California Lawmaker Proposes Ban on Insurance Against Abusive Tax Shelters – I had wondered about these policies, effectively insuring against being caught breaking the law.

Roughly 10 Percent of Forms 1099 Erroneous This Year, Study Finds – With the mid-year change in the rates for dividends and long term capital gains, I’m surprised that the error rate is so low.

Retrospective on the 1981 Reagan Tax Cut

The Bush Tax Plan: How Big is the Tax Cut?

Hiking Taxes on Gasoline: Who Gets Hurt? – As always, the DemonRats hurt the groups they claim to be helping.

The Tax Man and the Moving Van: Fiscal Policy and State Population Shifts – I have always known that excessive taxes and regulations will motivate people to migrate to areas with lower taxes and fewer burdensome regulations. We did that in 1993 and I have worked with literally hundreds of others who have done the same thing. This study (full 19 page pdf report) has many more quantitative statistics on how many people have made the same kind of move. While each state’s change in population between 1995 and 2000 is shown, it is no surprise to see the highest growth in Nevada. I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve known and worked with who have moved there, most often to the Las Vegas area.

Thanks to Ben Cunningham for passing this along.

I’ve seen stories of a drive to put Ronald Reagan’s picture on the ten dollar bill or a new gold coin. This other proposal is courtesy of Sacred Cow Burgers

Ameri-Debt Files For Bankruptcy – I guess scamming people who are in debt trouble doesn’t pay as well as it used to.

I have written and spoken countless times on one of my biggest pet peeves; the outright lies that are told about the effects of the Reagan tax cuts. The leftist media, and even some idiot RINOs, are afraid to tell the truth; that the lower rates signed into law by President Reagan (from 70% down to 28%) stimulated huge economic activity and actually doubled the Federal tax revenues.

His critics had no respect for the truth while he was alive; so it’s not surprising to see those same lies being tossed around now that he has passed. Their claim that the budget deficits of the 1980s were Reagan’s fault conveniently misses the fact that all spending bills were passed by the backstabbing lying DemonRats in Congress who reneged on their promises to control spending and went on a drunker sailor spending spree much like we have had in the past few years. Reagan, just the same as all other presidents, was frustrated with the lack of line item veto power, which most governors have. His choices were to either veto the entire spending bills and shut the government down or accept them in toto.

What has always been so puzzling to me is how anyone can have any faith in the media when they lie about such obvious things just because they despise Reagan and Bush so much. If they won’t tell the truth about obvious things, how can anybody possibly trust them to be straight with us on any issue?

Some people who have their facts right:

Reagan Tax insights and triumphs – Bruce Bartlett

We loved you, Mr. President – Jack Kemp

Reagan and Capitalism

Reaganomics Won the Day and the legacy lives on.

A taste for pork

IRS and State Partnership Moves Forward to Improve Compliance and Service – Maybe if our law enforcement agencies coordinated and cooperated as well together as the tax collection agencies, we wouldn’t be so at risk for terrorist attacks.

Web Bill Payments Hurting Check Printers – As technology changes, so do the ways in which people pay their bills. In spite of my extensive use of QuickBooks, I don’t use any online bill paying service except for PayPal, which I do use a lot as more online vendors accept it.

I did try another online bill paying service a few years back; but considered the process to be less efficient than just sending out my own checks. If they ever set things up so that we can transfer money directly from our bank account to the payees’, that will be an efficient way to do things. As these services work now, they charge you a fee to print out a check and mail it to the payee via snail mail. I have received a few such payments from clients. I don’t like this because it still puts you at the mercy of the postal service and gives you no control over the timing. They often take weeks to make the actual payment.

Besides the growth of online payments, the check printing companies have to be feeling the impact of software that allows us to print our own checks in smaller, more convenient, batches. It’s been a while since I’ve written about the VersaCheck programs, which I have been using for several years to print blank checks to use in Quicken and QuickBooks, as well as to print check drafts for clients who fax their payments to us.

I have been buying each year’s new version and have found enough improvements in each one to justify the additional expense. In fact, the 2004 version has had the handiest new feature in several years. It has what they call “one pass printing.” With past versions, I had to print out a bunch of blank checks with our company and bank info, which I would then later put into my printer’s paper tray when I wanted to print checks from Quicken and QuickBooks. With this newest version, I can put virgin blank check paper into the paper tray and when I go to print a check from QuickBooks, it starts up a driver that activates VersaCheck and prints absolutely everything onto the check paper at one time. Other than a problem with the memo info printing below the line instead of on top (which I have reported to the company and yet to see any fix for), I have been very pleased with how much time this saves me from printing checks twice.

And, as I’ve had to remind several clients, if you are not using QuickBooks to print out your checks – whether preprinted ones you buy or via a utility like VersaCheck – you are missing out on the biggest time saving feature of QuickBooks. It also improves the accuracy of the data input over entering check info after the fact.

Firms taught to milk ‘cash cow’ – I guess we in the tax practitioner community each have our own ideas of what is ethically acceptable in terms of services we provide for our clients. Helping them minimize their tax outlays is something I’ve always been proud to do. However, helping them fleece taxpayers through various corporate welfare schemes is far beyond anything I could stomach doing. It seems that Ernst & Young has no qualms about assisting in this.

Maybe it’s just my Libertarian philosophy that believes strongly in small inexpensive government; but I could never take part in anything that adds to the cost of government. I’ve even refused to take part in any of the lucrative farm subsidy programs for my 55 acre ranch back in California and our 285 acre ranch here in the Ozarks for that very reason. If we couldn’t make money from them on our own, it wouldn’t be fair to have the taxpayers pick up the tab.