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From today’s excellent batch of Thomas Sowell’s Random Thoughts:

More than half of all people filing income tax forms use someone else to prepare the forms for them. Then they have to sign under penalty of perjury that these forms are correct. But if they were competent to determine that, why would they have to pay someone else to do their taxes for them in the first place?

That actually may be connected to another of his points:

If you read all the fine print in all the documents you have to sign, you would have no time left to live a life. 

 

Q:

Subject: from Brice at TradingMarkets.com

 

Hello Kerry-

 

I’d like to invite you to be a part of  www.themoneyblogs.com/.  It’s gonna be big—we expect it to be the largest money blog site on the Web. The entire site was built around maximizing page views—to our knowledge, no one else has done this. Best of all, it’s free and it would not require any additional work at all from you—we can use your RSS feed to post. You could drive additional traffic to your blog and get even wider exposure. I have a media campaign starting shortly, and it would be nice to have you in there to receive the benefits from this.

 

What do you think? Can I set you up today?

 

Brice

A:

Brice:

I appreciate the offer; but must respectfully decline.  I value my independence and the ability to openly express my uncensored opinions far too much to be able to handle being part of a blog that is controlled by anyone else.

However, I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor.

Kerry Kerstetter

Follow-Up:

OK. Just to let you know, we are just repostintg blogs, not doing any editing.

 

Brice

 

From an interested reader:

Subject: Re: outsourcing to India

Mr. Kerstetter,

Just a note to say I liked what you said on June 12 about outsourcing.  I support anything that promotes an informed consumer.  I feel the same way about genetically modified foods.  I have no problem buying and eating them, but will support anyone who bothers to put that information on the label because it increases my choices.

Also, on the 11th you told a couple they would each qualify for the exemption on their home sales.  You might want to add that it is a per person exclusion, not really a 500k per couple exclusion.  In other words, if they were hoping that if one fell short of the exemption the remainder could be credited toward the other, they are out of luck.

My reply:

That was the point I was trying to make regarding the tax free home sale exclusion; but your explanation makes it even clearer that each spouse’s exclusion stands alone and they can’t be added together in the way that you mentioned.

Thanks for writing.

Kerry Kerstetter