Tax Guru – Ker$tetter Letter

Battling for dividend tax relief

I’m not sure of the artist’s intent with this comic; but I think it is to ridicule Bush. The truth is that anyone who understands capitalism and the US Constitution knows that many of the taxes in this country are downright evil.

Non-Cash Donations

I just finished installing the 2003 Tax Tools program and was checking out the new features added this year. One I really like is a five page worksheet, along with estimated values, for documenting non-cash donations, such as clothes and furniture. It obviously has a lot more room than the one page version I posted on my site a little while ago. I’ve made a master in pdf and uploaded it to my site.

KMK

Look at who won’t pay taxes under Bush’s plan

The Dems’ skimpy tax-relief plan

Bush Proposal May Cut Tax on SUVs for Business

I’m sure Arianna Huffington and her fellow traveler SUV haters are having a cow over this.

Taxing Statistics

With all of the discussion as to who bears the major portion of the actual income tax burden in the US, I found it interesting to consider another kind of tax related burden. These stats from Forbes relate to the burden in time and cost to comply with tax laws in regard to keeping proper records and preparing tax returns.

Self-employed persons with adjusted gross incomes topping $200,000 spend 62 hours a year working on taxes and $1,315 in tax preparation fees, compared with just 34 hours and $393 for similarly paid workers who labor for others, says a new study for the IRS by IBM Business Consulting. Total annual out-of-pocket costs to all taxpayers for tax compliance: $16 billion.

Glossary Of Terms

As with all professions, we in the tax and accounting arena have our own jargon. I have also adopted several other abbreviations and acronyms in order to save time and space when writing and speaking. As a public service, I’ve set up a glossary of the most often used terms. I’ve also added a link to it in the blogroll to the left on this page. If there are other terms that should be included here, please let me know.

As more new acronyms are coined every day, I hope to see glossaries such as this on other web sites. Places like Lucianne.com have developed their own shorthand way of communicating and it slows the discussions down when newcomers are always asking for definitions of such terms as PIAPS (pig in a pant suit) after stories are posted about our next president, Queen Hillary Rodham.

KMK