617 Words About Those 87,000 IRS Agents
Allan Rolnick, CPA Washington has just passed an “Inflation Reduction Act” that includes billions in new spending to cut carbon emissions and extend Obamacare subsidies. The act pays for it with a new 15% corporate alternative minimum tax, a 1% excise tax on stock buybacks, new Medicare drug pricing rules, and enhanced tax enforcement. In […]
Isn’t It Special?
Allan Rolnick, CPA Remember 1935? Bread lines across a country still mired in Depression, dust storms ravaging the Plains, the Lindbergh kidnapping trial. Good times. That’s when Washington passed the Revenue Act of 1935, raising the top tax rate to 79% on incomes over $5 million ($108 million in today’s dollars). Just one American paid […]
Splitting Hairs, Volume #2,379
Allan Rolnick, CPA 2022 is a cynical time, full of cynical men and women bending and breaking the rules that govern every aspect of our lives in a cynical race to do whatever cynical thing they can justify to themselves to squeeze out extra crumbs of money, or power, or both. (You’d be amazed to […]
Careful What You Wish For
Allan Rolnick, CPA On July 4, 1776, a determined group of colonists clinging to the shore of a harsh new world declared independence from the political bonds connecting them to the British Crown. The colonists cited all sorts of injuries and usurpations to justify their revolutionary decision: the King had plundered their seas, ravaged their […]
Sock It To Me
Allan Rolnick, CPA Most of us look back on the ‘70s as a time of louche excess: garish bell bottoms, deep pile shag carpets, slouchy conversation pits, and gold chains. But ‘70s style is back! Fashion houses are rolling out psychedelic prints, flared bottoms, and knotted tops. Interior designers are bringing back nubby textured fabrics, […]
Excuses, Excuses
Allan Rolnick, CPA A recent poll from the Pew Research Center finds that 54% of Americans think violent crime is one of our country’s biggest problems. You would think the last thing we need is more of it. Yet millions are obsessed with true crime stories, whether we find them on cable TV, streaming video, […]
The
Allan Rolnick, CPA On September 17, 1873, the brand new Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College opened its doors to 24 students. (Future President Rutherford B. Hayes was an early booster, and since you don’t remember anything he did as president, you may as well remember him for this.) Five years later, the school graduated its […]
Crook on the Hook
Allan Rolnick, CPA Fifty years ago, on June 17, a former CIA officer and four Cuban anti-communists carrying bugging devices found themselves handcuffed outside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. What started out as “a third-rate burglary” morphed into “a cancer on the Presidency” and then a “long national […]
Monkey See, Monkey Do
Allan Rolnick, CPA Every so often, I come across a newspaper headline and think, “I have got to turn that into story!” Usually, it comes from someplace like The New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Sometimes it’s from a specialized business publication like Bloomberg or a tax journal. But this week’s “ripped from the […]
Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots
Allan Rolnick, CPA Americans tend to think of “the taxman” as a single all-consuming ogre, demanding sacrifices of cash instead of children. In reality, though, our federal system of government gives us tax collectors at national, state, and federal levels, all chasing the same income dollar. And that’s before the taxes we pay to go […]