Tax Guru – Ker$tetter Letter

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.

Tax hikes urged in PRC for wildfire relief – This is just another exploitation of a tragedy for the Left’s goal of higher taxes. The Federal government is already picking up the tab for the repairs required by the recent firestorm. We all know that pretending that a new sales tax will go for fire prevention is bogus on its face. It’s never long before specially earmarked taxes are hijacked for other big government projects.

New tax-free savings accounts are the next Bush push

These proposals are basically extensions of Roth IRAs. I have the same reservations about these as I have always had with Roths. First, there will be no immediate deduction for the contributions to the savings plans. The payoff is that all income earned by these accounts will supposedly be tax free when drawn out. That is very risky because it depends on our rulers not changing the rules over the next few decades.

As I have to keep reminding people, our rulers have no qualms about breaking promises in regard to issues just like this one. The most blatant example of this happening has been with Social Security. The original plan was set up with no deductions for the money paid into the SS system with the trade-off being that the benefits would be completely tax free. As we have seen, this was changed so that 85% of benefits received are subject to income tax for those who are considered by our rulers to be too wealthy; which means anyone with an annual AGI (adjusted gross income) of more than $25,000 ($32,000 per couple).

There is no way anyone can convince me that our rulers won’t pull the same switch in future years. The concept of “means testing” (aka screw the evil rich) is too ingrained into the tax system of this country to expect it not to arise in regard to future withdrawals from tax free savings accounts by “wealthy” people.

Internet Tax Ban Stops Dead in Senate – The money is just too tempting for our rulers to resist.

A flood of red ink – The wild spending spree by our rulers in DC shows no sign of ever slowing down. The attempts to blame the deficit on the tax cuts is typical leftist propaganda; but there is no denying that spending is completely out of control, with no end anywhere in sight, especially if Medicare is expanded to pay for medicines.

Businesses Jump on an SUV Loophole. Suddenly $100,000 Tax Deduction Proves a Marketing Bonanza – And this is a surprise to people?

Most Like The New $20 Bill

Shifting Tax Payouts In The PRC