As a rule, I do my best to ignore the thousands of spam messages I receive each and every day in my several email accounts. However, I endeavor to catch any real messages by skimming the incoming mail through the extremely handy MailWasher program.

Late last night, I received a number of spams from this company promoting the concept of setting up a more prestigious virtual office in New York City.

I’m sure it’s the tax-centric way I look at everything; but setting up an office (virtual or otherwise) in NYC just seems like a completely counter-productive thing to do. I have written extensively on how to reduce or eliminate State taxes by sourcing income through tax free locales, such as Nevada, Florida or Texas.

In addition to the New York State income tax, New York City has its own expensive set of taxes. Anyone wanting the prestige of an NYC address for their business will end up having to fork over a lot of additional taxes for that privilege. Even if the business is really operated out of a lower or zero tax location, using an NYC address will give the New York tax authorities jurisdictional right to levy income and other taxes. I noticed that this point isn’t included in the virtual office company’s FAQs.

We all believe that receiving a huge windfall of cash, such as winning the lottery, would solve all of our problems and make our lives much easier. In an all too common scenario, this woman, who suffered a heart attack from all of the pressures she encountered after winning the lottery in Canada, discovered a whole new set of problems. While not all lottery winners have heart attacks, the kinds of demands on them for money from all sorts of people is a standard after-effect of this kind of “lucky break.”

Treasury Warns Against Abusive Tax Reduction Scheme – It’s good to see IRS alerting people earlier about these kinds of scams rather than waiting for several years, as has been their previous strategy. As I have been advising them for years, their silence in response to the idiotic claims by tax protesting and evasion promoters has always been taken as a sign of agreement as to their legality. They should be able to nip more of these scams in the bud if they continue to make public pronouncements as soon as they become aware of new angles being promoted, such as this one that tries to pretend income is from the Virgin Islands and is thus tax free.

Charitable Giving Holds Steady, Report Finds

For Third Year Running, No Member of Congress Voted for Net Reduction in Federal Spending

Contract revisited – With the huge growth of our Federal government over the past ten years, it’s frightening to think of how it would have been if the GOP, who are supposedly the good guys for those of us who still respect the Constitution, hadn’t taken over Congress.

The Reagan Presidency II – Jude Wanniski rebuts the lies about Reaganomics as written by the New York Times’ Marxist columnist, Paul Krugman. As Donald Luskin proves on a daily basis, Mr. Krugman has no credibility and doesn’t even deserve the press he receives exposing his leftist propaganda. It seems that Krugman writes such obvious lies just for the attention it brings him.

This would be funnier to many people who participated in the dot-com bubble if they didn’t have to pay taxes on phony income, such as the AMT on options for stocks that couldn’t be sold. Many people had tax bills of hundreds of thousands of dollars on this phantom income; and many more will if the insane AMT is not repealed or at least made more fair.

Reform AMT

For decades I’ve been writing about the idiocy of the logic behind the arguments of tax protesting scammer Irwin Schiff. Now that he is facing a bill for over two million dollars in taxes and penalties, he is taking a new approach; pleading insanity. I always said his ideas and anyone who fell for them were insane.

Defending the Reagan Deficits

Bank robberies quick source of cash

Are IRA Accounts Exempt From Bankruptcy Creditors? – A local couple will have this issue decided by the US Supreme Court in the Fall.

Just like ’84 – Besides the similarities with the economy 20 years ago, it’s looking more and more like a repeat of the November election results. The ass-kicking Walter Mon-dull received will look tame compared to what we’ll see if John sKerry stays on the ticket.