files and obtain more accurate information. The frustrating thing has been working with the few clients who use Apple Macintosh computers. Earlier attempts to access their QB data files on my WinTel machines were unsuccessful. I have been forced to work with the much less efficient printed reports rather than the actual data files.

A few days ago, I received the latest versions of QuickBooks for Windows and was reading over the included documents and noticed a flyer for the latest version for Mac, 6.0. It included the following feature that allows users to make a copy of their data that can be shared with the Windows version of QB.

Share QuickBooks data between Mac and Windows (New)

Experience greater efficiency, communication, and collaboration with Windows users, such as your accountant. QuickBooks: Pro 6.0 for Mac allows you to share your QuickBooks Mac data with users of QuickBooks for Windows. You can send your Mac data to Windows and Windows users can send it back to Mac users.

I’ve already passed this news on to the clients who are on Macs. Even though this requires buying the more expensive Pro version of the program, I have strongly encouraged them that, if they have been debating upgrading to 6.0, they should add this feature to the list of reasons to do so. I know that I am able to do a much more efficient job in tax prep and consulting when I have the actual QB data file to work with; so it should pay for itself quickly.

It shouldn’t be too long before PETA starts hassling those of us who refer to members of the JackAss Party as DemonRats.

This is a topic I’ve discussed many times; the difficulty in defining who is wealthy or rich. There are many different methods used in our country. It could be based on a person’s annual income, what their net worth is, or simply how much cash they have.

Against Krugmanomics. Republicans learn to love–well, like–the deficit. – The big difference between those who understand reality and those who long for a socialist utopia is that the deficits are caused by rampant spending and not by too few taxes on the wealthy.

Flat tax revolution – Jack Kemp expresses the same disappointment in the hypocrisy of our rulers as I did earlier. They see the wisdom of a low flat tax for Iraq, yet continue to force us to live under the Marxist punitive confiscatory structure in our own country.

QuickBooks 2004 – I had been beta testing the early versions of the latest QB program; but just received my copies of the final versions today. Among the many other disks in the package was the official Intuit QuickBooks 2004 Training Guide. It’s only about four megabytes in size; so, as I did last year, I zipped the files and uploaded them to my website to be available to anyone who wants to refer to them. My belief in the benefits of QuickBooks for everyone continues to grow every day; so I will continue to post resources to make it easier for everyone to use QB as efficiently as possible.

QuickBooks 2004 Training Guide

QuickBooks 2003 Training Guide

Beware of Unscrupulous Debt Counseling Services – Most of them are scams. You are better off negotiating directly with creditors than trusting these other crooks to do anything for you except make a bad situation much worse.