Taxes, Politics, Music and other important things....

Prophylactic Newt

2012-02-06T11:46:00.002-05:00

You would think with Newt’s very public extra-marital affairs he would be more supportive of birth control then he seems to be.

Notes to Herman Cain and Bill Maher + Mitt's Taxes Redux

2012-02-05T12:40:00.001-05:00

Note to Herman Cain – after your pathetic and stupid campaign and the endorsement of “we the people” followed by backstop your endorsement of Newt Gingrich I have a suggestion. Your new book should be titled “9-9-9, How I Joined the Media Circus and became a National Clown” and you can do your book tour with a big red ball on your nose. You won’t have donors to help support that tour but it will be a hell of a lot more fun.

Note to Bill Maher – first I wonder if folks on the right, who I suspect loath you, notice that you are essentially the mirror image of Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s show preaches to the converted on the right, letting them bask in the warm knowledge that their world view is correct, your show serves the same purpose for liberals. Conservatives are generally brought on to your show to act as punching bags to your leftist worldview, much the way left leaning thinkers are used on O’Reilly’s show. Both shows are essentially the same, support the audiences preexisting view without bringing to the table a scrape of intellectual rigor – fun stuff, but does not support or enhance our national dialog (such as it is).

On a recent show Maher stated that he thought it was wrong that Mitt Romney got to take a tax deduction of almost $3 million dollars for charitable giving ($1.5 million to the Mormon Church). In all the corruption of our current tax system it is hard to think of any tax deduction more in keeping with our heritage and deeply held beliefs then the charitable deduction. It should be unquestioned and unabated because we can all find a charity that we can support no matter what our beliefs and proclivities. I would propose to Bill Maher if he does not like the religious and conservative bent of Romney’s giving that he find secular and liberal charities to donate to.

Romney’s overall blended tax rate of 17.38% would have gone to an overall rate of 18.9% if he had not done his charitable giving which saved him about $835K in taxes. Hey (both) Bill’s, fuck you and welcome to America!

Mitt Romney, Taxes, YOUR Fair Share, etc

2012-01-25T13:30:00.001-05:00

Mitt Romney filed his tax returns following IRS rules, that is the beginning and end of this stupid story, investment income has ALWAYS had favorable rates under the tax code since its inception. There is a clear reason for this; it is the result of capital investment the heart and soul if the American economy.

Mr. Romney gets a significant part of his income as long term capital gains (taxed at 15%) thru the “Carried Interest” rule. Carried Interest is a tax maneuver that allows hedge fund and private equity managers to receive what is essentially compensation as investment income; they are allowed to “share” in the profits they generate for their clients. There is almost no reasonable basis in the tax code for this, and the Internal Revenue Service has fought this for years, it is a loophole virtually any way you look at it BUT that is the current law of the land as defended vociferously by the New York Democratic congressional delegation. My issue with carried interest is that these fund managers receive comparatively little straight compensation and that is what makes it egregiously wrong. I think the correct path would be a mix of W-2/Compensation and Carried Interest, a meaningful % of their income HAS to be traditional compensation at normal tax rates. But the bottom line is Mr. Romney did not make these rules and has not lobbied for them and simply followed the tax code in effect. It also appears to me that Mr. Romney no longer provides "services" to Bain Capital so it seems mostly correct to me that virtually ALL his income would be in the form of investment and 0 in compensation (in his case).

The other phrase that gets thrown about in this discussion is the term “fair share,” usually directed towards the “other guy” who is not paying his! Interestingly it is never directed at the almost 50% of Americans who routinely pay NO federal income tax. I am sad to say, in my opinion, the term "fair share" and taxes NEVER belong in the same sentence. The reason is that the tax system is so complex and corrupt that I don't know how you apply the word "fair" to it in any circumstance, one is either filing a correct and honest tax return (as did Mr. Romney) or you don’t – “fair” does not enter into it.

One final political thought on Mr. Romney; Newt Gingrich is so corrupt and debased that he makes Romney look like a school boy, if Republicans nominate Gingrich they will rue the day, I suspect Obama would eat him for lunch!

Message to Martha – GET ELECTED FIRST!

2012-01-09T09:49:00.000-05:00

In my writing on the disease of crony capitalism I always felt that it largely centered on financing campaigns, but Kevin Williamson’s article in National Journal “Repo Men” has shown me otherwise - http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/286704/repo-men-kevin-d-williamson. He has exposed the blatant and legal insider trading that is fed to congressional leaders by their Wall Street handlers in exchange for political favors. This is one of those articles that I feel all Americans should be forced to sit and read. Hey, who knew that Martha Stewarts only mistake was that she did not get elected to Congress before she invested in ImClone Systems!

Newt “don’t call it lobbying” Ginrgrich

2011-11-20T09:46:00.003-05:00

Six Republican presidential candidates sat around a mock Thanksgiving table Saturday to discuss God and social issues at an Internet-only debate held by “Citizen Link” (formerly “Focus on the Family Action”) and moderated by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. In keeping with the Thanksgiving theme Newt discussed Captain John Smith who told the early settlers “If you don’t work, you don’t eat” Gingrich went on to say that principle is the basis for a sound value system, and proof of “how much the left has collapsed in our country.” His topper was his message to Occupy Wall Street; “Go get a job, right after you take a bath." This brought a big laugh form the morons in Iowa.

Let us ponder this for a moment (a moment is all I am going to be able to stand); getting beyond the odd retort of "get a job" in our present economy we have this corrupt and decadent symbol of wealth and power, a very paradigm of crony capitalism lecturing fellow Americans about exercising their right to protest. While I find the Occupy Wall Street movement a bit juvenile, they are bringing up very serious issues that go directly to the heart of the way guys like Gingrich make a living.

Perhaps the leftist scum who occupy Wall Street have not had access to the $10’s of millions of dollars in lobbying fees that Gingrich’s firm have received, including over $1.5 million (of essentially taxpayer dollars) from perhaps the most corrupt and costly business organization in American history Freddie Mac. Gingrich is a multimillionaire leaching off the intersection of corporate and legislative special interests and he is going to lecture us on, values, work ethics, and Captain John Smith at a “Family Forum,” are you fucking kidding me!

That's not capitalism & the death of the American Dream

2011-11-06T11:31:00.002-05:00

From a wonderful piece by bank analyst Mike Mayo from the WSJ on Saturday (11/5/11) discussing his history of negative advisory positions regarding the Banking industry:

To fix the banking sector, should we rely more on government regulation and oversight or let the market figure it out? Tougher rules or more capitalism? Right now, we have the worst of both worlds. We have a purportedly capitalistic system with a lot of rules that are not strictly enforced, and when things go wrong, the government steps in to protect banks from the market consequences of their own worst decisions. To me, that's not capitalism.

There are 2 key phrases here; “we have the worst of both worlds” and “that’s not capitalism,” so that leaves the question is what the hell it is, this foul symbiotic relationship between politics and big business that leaves this class, the power elite, literally living above the law and too big to fail.

Of these facts there is really no dispute, the larger question is how much this corrupting crony capitalism that has overtaken our government has impacted our current economic environment. Has a government focused primarily on the needs of its corporate masters led to the current stagnation of our middle class, the ever growing gap between rich and poor, our failing educational system and most importantly the decline of upward mobility?

America has always had notable inequality, but it also had the upward mobility that is the hallmark of real free market capitalism. That was critically important, I may be down now but with hard work and a little luck I could better myself and my children could/would have a better and more prosperous life then I had, I think that is really the core of what we call the American dream. According to a recent, excellent article in Time magazine that seems to be vanishing (“Opportunity Nation Highlights a Lack of Upward Mobility” By Kayla Webley 11/4/2011). That leaves me to ask once again, in light of knowing that major Wall Street financial firms are too big to fail, I wonder if America is.

Occupy Wall Street - Part 3

2011-10-23T09:25:00.001-04:00

We need to be clear that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are addressing very serious issues concerning corporate influence over American public policy and America’s growing economic inequality. The right has decided that the way to cut this movement off at the knees is to turn them into a joke. “Conservative” commentators say the OWS folks are hippies, they are dirty, they will be gone when the first snow falls, they are backed by liberal fat cats (George Soros), they have sex in their sleeping bags, they play in drum circles & chant, etc. The right hopes that by turning OWS members into a joke they will essentially diffuse the serious message they bring forward, it is a cowardly means of avoiding these very complex and critical issues. The left should recognize this technique; they used it to attack the Tea Party, find the idiot with the placard of Obama made up as Hitler or dressed as an African bushman and paint them as racist. This shit is easy; we are human and thus full of hypocrisy, illusions and inconsistencies. Yes, I am sure that there are as many OWS protesters with (corporate) smart phones as there is social security and Medicare recipients railing in favor of small government in the Tea Party, but none of this necessarily invalidates or should invalidate the serious matters raised by both groups.

The Tea Party missed the larger issue of our dangerous corporate crony capitalism that underpins our current “democracy.” This situation has yielded our new American plutocracy. This fact gets lost in their odd dialogue about socialism and big government. The OWS protesters think that additional government regulation is the order of the day. Any additional government regulation will be of the “Swiss cheese” variety. Written by corporate lobbyist with holes big enough for the rats to crawl in and continue to eat, in this case the physician cannot heal itself. Asking our government to legislate solutions to the problems OWS see will not work; it is like asking the fox to make the laws governing safety at the hen house.

At the end of the government cannot legislate economic equality, it can only ALLOW for economic equality by staying the fuck out of the way. Allowing Americans, the businesses and institutions they create to be responsible for their own destinies, to stand and fall based on their own merits with no superfluous interventions from the government - that is (or should be) the American way.

Occupy Wall Street – Part 2

2011-10-22T20:40:00.004-04:00

On Bill Maher’s HBO program this past Friday he stated that the folks involved in Occupy Wall Street was “not against capitalism but against what capitalism has become.” If you have a hard time grasping the concept of the dialectic, this should help – a statement that is both true and false at the same time. Clearly the OWS protesters abhor capitalism, but Maher is correct that modern big business and Wall Street represents a complete corruption of free market capitalism. No individual that respects the natural function of the free market can embrace big business in this county with its statutory dependence on the government. Legislation like Dodd-Frank and government “investments” in private business are a mockery, lobbyists writing actual legislation and our tax code bloated with thousands on special interest tax breaks often written in for 1 specific company. These are all things that OWS mentions in their various manifestos, but these are not an indictment of real free market capitalism but of the brazen crony capitalism that has overrun our country and threatens its very existence.

Sever years ago Ralph Nader commented that the only true capitalist in our country were the small business men and women because they were allowed to fail. I have hundreds of small business clients in my practice and I can tell you that other than their families, employees, vendors and (hopefully) their customers nobody cares if they fail – THAT is free market capitalism, anything else is a sham.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-21T12:14:00.001-04:00

The new Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is sprung from exactly the same anger impulse as the Tea Party. Both movements express the overarching feeling that the government is not working for the citizenry or the common good of America. As the modern American plutocracy solidifies there is an odd brazenness about this governmental apathy (broken only briefly during the election cycle).

While the Tea Party comes at this situation from a more conservative (small government) position the new Occupy Wall Street movement engages the problem from a more (pro-Government) progressive angle. The underlying root of this problem is clearly the corrupting marriage of big business and big government, but the OWS participants do not grasp that the government is (at least) half of the problem. The inequity that they rail against is not the isolated product of corporate greed but those corporations and giant Wall Street investment firms working in harmony with a big and intrusive government. Politicians need massive amounts of money to run for office and the plutocrats who run these big businesses provide those funds and thus gain the legislative influence (you had a rather stark example of this yesterday as Barney Frank voiced his sympathy with the OWS movement as he headed out to a major fund raising dinner in New York at the house of Charles Myers, a banker at Evercore Partners).

The root of this problem is money; campaign reform is not going to happen, neither major party wants it, and the current Supreme Court is simply not going to allow it so the only solution is a smaller government. You cannot fix this problem thru additional government intervention but only thru the removal of government from both the business and the personal life of its citizens, i.e. a libertarian model. It is only thru the elimination of points of contact between business and government that you might start to ameliorate our current mess, if there are less points of contact than there is less opportunity for the corrupting complicity between big business and big government.

Romney vs. Obama or where did we find that barrel!

2011-10-10T07:44:00.000-04:00

America is apparently looking at a possible Presidential election choice of Mitt Romney vs. Barak Obama. All I can think of is where we found the barrels from which bottoms we were able to scrape up these two guys. Here we have a corporate democrat and a classic corporate republican, each possessing virtually NO discernable personal values, standards or ethics. I guess on the other hand that is the point, perfect corporate stooges, guys who do not have any personal vision to get in the way of performing their duties to their corporate/special interest donors. I mean, think of how problematic it would be if they actually cared about America, the constitution or its citizens – that could really get in the way of business as usual.

I implore republicans to pick either a real conservative, such as Ron Paul or at least someone interesting such as Herman Cain so the election might actually be about something (Michele Bachmann is correct when she says the republican party needs to nominate a real conservative, she has recognized that neither Romney and Perry are actually conservative). It is already very clear that a 1^st Romney term and a 2^nd Obama term would be very similar. Romney has already embraced a hand off approach to Medicare, he wants a large and archivist military with its associated foreign involvement and corporate welfare and has refused to address solutions for social security (any of this sounding familiar). This means that the very serious subject of controlling government spending and deficit reduction is off the table (apparently) for both of these contenders.

If republicans don’t make a bolder choice then Romney we will have an elections choice just like the one comedian Lewis Black spoke of during the Bush vs. Kerry race. He said that you walked into the voting booth and there was to piles of shit…..

Happy Columbus Day 2011!

The Genius of Steve Jobs

2011-10-09T07:09:00.000-04:00

As an accountant I have never been a user of Apple products, they were never designed for accounting/tax environment where PC’s and Windows dominate. As a business man what most impressed me about Apple products was its user’s absolute compulsion to show me what their devices could do. It was most apparent on iPhones but has continued unabated with iPads. The subject would come up when interviewing clients on potential tax deductions for the year. Even in tax season with its short appointment time’s clients simply HAD to show me their favorite cool app.

The book editor/author that loved the app that recognized font names when you held the phone up to any typeface, or the recording studio owner who loved the app that could identify a recording (artist, song title, record label, etc) when the phone was put up to the speaker. The studio owner made me pick the most obscure CD I had in the office so he could demonstrate (and, of course in both instances you were able to purchase said font or recording right from your phone). I would joke when I interviewed clients that told me they had purchased an iPhone or iPad how folks HAD to show me something that the device could do in an attempt to circumvent the coming demonstration, but it was always to no avail. The compulsion to show and demonstrate something the device was capable of was just too powerful!

I can’t think of any other product made by any company that fosters such a compulsion, or a piece of technology that people feel so connected to and love (we PC/Windows users have always had a clear love/hate relationship with our technology, love it when it is working well, hate it when it isn’t - which happened regularly in the pre-Window’s 7 environment). There are products I like that if you ASK me about them I will tell you what I like, but a product that I HAVE to tell you about and demonstrate whether you ask or not, that is the result of genius. RIP Steve Jobs

Tax Policy and the American Economy 2011

2011-10-07T10:53:00.002-04:00

Nearly half of all American households, or 48.5% of the population, is receiving some type of government benefit, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau report. The figure reflects the amounts of assistance U.S. families were receiving last year, and it's the highest percentage ever.

This is coupled with another alarming statistic (which I have written about often): The Tax Policy Center (an independent organization that monitors tax policy) has reported that 46.4% of households will pay no federal income tax this year.

Still, most of those households will be liable for payroll taxes; just 18.1% of households pay neither payroll nor federal income taxes, the Tax Policy Center said, as they comprise the nation's most needy and poorest households.

So there you have it in 2011, almost half of American citizens receive some form of government benefit and almost half pay no income taxes, most assuredly many of the same individuals populate both groups.

This is not a conservative or liberal issue; this is a question about free and effective democracy. You cannot have a properly functioning and engaged citizenry when this is the economic reality for almost half of the country.

Will Rogers on politics and politicians

2011-10-04T10:07:00.000-04:00

· The Democrats and the Republicans are equally corrupt where money is concerned. It's only in the amount where the Republicans excel.

· Democrats never agree on anything, that's why they're Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.

· Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke, when it used to be vice versa.

· A Republican moves slowly. They are what we call conservatives. A conservative is a man who has plenty of money and doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't always have plenty of money. A Democrat is a fellow who never had any, but doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't have some.

· America has the best politicians money can buy. (my personal favorite!)

· Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, they don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

2011-10-03T14:21:00.001-04:00

The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in fine, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.
- Mark Twain in an Op-Ep in the New York Sunday Mercury 4/21/1867

Down in New Orleans where everything’s fine….

2011-09-20T08:11:00.002-04:00

Thus sang Stick McGhee in the famous “Wine Spodee-O-Dee” back in the late 40’s. As the 10^th anniversary of the Ponderosa Stomp comes to a close everything is indeed fine, but there was no wine (at least for this guy!). The elusive qualities of “the Stomp” that make it simply one of the most special and unique musical events in the world also demands a serious commitment, the Stomp is not for the faint of heart. Over the course of the 2 nights you are unlikely to get more then 6 to 8 hours of sleep, that is, if you plan on attending the 2 consecutive nights of 8+ hour shows that include conferences in the daytime starting @ 11 in the morning! That is why I say “drinkin’ wine Spodee-O-Dee” is probably not a good idea for serious Stomp attendees.

The Ponderosa Stomp (named after a tune by the swamp blues harp master Lazy Lester) springs from the strange and wonderful mind of our fearless leader Ira “Dr Ike” Padnos who after 10 years NEVER fails to surprise and delight his audience. It is a truism that once you come to 1 Stomp you never want to miss another one. That is the reason you see the same faces year after year coming from all over the world. Beyond the innovative bookings, if there is a secret to the Ponderosa Stomp it is in its bands. The DNA of the Stomp might be found in what has become its 4 key bands, Lil Buck and the Top Cats, led by Paul “Lil’Buck” Sinegal, Deke Dickerson & the Eccophonics, The Bo-Keys, and Michael Hurtt and his Haunted Hearts. These 4 amazing groups bring a level of skill, heart and soul to the proceedings that succeed virtually 100% of the time in making these older and often fragile (to coin a term Deke Dickerson used with me last night) sound great. If the Stomp has a secret, at least one that exists outside the weird and wonderful mind of Dr Ike, that may be it.

Ponderosa Stomp nights typically have a theme if you will, as each night tends to be “anchored” by a particular musical style and/or performer. For the special 10^th anniversary, Friday night featured and artist the Dr Ike has been trying to get for years, Allen Toussaint. Toussaint has visited the stomp in the past and on one amazing occasion appeared on stage with the late Wardell Quezerque and Dave Bartholomew. Fans of New Orleans R&B were stunned to see all 3 of its most revered arrangers & composers on stage at the same time.

For his first official Stomp appearance Allen brought his great working band but thankfully left behind the “show band” aspects of his usual appearances (I have written about this in an earlier blog) and came to do some serious playing. As is typical with the Stomp, Dr Ike got Toussaint to do a couple of his old “Wild Tousan” tunes: “Whirlaway” and “Java” that he rarely performs. Toussaint then backed up the delightful Clarence “Frogman” Henry in a rollicking (I Don’t Know Why I Love You) “But I Do” and “Ain’t got no Home,” Robert Parker in a smokin’ version of his hit “Barefootin’,” and ended with a medley of his own compositions including a robust singalong from the audience on Ernie K-Doe’s massive hit “A Certain Girl” (which as produced and written by Toussaint). All this was part of a tribute to the ailing Cosimo Mattasa the engineer and owner of the famed New Orleans recording studio J&M that was such an integral part of recording in New Orleans.

Other highlights of the first night was an incredible set of delta blues from Bobby Rush and a tribute to the great Louisiana record label “Excello” with wonderful performances by Classie Ballou, Carol Fran and Lazy Lester full of trademark swamp pop, blues and gulf-coast soul.

Saturday night’s main event was a Stax Records tribute with The Bo-Keys Memphis soul band backing what are the 3 greatest male soul singers alive; William Bell, Eddie Floyd and Otis Clay. We were extraordinarily blessed to attend the Saturday afternoon rehearsal watching these great singers interacting with Scott Bomar’s all-star Memphis soul band The Bo-Keys as they worked out a set that included such soul classics as “Raise your Hand” and “Knock on Wood” by Eddie Floyd, “Trying to Live my Life Without You” and “Got to Get Back” by Otis Clay (“Got to Get Back” is the title track from the fabulous new record by The Bo-Keys) , William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and “I Forgot to be Your Lover” and songwriter Sir Mack Rice doing his classic “Mustang Sally.” The Bo-Keys are a mix of Memphis veterans such as guitarist Charles “Skip” Pitts, drummer Harold Grimes, keyboard player Archie “Hubby” Turner, and trumpeter Ben Cauley as well as younger players such as band leader and bassist Scott Bomar. This band lays down a wicked and ferocious Memphis groove that literally blew the roof of the club. Their 2+ hour set (that started after midnight!) had no highpoints or lowpoints but was one continuous blast furnace of deep Memphis soul and serious testifying by these master singers who command the stage with stunning authority, energy and grace. I have no doubt that any modern configuration of band or singers that could have conjured up such an authentic and powerful Memphis soul stew.

Other highlights of the night was stomping set of early Chicago blues with Billy Boy Arnold, a rip-roaring session with 80+ year old sax honker Big Jay McNeely (who a fellow Stomp attendee said was “moving slow, but blowing hard”) and a short high energy set by Louisiana rockabilly master Joe Clay all backed with typical genius by Deke Dickerson.

So there you have it, the rich fabric of American roots music presented by the original practitioners, the “real deal,” performed in a loving environment with taste, skill, soul, sensitivity and love. Every year I leave New Orleans with one simple thought, God Bless “Dr Ike” and the Ponderosa Stomp.

Porgy and Bess

2011-09-16T10:32:00.002-04:00

In 1976 I saw the magnificent production by the Houston Grand Opera Company of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess (libretto by Ira and DuBose Heyward). I remember sitting in the theatre for almost 15 minutes weeping uncontrollably I was so overcome with the sadness and emotion of the ending and the song “I’m on my Way.” This story of the crippled African American man and his love of the fast living, drug addict Bess has always been, since that time, the most moving performance of anything I have ever witnessed.

This past month we were truly blessed to see a semi-performed Porgy and Bess at Tanglewood and the brilliant new production at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge. The Tanglewood performance with the BSO and chorus was sort of half acted out on a concert stage, no costumes or sets. I suspect to the singers it just made sense to acknowledge the actions taking place rather than just standing there. This performance was engaging and well sung (of course!) but the chorus was way too large and tended to overwhelm the singers, but this was a very satisfying production. While the Tanglewood production was a full “operatic” creation the ART has taken a different approach
(with the blessing of the Gershwin Estate) moving Porgy and Bess back to being more of a musical and a little less of an Opera.

Director Diane Paulus, musical adaptor Deidra Murray and playwright Susan-Lori Parks have essentially re-imagined the play, adding bits of dialogue to make the story flow better and make more sense. They have with great intelligence and respect for the music tried to look at the characters as actual people and create and underpinning of motivation and character development that does not make the story “better” but fleshes it out a bit more (now you have to keep in mind that we (THANKFULLY) saw the production late in the run when the travesty of the much discussed “happy ending” had been removed).

In the ART production Bess (played by the magnificent Audra McDonald) is a battered woman in the modern sense. Porgy (Norm Lewis) is not rolling around on a cart (like Eddie Murphy in “Trading Places”) but walking with a cane, Sportin’ Life (wonderfully realized by David Allen Grier) is a not the flashy cartoonish drug dealer with slick moves but a real lowlife playing on folks weaknesses for sex and drugs. In this production Sportin’ Life does not want Bess for himself but clearly he wants to pimp her in NY. Philip Boykin is the best Crown I have ever seen, and gets to the real heart of the true malevolence and violent evil of this character (he was booed when he took his curtain call, much to his delight as he curtsied!).

Is the production perfect, no, the none too subtle scar they put on Audra McDonalds’ cheek was a bit much, I thought the orchestrations were at times a little thin in their attempt to move Porgy and Bess from opera to “show,” the set was classic ART minimalist but at the end of the day none of this mattered. It all worked and, again, they honored the characters, story and the music. These are some of the most beautiful and moving songs ever written, focusing the story line a little, modernizing the characters and language simple cannot minimize or denigrate the deep emotion of a well sung and passionate performance of “I Loves you Porgy” and that we had here in abundance.

PBS celebrates free market capitalism!

2011-09-06T11:01:00.003-04:00

Recently came across a TV show featuring Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on PBS called “Faces of America.” In the show he researches the ancestry of famous American’s, then meets with them to enlighten them about their family history. If features such folks as Yo-Yo Ma, Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols and Queen Noor. One segment I saw concerned the great Italian chef Mario Batali. Who commented on hearing some of the troubles that his ancestors had gone thru by saying: “I would have gone back to Italy.” Gates then asked him, would you be here today talking to me if they had gone back to Italy, and he responded “no.”

This was true in many of the histories, families that had endured great hardships, but had survived and prospered within a system that offered no help, just opportunity and reward for intelligence and hard work. In the case of champion skater Kristi Yamaguchi, her ancestors had been interned during WWII and all their property confiscated! While this was not stated, most of the stories I heard were profound testaments to classic free market capitalism, not 1 family (that I heard) had benefited from any government programs, entitlements, preferential treatment, quotas, aid or any other form of help. They came to America for opportunity; their work ethic, ambition and intelligence was the only other ingredient needed to succeed.

Tax Incentives & “Loopholes,” or how stupid can the tax code get???

2011-09-05T09:10:00.001-04:00

No doubt the president will be proposing some business tax breaks on Thursday night, and that got me thinking – do these do any good, will they promote growth or job creation? My short answer is no. I say that not because I don’t think there are tax policies that might help businesses by promoting expansion and growth, it is just that few of these recently have been around long enough to take root. To gain any traction a business tax incentive has to be in effect for (at least) several years, 6 month and 1 year incentives are not around long enough to become inculcated into business planning and yield the desired result. Most small business owners don’t even become aware of some of these tax deductions before they expire!

Many of these incentives just drain treasury with not one iota of the desired result. Some of the new business tax credits; employment credits for new employee retained for more than a year, the credit for providing employee health insurance, and the plethora of energy credits are examples of less than effective tax incentives. Why do I say “less then effective?” – Because they probably do not change any business owner’s behavior, they just provide tax breaks after the fact when firms like ours prepare the companies tax return.

Conversely let us look at a long standing tax incentive that is well known to many business owners, the section 179 depreciation deduction. This election to write off a chunk of tangible equipment in a single year has been in the code for many years and has become a staple of small business planning. Every year I have dozens of conversations with business client that start out with; “should I buy a vehicle/truck/equipment before the end of the year.” This is an example of a tax incentive that is designed to foster investment in tangible assets and it clearly accomplishes that goal.

I am not necessarily a fan of “tax incentives” as many are clearly loopholes designed by and for specific interests/entities by corrupt politicians. Need some examples?: Hedge fund managers that (essentially) get to declare compensation as long term capital gains, corporate deferred compensation and stock option schemes, electric & alternative auto credits, accelerated depreciation on corporate jets and last but not least MOST of the corporate and personal energy credits and deductions (“energy” credits are the reason GE got a tax benefit/refund of $3.2 billion from the IRS, and I am sure they lobbied ferociously for each and every one of them! – see below).

When I Googled “tax loopholes” I got discussions on the mortgage interest & charitable donation deduction, tax free municipal bond interest and long-term capital gains rates, it made me think that for some a tax loophole is anything somebody else gets to take advantage of.

Let us take the famous case of General Electric (from the NYT 03.24.2011);

General Electric reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the I.R.S. for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former official treasury named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well. Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less.

If there was ever an argument for tax simplification this might be it, when a huge company like GE spends millions in tax planning and lobbying to yield not only 0 taxes but an actual refund of $3.2 million dollars! If you couple this with the fact that over 50% of American taxpayers pay no income tax or that General Electric’s Chairman and CEO, Jeffrey Immelt is now head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and you know you have an incredibly corrupt and broken system.

Illiminate MOST if not all tax incentives, credits and deductions in favor of lower tax rates, let GE fire its tax attorney staff and lobbyist (maybe they can go to work on rebuilding American infrastructure projects!) and allow the millions of small business owners to concentrate of running their business instead of keeping up with the idiotic, ever changing minutiae of our tax code.

Happy Labor Day 2011!

Pure Pop for Now People

2011-09-02T08:08:00.000-04:00

On April 2nd we were treated to a wonderful “unplugged” show with the Boston based trio Buffalo Tom (featuring Newburyport’s own Tom Maginnis on drums). Buffalo Tom was opening the new Loft space of the Portsmouth Music Hall. The band was touring to support this year’s excellent “Skins” disk. The acoustic setting complimented the voice of singer Bill Janovitz as he did not have to strain as much. In this quieter setting I missed the powerful roar the band typically displays, but this show allowed me to appreciate the group’s lyrics and wonderful punk/pop melodic sensibilities all the more. New songs such as “She’s Not Your Thing” and “The Kids Just Sleep” really shined.

Last month we finally caught up with The Smithereens, a band I have been listening to for over 30 years. They were touring behind their great new record “2011,” their first record of new material in 12 years. Amazingly, they sounded as fresh an energetic as if they were playing for the first time. Classics like “Blood and Roses” and “Behind a Wall of Sleep” rocked with great muscle and authority. The band still has 3 original members, and roared thru their show without a setlist with leader Pat DeNinzio’s calling out the songs as they went along. The Smithereens have been biding their time recently with odd cover records (Beatles “B-Sides,” Tommy, etc) so the quality of the new CD was a surprise. I asked Pat after the show why the delay when they obviously had so much good material and he told me that the record company did not want to release it, and only did so after the group agreed to release their “Tommy” cover disc (further evidence, if you needed it, of how fucked up the current record industry is).

On a final note, the new disk by New Jersey Pop-Meisters “Fountains of Wayne” called “Sky Full of Holes” is excellent, power pop at its best! (FOW is another band who has evaded me in concert)

Sayings Heard Recently

2011-09-01T10:02:00.002-04:00

Here are 3 sayings I have come across recently that I liked:

· From a church letter board in Ossipee, New Hampshire:

“Excuses are the nails which hold the house of failure together”

· From a client during an Internal Revenue Service audit (referring to a receipt that was being discussed):

You know the old saying: “you can have it good, fast or cheap, pick 2”

· This from a professor discussing whether New Yorkers would heed the warnings concerning hurricane Irene:

You know the old saying about New Yorkers: “You can always tell a New Yorker, but you can’t tell them much”

Rockpile LIVE 1980

2011-08-25T20:45:00.002-04:00

Back in 1980 the “Dean” of American rock critics Robert Christgau named The Clash, Gang of Four and Rockpile as the greatest live bands then playing. Having seen all 3 of these bands live at least once during 1980 I knew this was true. Sadly there has been scant evidence of the greatness of the British all-star group known as Rockpile, until this week. Rockpile was Nick Lowe on bass, Dave Edmunds and Billy Bremner on guitar and Terry Williams on drums. With the release of the new “Live at Montreux 1980” this week we now have ample evidence of this groups amazing ability to rock. I did not realize until listening to this record this week what a powerful and unrelenting rhythm section Nick Lowe and Terry Williams were. This album contains blistering live versions of so many classics from Dave and Nicks “solo” records: Crawling from the Wreckage, Girls Talk, Swichboard Susan, I knew the Bride (when she used to rock n’ roll), Queen of Hearts and So it Goes. This is classic rock n’ roll of the highest order and delivered with sledgehammer power.

Amy Winehouse

2011-07-28T17:11:00.003-04:00

With the sad death of Ms. Winehouse I would ask her fans to seek out and support some of the real soul survivors and soul sisters who would be thrilled (and deserve) to have some of your CD/download dollars and would love even a small amount of the press bestowed upon Ms. Winehouse.

For your consideration: Barbara Lynn, Sharon Jones, Bettye LaVette, La La Brooks, Jean Knight, Tammy Lynn, The Velvalettes, Dorothy Moore, Mavis Staples, Irma Thomas, Barbara Harris and I am sure there are many more I am forgetting about. Make sure you are supporting the real thing and giving the folks that chose to work and survive the respect, honor and money that are their due!

Following Atticus

2011-07-22T14:38:00.001-04:00

We here in Newburyport (our fair city) have been very fortunate to be featured in three wonderful books recently. The first was Joel Brown’s superb murder mystery “Mirror Ball Man,” next was Andre Dubus’ celebrated “Townie” and next up is Tom Ryan’s “Following Atticus.” Newburyport residents know Mr. Ryan as the provocative editor of the local political journal “The Undertoad.” He was reviled by some and loved by many for his intrepid news reporting and his courageous stands against authority and power. Mr. Ryan and “The Undertoad” were by turns smart, petulant, insightful, caustic, sentimental, enormously funny and ALWAYS worth reading. In the days of “The Undertoad” you truly could not be considered “in the know” about Newburyport if you had not devoured the latest issue.

Those of us who got to know Tom Ryan knew he was a fine writer, great storyteller and immensely witty. Much like our local son’s Joel and Andre, Tom simply knows how to write. In what I trust will be the first of many books, on September 20 “Following Atticus” will be published. Newburyporter’s will certainly delight in his characterizations of our fair city and his observations of some of its inhabitants, both named and un-named.

“Following Atticus” is best described as a memoir that really reads like a novel. As I got further into the book I would often forget that I knew Tom and much of the story and find myself just enjoying the craft, wit and heart of his storytelling. The core of the book is Tom’s relationship with his amazing little dog Atticus and their adventures hiking in the White Mountains, but the story begins to unfold as family elements come into play and you soon realize that what you are really reading is a tale of redemption and discovery. About a third of the way thru the book my wife asked me how I liked it and I told her with great authority that; “I didn’t care what Tom said, this is a dog book.” Of course about 50 pages later as the book deepened and opened up I had to eat my words; this was certainly not a “dog book” or a “hiking book” but a great story. In the way Moby Dick is not a “whale book”
Tom had succeeded in using his hiking quest and his friendship with this little dog to tell a much grander story about love, survival, fear, change, dysfunctional families, and of course small New England cities. Like all great writers he uses the colors of his simple story to paint a much grander canvas about life itself and he does it with a quiet skill and artfulness of a fine writer. So it will not matter if you love dogs, or care anything about hiking or the White Mountains, or live in a small New England city this book will draw you in with its heartfelt tale of love, survival and triumph.

Just say HELL NO, after all “Deficits Don’t Matter”!

2011-07-21T17:45:00.000-04:00

WOW, remember the halcyon days just a few short years ago when the Republican controlled Congress easily passed 8 increases to America’s debt ceiling with little or no debate and back when the great sage Dick Cheney told Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in 2002 that “deficits don’t matter” – ahhhh, those golden days of our youth! There are so many glorious high points; back in 2003 Congress raised the debt ceiling “by almost 1 trillion dollars to cover the second round of Bush tax cuts approved by Congress, at $350 billion. And to cover the President’s Medicare prescription drug bill, projected at $400 billion (but at an actual cost greater then $600 billion). Bush signed it into law without the revenue to fund it” (from The Washington Spectator from July 15, 2011). In a mind boggling dereliction of duty, the day the $350 billion tax cut was passed was the same day as the debt ceiling increase, clearly the new “hell no” Republican Party was not in session that day.

I know what you are thinking, back in those splendid days a Republican was president, but in fact there was a young senator who spoke up deploring the raising of the debt ceiling: “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” the senator thundered. “Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. . . . Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.” Of course the young Senator was Barak Obama in an earlier incarnation, before he morphed in to George W. V2 and brought us our current 3^rd term of the Bush administration complete with continued idiotic wars, insane tax policy, corporate welfare, more unfunded mandates and entitlements, same war on terrorism and rising deficits.

So the question is; are the gates of hell going to open up and swallow us if we do not increase the debt ceiling by 8/2, probably not but the results could be very damaging. It is important to remember that increasing the debt ceiling has nothing really to do with spending levels. Increasing the debt ceiling is simply coming up with the money to pay the bills that are coming thru the door, bills that Congress itself approved. One of the very real dangers in any sort of default no matter how minor is its effect on the interest rate we have to pay to borrow money. As Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration wrote in the Washington Post today: “J.P. Morgan recently surveyed its clients and asked how much rates would rise if there was a delay in (debt) payments, even a very brief one. Domestic investors thought they would go up by 0.37 percentage points, but foreign buyers — who own close to half the publicly held debt — predicted an increase of more than half a percentage point. Any increase in this range would raise Treasury’s borrowing costs by tens of billions of dollars per year.”

So at the end of the day this is not the stupid game of chicken that the tea party morons seem to think it is. It is also not about taking a stand on debt, as this is money to pay the credit card bill for the stuff we already charged. This August 2^nd “deadline” is an important line in the sand, do our elected officials have the intellect and guts to start down that road to more fiscal sanity. The American people are simply asking our elected officials to do what millions of Americans have been doing (and struggling with) over the past 2 years; control spending, lower debt and live within our means.

Justice Scalia plays a Grimm game of Mortal Kombat

2011-07-04T13:38:00.000-04:00

Part of Justice Scalia’s assenting decision in last week’s Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown vs. Entertainment Merchants Association (the case concerned whether California could regulate the selling of violent video games to minors) was much quoted:

California's argument would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children's access to depictions of violence, but there is none. Certainly the books we give children to read—or read to them when they are younger—contain no shortage of gore. Grimm's Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed. As her just deserts for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers "till she fell dead on the floor, a sad example of envy and jealousy." . . . Cinderella's evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves. And Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven.

High-school reading lists are full of similar fare. Homer's Odysseus blinds Polyphemus the Cyclops by grinding out his eye with a heated stake. . . . ("Even so did we seize the fiery-pointed brand and whirled it round in his eye, and the blood flowed about the heated bar. And the breath of the flame singed his eyelids and brows all about, as the ball of the eye burnt away, and the roots thereof crackled in the flame"). In the Inferno, Dante and Virgil watch corrupt politicians struggle to stay submerged beneath a lake of boiling pitch, lest they be skewered by devils above the surface. . . . And Golding's Lord of the Flies recounts how a schoolboy called Piggy is savagely murdered by other children while marooned on an island.

To the right this decision is another triumphant win for the 1^st amendment and free speech (I wonder if the right is going to end up regretting equating free speech with corporate profits), for the left it is another in a line of successes by big business in the Roberts court (about 20% of the sales of violent video games are to players under the age of 17).

What struck me about Scalia’s argument was how vacuous it was. Grimm’s fairy tales, stories that inhabit a moral universe, are being compared with games such as Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto which inhabits an amoral and nihilistic universe where violence is both random and extreme; intellectually, artistically and morally there is almost no reasonable basis for this comparison. Secondly children were READ Grimm’s fairy tales not being asked to PARTICIPATE in them! If the Grimm brothers had created a modern video game of Hansel and Gretel the players would have to devise the most violent and graphic death of their captors, and believe me it would not be as prosaic as being baked in an oven! In Scalia’s argument all violence is equal and is not measured by its function in a story but just its severity, how else could anyone make a moral equivalence of Homer’s Odyssey and Mortal Kombat as Scalia essentially does?

If the primary issue is that our society has not set up proper safeguards on ultra-violent imagery being delivered to minors as we have for pornographic content then so be it, Justice Scalia, spare us this insipid argument.

Cars 2, Audience 0

2011-07-03T21:12:00.000-04:00

It is with great sadness that I write that heretofore the least film in the Pixar universe, Cars, has now been supplanted by a new and decidedly more marginal film “Cars 2.” From Blue Sky or Dreamworks Animation studio’s Cars 2 would have seemed OK, but from John Lasseter and Pixar it becomes a major disappointment. The film is to long with a spy plot that is too complicated for most kids, and it was certainly a questionable decision to make Tow Mater the main character.

In the middle of the film my six year old spend 5 minutes searching for a piece of candy she thought she had dropped on the floor, and while she is a very experienced movie watcher I am quite sure she had no idea what was the hell was going on. As soon as the end credits started running she looked at me and said, “Can we go now?” – not a good sign. Of course the movie looks great, with stunning racing visuals but it is strangely heartless. It is almost devoid of the tremendous feeling and soulfulness that Pixar seems to be able to conjure up with ease. It was also lacking their laser like focus on story and character. You have nothing in Cars 2 that even approaches the poignant depth of the furnace scene near the end of “Toy Story 3”, or the elegant space ballet between Wall-E and Eve in “Wall-E”, or that amazing voice over from Peter O’Toole that serves as the story climax in “Ratatouille.” Moreover Cars 2 is built around the friendship between Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater but it never rings as true as the one between Sully and Mike in “Monsters Inc.”

While most of us assume that Lasseter is the mastermind at Pixar one wonders if he should have brought in some of the other geniuses at Pixar for help with Cars 2 such as Andrew Stanton or Brad Bird. In any case Cars 2 is not bad; it is gorgeous and entertaining enough but just don’t expect the sheer greatness and emotional depth we have come to expect from Pixar Studios.

Stuck in Downey with the Texas blues again – Jimmie Vaughn and Dave Alvin LIVE

2011-06-26T21:44:00.000-04:00

Had the great good fortune to see two of America’s great roots artists in the last week. First up was the great Jimmie Vaughn at Tupelo Music Hall in Londonderry, NH. The first saw Vaughn when he began his post Fabulous Thunderbird’s solo career he seemed a fish out of water onstage, unsure of himself in the front man role. I am happy to report those days are gone, Vaughn was amiable and comfortable fronting his fabulous band. While his voice is not great, it is solid and serviceable and he does a brilliant job of choosing material that compliments it. We were also thrilled when he brought out Texas roadhouse songbird Lou Ann Barton to sing about half way thru the set. Barton and Vaught complement each other perfectly.

Vaughn’s band including sax players Greg Piccolo and Doug James, (from Duke Robillard’s original Roomful of Blues) who have played together for so long they literally sound like 1 horn then they riff! Then, of course, is the guitar playing – Vaughn is true blues master with tone and taste to spare. I have been a fan of Vaughn’s straight up Texas blues guitar since the first Fabulous Thunderbirds LP “Girls go Wild” back in 1979. He is an elegant and tasteful player that never plays a superfluous note and his biting Fender tone is to die for. I noticed even on fast tunes he never plays fast, just maintains his perfect lean and soulful style. Vaughn featured a lot of tunes from his fine current CD, “Plays Blues, Ballads & Favorites” and his upcoming CD called “More Blues, Ballads and Favorites.”

Next up was one of Americana’s great songwriters and performers Dave Alvin @ Johnny D’s in Somerville. Dave and his brother Phil roared out of Downey California with “The Blasters” back in 1979 (same year as the first Fabulous Thunderbird’s LP!). With New Orleans great Lee Allen on tenor sax and Gene Taylor on piano they were, for me, the greatest roots rock band that I ever heard. Dave was the driving guitar player and main songwriter and Phil was the lead singer. In his post Blaster’s career Dave has played with X and various other bands prior to beginning his formal solo career in 1987.

At Johnny D’s Dave and his quartet featured mostly songs from his new CD “Eleven Eleven” (being his 11^th album, released in 2011). The set was, was like all Alvin’s shows a wonderful mix of beautiful working class poetry and ragged but right rock and roll. Highlights from the superb new CD were “Harlan County Line” and “Johnny Ace is Dead,” but there were great older tunes as well, the elegiac “Abilene” and rip roaring “Marie, Marie” and a menacing and deadly “Out of Control.”

The Big Man, Master of the Universe, King of the World, able to leap tall women in a single bound!

2011-06-19T11:39:00.001-04:00

It is with profound sadness that we learn of the death of Clarence Clemons from the E Street Band. If you were lucky enough to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band back in the 1970’s as I was you know that the relationship between Bruce and Clarence went way beyond anything musical and into the realm of the mythic. Clarence was Bruce’s onstage foil and way beyond a “sidekick” as he has sometimes been characterized. In thinking about the many wonderful moments I witnessed, the long kiss on the lips, the onstage slide into Clarence’s outstretched arm my favorite was at a show in Saratoga, NY on the “River” tour when Bruce and Clarence did a vignette during the song “Sherry Darling” where Clarence played the psychiatrist counseling Bruce while he declares his profound dislike of his girlfriends mother. They performed it with Bruce laying on the stage with his head in Clarence’s lap and him this a clipboard in his hand studiously taking notes while Bruce ranted on. If coarse Clarence loomed large in so many Springsteen onstage stories over the years (thanks to the wonderful folks at www.backsteets.com for this memory):

This was in addition to Clarence's active participation, or at least invocation, in the gamut of stories Bruce told onstage. It was Clarence who walked through the woods with Bruce to find the gypsy woman, or it was Clarence that gave him the directions to find God to ask him whether he should be a writer or a lawyer. It was Clarence with whom Bruce drove through the wind and the snow and the tornado, the car falling apart, until the radio broke. It was Clarence in the forest when they were visited by Little Melvin and the Invaders in the spaceship. Clarence was there when Bruce and Steve sat on the porch trying to get up their nerve to talk to Pretty Flamingo, and it was Clarence on the park bench showing off the pictures of his son.

The onstage relationship between Bruce and Clarence faded over the years as Springsteen grew older, the elaborate stories and vignettes grew rarer. My good friend Dave Little got it right the other night when I stated that it was a kind of father/son, big brother/little brother relationship and he corrected me (as he often does!). He said that Clarence was the onstage anchor to his younger, wilder band leader. Clarence was the steady presence, grounding the band against this young, unpredictable, out of control force of nature, and as such Clarence in the early days was in an odd way the center of the band. As Bruce grew older this paradigm necessarily changed and thus the onstage relationship changed but was always essential.

Of course there is no denying that there was an (unstated) racial element to their partnership. Entering the public consciousness in the 1970’s there was no mistaking that a statement was being made on the iconic cover of “Born to Run.” Thankfully their public persona was far too rich and deep to ever become bogged down racial politics; after all they were having too much fun!

And then, of course, is the music – solos that are so truly iconic that it is hard to find a parallel in rock n’ roll, certainly not one that traverses 40 years; "Rosalita," "Backstreets," "Born to Run," "Jungleland," "Badlands," "The Ties that Bind," "Out in the Streets" and right up to "Girls in their Summer Clothes." Solos that were by design the emotional center and focus of the songs, especially on the concert stage. Clarence’s saxophone was the key element that tied Springsteen’s rock n' roll songs to their underpinning of the great soul and Rhythm and Blues that Bruce loved. Springsteen’s music is inexorably changed without the presence and sound of Clarence Clemons’s saxophone. So ultimately, even though Springsteen is indeed “the Boss” this was a wonderful partnership between these 2 men. Clarence wrote in his delightful autobiography “Big Man” that “without scooter, there is no big man,” I would also say there without the big man there might have been no scooter (as we know him). The very fabric and tone of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band is altered inexorably in the absence of Clarence Clemons.

Rest in peace and God bless Clarence Clemons - the best remembrance and obit is found on www.backstreets.com

Tax reform and how to win the lottery when you file your 1040

2011-06-17T11:02:00.000-04:00

At least once every tax season I have a client who is dumbfounded that their federal tax refund is bigger than the amount of income taxes they had withheld, and they invariably say “you mean the Internal Revenue Service will send back more than I paid in, that doesn’t make any sense!”
Indeed, but in fact (according to a recent nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation report on 2009 Federal tax filings) about 30% of American taxpayers do, in fact, get back all and more of what they paid in for federal income tax. This happens via something called “refundable tax credits,” credits that directly lower federal income taxes but are then refundable if the credit exceeds the taxpayer’s liability. In the tax world these refundable credits are often called tax expenditures, i.e. the I.R.S. sends out a refund in excess of the money the taxpayer has actually paid in. The growth of these refundable credits has produced this 30% of the population that gets back more than they paid in, as well as to the equally shocking 51% of Americans that pay no federal income taxes (according to the same Joint Committee report). These refundable credits include the much abused earned income tax credit, adoption credit, American Opportunities education credit and the new home buyer’s credit. These credits essentially turn the Internal Revenue Service into a quasi-welfare agency for approximately 30% of American taxpayers.

So what is tax reform going to look like? I suspect it will be modeled on the huge 1986 tax reform bill, and that can best be visualized in this way; if the tax code is a rubber ball, the reform will essentially squash the ball. It will lower all marginal rates in exchange for eliminating special tax breaks and credits and it will broaden (flatten) the tax base. Regardless of what one thinks about “tax breaks for the wealthy” no democracy is going to function properly if 51% of its citizens do not pay taxes and 30% see filing their taxes as akin to playing the lottery. We certainly have poor people in this county that should not be paying taxes, but I have a hard time believing that group is 51% of US tax filers. I also find it hard to believe that 30% of the American public needs to be collecting what amounts to welfare payments thru their tax filings (a process loaded with opportunities to manipulate income).

While I am no fan of the Internal Revenue Service part of tax reform should be returning the Service to its proper function; the administration and collection of taxes. It should not be a welfare agency and it should also not become the traffic cop for the national health reform (a subject for another day). The I.R.S. should never be sending out checks in excess of what it has collected and most important more Americans have to become tax paying citizens. I think before we even have the discussion on proper tax rates for “the rich” we desperately need to get more American’s with “skin in the game.” A capitalist democracy demands and needs a citizenry that sees and understands the relationship between money paid in for taxes and goods and services received from the government.

Brain-dead Liberalism 101

2011-06-14T21:55:00.000-04:00

Highly recommended (and now widely read) is David Mamet’s Village Voice piece “Why I am no longer a “Brain-Dead” Liberal.” This much reviled piece (by the liberal establishment) written back in March of 2008 is a must read, thoughtful and wholly non-partisan (at least as far as our current pathetic 2 party political system is concerned). He takes a run at the world view of liberalism and conservatism thru a theatrical lens of his (then current) play “November”;

“The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.”

The article reminded me how daunting it is to challenge your own assumptions, especially in these days of instant 24 hour digital news. It has become all too easy to make sure that your assumptions are never challenged by any alternative views, liberal or conservative. The Fox News audience makes sure it is fed on a steady diet of “conservative” thinking as the CNBC viewers do the same with it brand of “liberal” swill.

The other issue that Mamet brought to my mind is how ingrained liberal thinking is to those of us “Born in the 50’s” (to quote the song by The Police). Mamet made me remember a very fine literature teacher I had sitting with me one day “proving” that liberal thought and worldview was inherently more “moral and ethical” then the conservative view. Thus these ideas become intellectual assumptions that are tough to overcome.

While we are on the subject of “brain-dead” liberalism was Janeane Garofalo on Bill Mayer’s HBO show the other night who stated that among other things that she did not understand why Representative Anthony Weiner was “being thrown under the bus” as he had not “broken any laws” (this remains to be seen) and that his actions had not “impacted anyone’s life negatively.” I was struck by this incredibly shallow and vapid ethical view. This arrogant, lying, unfaithful little worm is only to be judged unfit for a leadership position in the country if he has “broken the law” or “impacted anyone’s life negatively.” God help us if this is how otherwise intelligent (Ms. Garofalo has always struck me as bright and engaged) Citizens understand ethical leadership in this country.

Looking for a Bad Guy!

2011-06-05T19:49:00.001-04:00

'The American people realize they've been robbed. They're just not sure by whom," write Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner in "Reckless Endangerment." But Americans who read this outstanding history of the financial crisis will know, by the end, exactly who created the meltdown of 2008 and how they did it. This is a story, the authors say, "of what happens when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home."

Thus begins an excellent review by James Freeman in the WSJ 6/3/11. The book is an accurate and damming incitement of America’s financial toxic twins Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, but it struck me that it is really only half the story.

Yes, the government was promoting easy mortgage acquisition but Wall Street was hungry for mortgage fodder and wanted all the mortgagees anybody could write because they were making a fortune bundling them as securitized investments. Then after Wall Street packaged up these securitized mortgages, AIG (the primary culprit in the financial meltdown) was making a fortune insuring these bundles of shit (the infamous “credit default swaps”).

When writers and pundits go looking for the boogie man under the financial crisis bed the answers are easy to predict. The right wants the government to be the bad guys (they are!) and the left wants Wall Street to be the bad guys (they are!). But when you examine all the evidence and watch the flow of money you see a hideous marriage of business and government designed to line everybody's pockets at the brutal expense of the American taxpayer and economy. Wall Street made a fortune and the Senate Finance Committee collected millions in campaign contributions.

Of course the sad thing is that it could all happen again tomorrow - only difference will be that Dodd-Frank Financial Reform will have institutionalized the “bail out” so there will not have to be any sick charade in Congress to get the money. Welcome to the new system of American free enterprise (of you have enough money to buy in) = privatized wealth and socialized failure - heads I win, tails you lose!

The great Medicare debate

2011-06-02T10:28:00.000-04:00

The recent win in New York’s 26^th Congressional race has emboldened Democrats that Paul Ryan’s plan for saving Medicare is a fatal Republican flaw. Thus this rudderless and intellectually deprived political party has decided that it need not embrace or even offer up a solution to this very serious problem but just highlight the faults of Ryan’s plan and it will win elections.

This reminds me of how the Republican Party calls for the end of President Obama’s healthcare plan while offering up no solutions to the national disgrace that is our current healthcare system. If you are still in need of proof of the complete corruption and moral bankruptcy of our 2 main political parties look no further.

Standing at the Crossroads with my head hung down and crying

2011-05-30T10:52:00.000-04:00

Thus sang the great Elmore James back in 1954 and I think as well American on this Memorial Day 2011. It is fascinating to read over the various plans for deficit reduction put forward by the players in the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s fiscal summit last week. The only fiscal cut that was embraced by all the players was farm subsidies!

The great disparity in these plans, as well as Representative Paul Ryan’s highlights that this matter is not about spending cuts per say but is really a philosophical argument about the nature of government. On the left is a more activist government that is seen as a key player in people’s everyday lives, stepping in to solve problems and provide solutions. On the right is a small government, one that does as Regan used to say “only what it has to” and nothing more. A government that is NOT looked to as a solver of problems (more likely seen as a causation of problems), The right sees a government that needs to get out of the way and allow the American people the room to innovate and succeed – take responsibility for their own destiny.

But let’s first be clear, for politicians of both stripes the good of the general public on both sides of this great philosophical debate run second to their serving their various corporate masters. Republican are VERY interested in personal responsibility, not so much on corporate responsibility as they will vehemently oppose even basic environmental & consumer protection regulations. Democrats are VERY concerned about all Americans having health care as long as the various industries can continue to make profits and there are no cost controls in the system, and neither side is slightly interested in how everything is going to get paid for, which is the reason we are at the crossroads today!

Philosophically both sides are “correct” and that is the problem, how do you define what government “only has to do?”

For example, on the right the free market is a great “self-regulator” and government only fucks up this great natural mechanism when it steps in. This is, of course, absolutely true – government regulation can easily throw the free markets off kilter with ill-designed regulations and market manipulations. Yet the government has a very important and powerful role in regulating financial institutions (for instance) in matters of fraud, safety and the protection of the public. That is a (maybe the) critical government role, protecting the public welfare, but these regulations need to be simple and as minimal as possible to provide these protections against capitalist excess and do nothing more than that (this is part of the “only what it has to” axiom). What did we get on reform of Wall Street, the Dodd-Frank behemoth that was written by the very industry that it was supposed to regulate with provisions designed to the wishes of the highest bidder.

We have seen plenty of examples over the past few years of lax regulations and regulators such as in the oil industry where the regulators were (literally) in bed with the industry. When American has a major nuclear disaster like Japan (and we will) we will see once again how the marriage made in hell between (in this case) the nuclear industry and government has sacrificed the public safety and good.

I think the main problem that the right does not address in its thinking is that the government interventions and regulations that it hates so much are often written (literally) by the industries themselves. Unless we get a level playing field were our public servants are really public servants and not shills for big donors, corporations and special interests then I do not know if there is any hope for us.

We are heading into rough waters, a new American public austerity (austerity which many citizens have already embraced in their personal life). This will include cuts in federal and state services (and not just services needed by folks other then ourselves!), cuts in entitlement spending, defense, tax increases (and not just the other guys taxes, but everybody’s!). I am not sure how this consensus is going to be reached in an environment where corporate masters are serviced first and the public second.

The issue of corporate influence in American public life is one that should easily unite both the left, right and everyone in between – it might be the most important and completely non-partisan issue in American public life.

Mavis Staples and the Rick Holmstrom Band

2011-05-08T10:48:00.002-04:00

On March 25th we went to the Portsmouth Music hall to see a woman who is, simply put, a National Treasure of music, Ms. Mavis Staples. Mavis was born in 1940 in Chicago and is part of the institution known as the Staples Singers lead by her late and beloved father Pops Staples.

One of the things that has made seeing Mavis special in recent years has been her current backing band, guitarist Rick Holmstrom’s Trio. I first heard this line up on the superb live 2008 CD “Live: Hope at the Hideout” followed by an amazing show in New Orleans in the spring of 2009. This simple instrumental trio (drum, bass and guitar) and 3 backup singers make for a jewel like setting for the rich, transcendent voice and spirit of Mavis (in this case there is no way to separate the voice from the spirituality and presence of the great lady herself, and why would you ever want to)

Hearing Mavis with Mr. Holmstrom and his trio reminds me of the scene from Norman Maclean’s novella “A River Runs Through it” (both book and movie) where the young writer Norman Maclean is being edited by his father, who is busy crossing out more than half of what the young writer has written removing all that is superfluous. Of course that speaks directly to the graceful simplicity that is so often found in great art, nothing wasted and focus on only what is relevant and important to tell the story. The pairing of Mr. Holmstrom’s band and Ms. Staples is an object lesson in that understanding; all the prodigious talent, spirituality and deep feeling brought to bear in delivering profound and joyous music, stripped of any pretense or unnecessary embellishment.

One of my memories of that stunning New Orleans show back in 2009, and repeated this year in Portsmouth, was Mavis patting Mr. Holmstrom on the back while he played a guitar solo. I told Rick after the show when the daughter of Pops Staples pats you on the back while you play then you really know you are doing something right! Indeed everyone in this group is doing a lot right and they are not to be missed - lucky for us they will be back locally at the Lowell Summer Music Series on Friday August 19th 2011 for a show that, I am proud to say, will be sponsored by Riley & Associates, PC.

Bettye Lavette LIVE @ The Regattabar

2011-04-29T17:14:00.002-04:00

On March 10th we went to the Regatta Bar to see the amazing Bettye Lavette, a true force of nature. With the modern soul world inhabited by poseurs, Lavette is the real deal, the absolute paradigm for the term “soul survivor.” In her mid-sixties she is still beautiful and sexy with an uncompromising stage presence, she made me think of the lettering emblazoned across the top of James Brown’s 1962 LP “Excitement;” “Cool – Tough – Pure,” that, in a nutshell is Bettye Lavette.

She made her first record in the early 1960’s at age 16, with real success just missing her until late in life. While I like Ms. Lavette’s records to me she is someone you need to see live where you get the whole package. She was backed by her tight band that easily conjured up the deep soul groove that she needed while not attempting to re-create any earlier era. I think that might be what is special about Ms. Lavette, she is not attempting to reproduce 1960’s soul music but simply taking that style that she was forged in and adapt it to contemporary material (much like the late, great Solomon Burke did). So you hear genuine “soulful” takes on material written by John Hiatt, Lucinda Williams, Fiona Apple, Pete Townsend, Sinead O’Connor and Elton John (stylistic versions that they themselves could never pull off). Lavette’s performances cut like a laser beam straight to the emotional heart of every song, wrenching every bit of feeling out of them and letting you know that she is one of the soul greats regardless of what the record charts ever said about her.

Heads I Win, Tails you Lose

2011-04-27T10:41:00.000-04:00

The White House as put up a “Federal Tax Receipt” calculator that will print you a “receipt” of where your tax dollars were spent in 2010 (www.whitehouse.gov/issues/taxes/tax-receipt). Ingenious, I was kinda hoping they might add a second calculator that would add up what my 6 year old daughter, her children and grandchildren might end up paying on the dollars that the federal reserve is busily printing up – maybe some enterprising Republican (are there any??) will do that. I’ll make this easy for you: 26.3% goes to defense, 24.3% to healthcare (largely Medicare), 21.9% for Job and Family Security (mostly Social Security) and 7.4% to federal interest payments.

I was thinking of all this while reading Matt Taibbi’s excellent piece in the recent issue of Rolling Stone “The Real Housewives of Wall Street.” Taibbi writes about the “secret” budget maintained by the Federal Reserve (cue Ron Paul – maybe he isn’t so crazy after all!):

What they (the public) don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the "official" budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the "other" budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."

With the media overrun with stories about public anger over unions, public employees & their pensions, the NEA, Planned Parenthood and other idiotic nonsense we have Cretans such as Tim “nobody ever told me about self-employment taxes!” Geithner, Ben “I know a lot about the Great Depression” Bernanke, and Larry “the markets are completely self-regulating” Summers printing up money at will, and handing it out to anyone they want to with NO oversight and NO accountability (including millions to off shore “companies” in the Caymen Islands – that’s right, publically funded tax evaders). Couple this with the fact that 26.3% of our tax dollars went to the defense of our country when we have no real formal “enemies” that require this level of traditional warfare and hardware and all I could think of is the great Walt Kelly quote “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

In response to calculating my “Federal Tax Receipt” this year I would ask the President one question; is any chance that some of the 26.3% going to defense could be reallocated to protecting us from our elected (and unelected) officials?

Tax Season 2011 Music - C.J. Chenier comes to Newburyport!

2011-04-26T17:38:00.000-04:00

On March 4^th (thanks to my good friend Dave Little) we went to the Bellville Church in Newburyport to hear C.J. Chenier and his Red Hot Louisiana Band. C.J. is the son of Zydeco pioneer Clifton Chenier (think of what Bill Monroe is to Bluegrass music or Louis Armstrong to Jazz to understand Clifton’s role in Zydeco music). I told Dave, “I am not really that into Zydeco” when he asked if I was going to the show, to which he responded “I bought you tickets, you’re going.” Smart man, certainly not the first time I might have missed something truly great without his prompting! C.J. was fabulous, so much better than any zydeco I have ever heard, even in New Orleans, the show became a real epiphany for me. His band was razor sharp and you could not have slipped a piece of paper between the drummer and the bass player they were so tight. The smokin’ band and C.J.’s towering presence was all that was needed to keep the locals jumpin’ that cold winter night. Babysitting time limits caused my wife and me to leave a little early that night and we had a wonderful moment standing in the snowy street outside the church and listening to this great Louisiana party music blasting out of the open windows of the hot church. I closed my eyes and imagined myself back at the Rock n’ Bowl in New Orleans and it all seemed perfectly natural.

Lizz Wright @ Scullers

2011-03-09T12:26:00.000-05:00

Several weeks ago we had the good fortune to see Lizz Wright again at Scullers in Boston. We had seen Ms. Wright during her first American tour back in 2003 and were knocked out. At that point Ms. Wright was what I might call a pseudo jazz singer, not a pure jazz singer but a singer with strong jazz influences, but what we encountered the other night was something of another realm entirely. Like some great African priestess the lovely Ms. Wright conjured up a rich blend of southern African-American traditions in a performance that was at once elegant and soulful.

She began the show with an elegiac reading of Me’Shell N’Degeocello’s hymn “Fellowship” (the title track from Wright's excellent new album). I can count on one hand the performers I have seen who pulled off beginning a show with a slow number, Ms Wright accomplished it with grace. Ms. Wright and her superb band blended southern blues, spirituals, gospel, funk, southern soul and R&B with ease, these interconnected but still disparate styles held together with the Ms. Wright’s powerful presence and voice. Ms. Wright has a wonderful gesture when she performs in which she will pat her chest as if to emphasize what is plainly apparent to her audience, that every note she utters is coming from deep in her soul. Whether it is the traditional blues of “Easy Rider” or her collaboration with Bernice Reagon on the new spiritual “I Remember, I Believe,” or her soulful adaption of Neil Young’s “Old Man,” or her funk reading of Gladys Knights “I’ve Got to use my Imagination” this show was a rich and moving experience. I can’t think of any other singer performing today who has such an effortless grasp of all the major styles of great Southern African American musical traditions and can perform them with such alacrity, joy and grace.

Reagan @ 100

2011-02-26T15:31:00.000-05:00

During the recent celebration of Ronald Reagan’s centenary we have seen a renewed blossoming of the rights obsession with our 40th president and the so-called “Reagan Revolution.” Like him or not, Reagan is undoubtedly one of our more fascinating presidents. The reason, I suspect, is that he was a real person, full of contradictions but possessing a true and deeply felt personal vision for our country. This stands in opposition to the current fashion of politicians who come to office with often no personal accomplishments in the world and have to write books to create a “story” that allows the public and the media to begin to put them into focus (with the help of advisors, ghost writers and public relations specialist). You saw this with the President and you can see it happening right now with Senator Scott Brown. Reagan was a man who needed no book; he had a long and varied career that took him thru a number of jobs and careers that prepared him for the presidency on many levels.

Along with the contradictions of the man himself, the contradictions of Reagan revolution and the revitalization of the American economy under this president in the 1980’s require us to address the other side of this success story. During the Reagan administration we begin to see the establishment of the American plutocracy, the stagnation (at least) of the middle class, wholesale union busting, the growth of corporate influence, uncontrolled defense spending and unrestrained deficit spending (any of this sounding familiar).

David Stockman, who was a primary architect of Reagan’s economic policy, argued in cabinet meetings at the time that President Reagan needed to seriously address spending (entitlements & defense) if he was going to cut taxes, but he never really did this (FYI, all American’s should be required to read David Stockman’s article “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse” from the NYT 7/31/2010). Reagan’s desire to bring Russia to its knees was the prime motivation behind the uncontrolled and unmonitored corporate welfare that we call defense spending and the deficits roared out of control (again, any of this sounding familiar).

As a CPA who lives and breathes business on a daily basis I get Reagan’s support of business as the lifeblood of America, I think the business of America is probably business. I also understand the concern over intrusive and incompetent government regulations and taxation, but that is not a recipe for free and unregulated markets and corporate domination of the American landscape. One has to be clear in understanding that capitalism, at its core, is ruthless, hence the phrase “it’s only business” can be used when eviscerating a rival. Conversely some of our most ruthless capitalist have also become great philanthropist; witness the Rockefellers’, Bill Gates, Ronald Perelman or Warren Buffet. It is balance of these 2 elements and the energy from this dialectic is part of the very fabric of our country.

The question for the American people is simple; can we have a vibrant free enterprise culture and strong capitalism yet still have a humane society that cares for their underprivileged citizens and children (what is another time and place we might have called “Christian values”)?

I believe Government has a vital and necessary role in acting as a bulwark from the excesses of unbridled capitalism but conversely we cannot create a welfare state that disconnects its constituents from responsible citizenship. Thru uncontrolled (and not to mention unpaid for) entitlements we run the risk of createing a sub-class of citizens who are essentially have no incentive for self-betterment or personal responsibility.

This is ground zero in the debate between left and right, liberal vs. conservative; the proper role and size of government. This clash was certainly evident during the Reagan years, and continues unabated today, but I am not sure that this is an unconquerable divide. If we had courageous and intelligent leadership and could get corporate and union influence minimized we might be able to come to some agreement on these matters.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings

2011-02-14T13:08:00.000-05:00

Several weeks ago we saw Sharon Jones @ the Music Hall in Portsmouth. Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings are one of the better (and most popular) of the neo-soul bands, groups that mine the rich soil of 1960’s/1970’s American soul music. These groups satisfy a desire for a more organic, traditional and rootsy African American music.

I first saw Ms. Jones at Jazz Fest in New Orleans several years ago and came away from this Portsmouth show with essentially the same opinion. Ms. Jones (an ex-Riker Island prison guard) is the real-deal, a foot-stompin’ nuclear powered soul bomb that looks the audience dead in the eye (literally) and dares them to not have a good time. She has the driven desire to entertain that has always struck me as the hallmark of many of the great soul singers I have been lucky enough to see.

The Dap-Kings on the other hand are certainly not soul royalty despite the self-proclaimed moniker. On later introspection the Dap-Kings reminded me of the white blues bands I used to see many years ago, musicians that were well meaning and sincere, who get all the notes right but completely missed the target. Other than the drummer, who seemed incapable of conjuring up any kind of a groove, the band sounded fine but unable to maintain that deep, righteous rhythm that soul music needs. With their vintage instrumentation the sound was spot on and all the notes were “correct” but the performance possessed little of the spirituality and gospel fervor that this music needs. Because of their diligence about sound and technique they sound better on recordings then live.

Despite all that, the show, with its fun “soul review” kind of vibe, was enjoyable and Jones is such a powerhouse with an obsession to entertain that is truly undeniable. It did make me long to see Ms. Jones with a band worthy of her talents, say, Booker T and the MG’s, The Bo-Keys or the Hi Rhythm Section out of Memphis or the Wardell Quezergue band or Lil’ Buck and the Topcats from New Orleans– now then we would be really getting’ way down in the alley!

The Great American Songbook and the First Lady of Song

2011-02-06T15:07:00.002-05:00

Years ago I decided that I needed to gain an understanding of what is now routinely called the great American songbook. In many cases these tunes had formed the backbone of the jazz music I had grown to love. I am, of course, talking about the music of the Gershwin’s, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, Rogers and Hart and Harold Arlen (among others). I soon discovered the groundbreaking series that Ella Fitzgerald made between 1956 and 1964 under the guidance of the producer Norman Granz; the Songbook Series. These 8 amazing sets of records (16 CDs) were out of print when I discovered them and I had to track down the French double album reissues when I could not find good used copies.

Granz who had stolen Fitzgerald away from the hacks at Decca Records in the mid-1950’s had decided that this project was a perfect vehicle for the great lady, he also understood that these songs were a profound part of America’s cultural legacy, and that they were at risk of being lost.

All these genius’ were alive when these sets were recorded and in many cases were active in the projects. Irving Berlin requested that Granz dedicate one of the sets to his songs (as if you could leave Berlin out of any examination of the great American songbook!). Ira Gershwin altered lyrics to suit Ms. Fitgerald and Granz recounted taking the acetates over to Cole Porter’s NYC apartment to play the recordings for him before they were released. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn provided the arrangements and the Ellington Orchestra to back up Ella on their Songbook.

These recordings are fascinating not only as an overview of the American canon, certainly some of the best songs ever written, but the unerring quality of the recordings themselves. The arrangements are great and Ella sings them with an almost heroic delicacy and taste, with just a touch of improvisational filigree. Many of these recordings are not “jazz” performances but share the light swinging flavor that lovers of American music & jazz can appreciate. These recordings are also enhanced by the addition of many jazz greats in the bands, so there are many wonderful solos peppered throughout these sessions.

These historic sessions have become ground zero for the American Songbook, definitive versions that established once and for all the importance and greatness of these songs and the men that wrote them. Many of these songs might have been lost to time had Granz and Fitzgerald not formally tackled this landmark series. One of the other wonderful things that Granz did was have Ella sing the song intros. The majority of these tunes came from Broadway shows and as such often had short intros that set up the song in the context of the show and story. I always loved the fact that these show intros were left in for these recordings, as well as virtually all the lyrics. Even though we don’t need these setups in the context of these records they serve to fill out the song and like a setting for a fine jewel they enhance the emotional depth of the songs and their lyrics.

These recordings also did another important thing; they established Ella Fitzgerald as America’s First Lady of Song. But more important than all this historical blather; these record are delightful, warm, intelligent, swinging, romantic, humane, funny, optimistic, sad, witty and speak very clearly of the best in America’s culture and its arts.

To quote Frank Rich from the New York Times following Ms. Fitzgerald’s death;

Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians. As Ira Gershwin said, in the line quoted in every obituary: "I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them." Most of the rest of us didn't know, either. By the time she had gone through the entire canon, songs that had been pigeonholed as show tunes or jazz novelties or faded relics of Tin Pan Alley had become American classical music, the property and pride of everyone.

A Sad Anniversary

2011-01-23T12:18:00.001-05:00

Friday was the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision “Citizens United v Federal Election Commission.” This was the case that let you know that the Supreme Court had now fully aligned with the corporate masters that control the rest of our government. Most of you know the issues involved in this landmark case, for those of you who do not, shame on you. What sparked me to write again about this matter was an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (you know them, the intellectual branch of Fox News – or to put is another way, Fox News for folks that still have some functioning gray matter) this past Friday. Author Joel Gora stated:
Although the decision has been vilified, the court's evenhanded principle protects the free-speech rights of business corporations, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, media outlets and the myriad groups that people form and use to press their views and amplify their voices, especially on public issues.

I would remind Mr. Cora that business corporations are state mandated animals (not federal) whose primary function as a separate legal entity (NOT a person), is to limit personal liability for the owners and whose primary business goal is profit. A corporation’s objective is not to “press their views and amplify their voices, especially on public issues” – their goal as businesses is to make money. As such these “myriad groups that people form” are not just random organizations but organizations with very specific goals and desires that would generally not fit with the more broad based concerns of an average citizen.

Citizens United Corporation is a 501c4 non-profit (donations are not tax deductible) funded by (mostly) wealthy individuals whose sole intent in this matter was to harpoon the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton. The folks who fund Citizens United have every right to do this, and should have every right, they are in fact a “group that people form and use to press their views and amplify their voices, especially on public issues” – clearly business entities are not. The problem is that the Supreme Court expanded the scope of this case and brought in all legal entities into consideration. It is hard not to see the hand of the corporate influence in the unnecessary expansion of this decision (Justice Stevens' referred to the court having an "agenda" in his dissenting opinion).

In this case the Supreme Court argued:

In the free society ordained by our Constitution, it is not the government but the people—individually as citizens and candidates and collectively as associations and political committees—who must retain control over the quantity and range of debate on public issues in a political campaign.

Most of us would agree with this statement, the problem is that a private, limited liability business entity such as corporations, whose primary goal is profit, in no way, shape, manner or form can be considered under the heading neutral rubric “collectively as associations.”

We got Golden Voices and Hearts of Steel

2011-01-21T10:36:00.000-05:00

My little one asked me other day if I had any “Hip-Hop” music. This caused me to dust off my Sugar Hill Records anthology from Rhino Records. I had forgotten what a total blast this “old-school” rap music is. With bands like the The Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, The Funky 4 +1, The West Street Mob, etc. Sylvia Robinson’s Sugar Hill Records, out of Englewood, New Jersey, had the pulse of the powerful sounds emanating from the streets of the South Bronx in the late 1970’s.

Sylvia Robinson had a long career in music prior to starting Sugar Hill Records with husband Joe. She was the “Sylvia” half of “Mickey and Silvia” who had the 1957 smash hit of Bo Diddley’s “Love is Strange” with guitar slinger Mickey Baker. In the 1970’s she recorded one of the great semi-pornographic R&B/Soul/proto-disco records with the song “Pillow Talk.” She wanted Al Green to record “Pillow Talk” but it proved to be too suggestive for him so she recorded it herself. In her song “Didn’t I” (from the same era) she sang “at last you know I'm not margarine - but I am a high-priced spread!" – gotta love that!

Ms. Robinson was instrumental in putting together The Sugarhill Gang and recording what is considered the first rap record with the song “Rappers Delight” in 1979. It is important to note that a tradition of rap singing had existed in African American music since (probably) the late 1800’s but it had not been formalized into a style of music as it was on the streets of New York City in the late 1970’s. In the way Elvis Presley’s first record catalyzed rockabilly music in the south in the mid-1950’s the release of “Rappers Delight” opened the floodgates on groups performing rap.

Rap began around the same time as the punk/new wave movement in Rock, and like punk, Rap was a voice of the street and of the disenfranchised. Also like punk, with its rudimentary musical skills and DIY approach, rap groups played records as backup music to their raps. The DJ’s put together the backing tracks by sampling directly from records on duel turntables. The Bronx DJ’s also invented a variety of percussive techniques by manipulating the records as they played called scratching. I remember seeing Grandmaster Flash live one time, it was amazing how he played 2 turntables at once, changing records at exactly the right moment and moving disks backwards creating great rhythmic patterns. He was able; live, to create instant montages of sound, music, rhythm and percussion.

I think what is appealing about the so-called “Old School” rap of labels like Sugar Hill Records is that they used real bands (the funky Sugar Hill house band was included drummer Keith Leblanc, along with guitarist Skip Macdonald and bassist Doug Wimbish). At Sugar Hill Sylvia Robinson would take the raps performed by the groups with their DJ’s and put them in the studio with an actual band. Later groups like Public Enemy or N.W.A. made heavy use of sequencers, drum machines and other electronics that took some of the soul out of the music (for me).

Sugar Hill records, under the creative hand of the Robinson’s, was responsible for 26 gold records and such revolutionary recordings as the Grandmaster Flash classic “The Message” & “White Lines.”

Now of course my 6 year old does not care about any of this shit but just danced like crazy when The Sugar Hill Gang rapped (in “8th Wonder”);

Once upon a time not long ago everybody had on their radio
And then a fella came on with a groovy noise
To put the wiggle in the women and girls and boys

Or when the Funky 4 + 1 rapped (in “That’s the Joint”);

These words we say we want ya’ll to hear
We Gonna
Make a lot of sense
We Gonna
Make it clear
We Gonna
Rock this place
We Gonna
Use some class
We Gonna
Do our best
We Gonna
Make it last
We Got
Rhymes in our minds
We Got
Rockin’ in our hearts, and now the things we do you can call it arts
We’re bad, We’re slick, We’re doin’ it hip
We’re gonna rock this record and don’t you forget
That’s the Joint!

Internal Revenue Service 2010 Audit Rates

2011-01-10T09:48:00.000-05:00

The Services audited 1.11% of personal income tax returns in 2010, the highest audit rate since 1997 when 1.28% of returns were examined. Taxpayers with income over $1 million or more saw the largest jump in audits, 8.36% in 2010 (1 in 12 returns!), up from 6.42% in the previous year. In the $200K to $1 million income range the audit rate was 2.65%, up from 2.55% in 2009. For filers with income below $200K the rate was 1.04% in 2010, just a bit above the 2009 rate of .96%.

Keep in mind that the majority of audits are what we call “correspondence audits” done via mail, generally on a single issue. These are far less intrusive then “in person” audits done by agents.

The overall rate of business return audits (corporations and partnerships) held steady at .58% in 2010. Audits of partnerships slipped a bit to .36%, compared with .38% in 2009. The examination rate for small corporations increased to .94%, up from .85%, S corporations audit rate was just .37%, down from .40% in 2009.

Issues to keep in mind – in all audits we are seeing the Internal Revenue Service is expecting the taxpayer to have both the original receipt AND the proof of payment as to how that expenditure was paid (cancelled check, credit card statement, etc.). Of course the overarching issue is always the purpose of the expense and why it is deductible in the first place.

Rockin’ around N.Y.C. (thanks to Marshall Crenshaw)

2010-12-29T08:41:00.000-05:00

We are in New York for a short, post Christmas visit, and once again the great city casts its magical spells. My wife, in her typical display of brilliance, bought me a copy of E. B. White’s “Here is New York.” Now I know E.B. White mainly from studying the indispensable Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style,” a book that should still be considered required reading for all writers and speakers of our language (not that I consider myself in any way a paragon of either practice!). His “Here is New York” is a wonderful essay on the nature and character of New York City written during the sweltering summer of 1948. Whites prose is elegant and graceful and a joy to read, and while virtually none of the landmarks he discusses still exist it still felt to me like White touched the very heartbeat of America’s great city.

White writes about that great urban paradox of being alone in the crowd; “New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; better then the most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all the enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.” He also elucidates New York’s greatest gift to its admirers, the gift of possibility; “although New York often imparts a feeling of great forlornness and forsakenness, it seldom seems dead or unresourceful; and you always feel that either by shifting your location 10 blocks or by reducing your fortune 5 dollars you can experience rejuvenation. Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of moral. In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation – a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless.”

White discusses the 3 types of New Yorkers, the natives, the commuters and third, the person “who was born somewhere else and came to New York in a quest for something.” He writes that it is “this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.”

Vivian Leigh said that when she got a script she looked for the key line of dialogue for her character, she felt that in a good script there would be a line that encapsulated the essence of her part, a line that best illuminated the character she was being asked to play. If New York City was a character my line will always be that great room in the Metropolitan Museum that is full of Rembrandt paintings. This large room says to me everything about NYC, if any other major museum has 2 or 3 Rembrandts, New York City is going to have a room full, wanna see Robert DeNiro do live theatre or Dustin Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman” or Kevin Spacey do Eugene O’Neill you gotta come to New York. In a way that is part of the character of New York City; bigger, better, best. When I first took my wife to New York we visited the MOMA, she was staggered to see one landmark painting after another, in room after room - art that she had seen a million times in books all in one place, that is New York City.

As we walked around New York City these few days I often thought of E.B. White’s New York; when I saw the slim young man standing in the subway engrossed in his reading of Tennessee Williams “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or when we ran into the fine actress Jennifer Carpenter (who plays Deb on the TV show “Dexter”) on a subway platform at midnight in Times Square. When I had a wonderful corned beef and pastrami sandwich at 10pm, during a blizzard at Juniors deli in Brooklyn. When we took a much needed lunch break (and escaped the insane crouds on 7th Ave.) at the elegant Warwick hotel in Manhattan. When we left the theatre (after seeing Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in the delightful musical “The Addams Family”) at around 11PM and found ourselves enveloped in the massive flow of people out and about in Times Square.

E. B. White wrote “A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, this heightening it meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life; all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt, the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residences but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushiest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the east River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing kings….”

Thank you New York, my life would be far less then it is if had not been touched by your greatness, grace and passion.

Food in Land of Plenty – a Holiday Essay on the (Un-Holy) Trinity

2010-12-19T21:35:00.000-05:00

Being a lifelong fatso I find the subject of food is endlessly fascinating, and certainly no one can doubt that America (like me) has a somewhat warped relationship with food. Half the population is obsessed with the subject and study food labels like they were Holy Scriptures and the other half doesn’t give a shit and will eat anything put in front of them. Several weeks ago Lisa Miller wrote a fascinating piece in Newsweek examining the class divide around food called “Divided We Eat.” Ms. Miller examined 3 Brooklyn families and their approach to food and diet. One of her starting points was the fact that one of her subject families, obsessed with bestselling author Michael Pollan and his thesis regarding eating local and organic foods (the so called “locavore” movement), lived just 5 miles from families whose children went hungry. One of the more telling passages;

Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, has spent his career showing that Americans’ food choices correlate to social class. He argues that the most nutritious diet—lots of fruits and vegetables, lean meats, fish, and grains—is beyond the reach of the poorest Americans, and it is economic elitism for nutritionists to uphold it as an ideal without broadly addressing issues of affordability. Lower-income families don’t subsist on junk food and fast food because they lack nutritional education, as some have argued. And though many poor neighborhoods are, indeed, food deserts—meaning that the people who live there don’t have access to a well-stocked supermarket—many are not. Lower-income families choose sugary, fat, and processed foods because they’re cheaper—and because they taste good. In a paper published last spring, Drewnowski showed how the prices of specific foods changed between 2004 and 2008 based on data from Seattle-area supermarkets. While food prices overall rose about 25 percent, the most nutritious foods (red peppers, raw oysters, spinach, mustard greens, romaine lettuce) rose 29 percent, while the least nutritious foods (white sugar, hard candy, jelly beans, and cola) rose just 16 percent.

This statement highlights the way cheap, unhealthy processed food has become blight on American culture, health and waistline. Another author, Dr. David Kessler has written brilliantly about the way food is carefully designed and processed in this country to make it inherently unhealthy and fattening. Kessler’s book “The End of Overeating” is a dazzling account of how the food industry carefully manufactures food that essentially promotes and exacerbates overeating. The use, by the food industry, of its unholy trinity of fat, sugar and salt has made Americans fatter by design. His interview with the creator of the Dorito is stunning. I actually went out a bought a small bag to experience the almost delicate pattern of unfolding flavors and textures and to understand how scientifically calculated they all were. While much of Dr. Kessler work centers around the fast food industry (an easy target) it is important to realize that these problems exist across the full spectrum of products found in the American grocery store.

I am certainly not trying to underplay individual responsibility in Americas obesity problem, but as anyone will tell you the abundance of cheap, fattening and unhealthy foods certainly makes healthy eating and dieting very difficult for millions of American fatsos, and the fact that the very thing that makes the quest for healthy eating so difficult is actually meticulously designed into the food we encounter every day is somewhat shocking.

Much was made of personal choices during the healthcare debate and how the American diet adds to the cost of medical care in this country, and I could not agree more, but let’s add a little corporate responsibility to that equation. Maybe as part of our healthcare system American needs to examine how food is processed, marketed and sold in this county, especially to children and the poor. This might do as much to elevate the health of our country as anything any insurance company or government agency is going to do.

Wishing you all a (reasonably) healthy holiday this year!

Go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200

2010-12-08T18:03:00.000-05:00

Once again I am reminded of the bizarro world as sketched out so brilliantly in the Seinfeld TV show, or better yet maybe it’s Wimpy from Popeye who will "gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today," either way we’re fucked!

The Republican Party, remember them - the party (largely supported by the Tea Party) who has been so strung out with deficit anxieties, fights Obama to the mat (believe me this was no heavyweight bout!) to maintain the Bush era tax cuts. The deal is that Democrats get an extension of unemployment benefits and a payroll tax cut and the whole steaming pile of shit adds $900 billion directly to our deficit over the next two years.

To quote the New York Times yesterday:

The package would cost about $900 billion over the next two years, to be financed entirely by adding to the national debt, at a time when both parties are professing a desire to begin addressing long-term fiscal imbalances.

Our public debt orgy is often credited to the tendency of human nature to not address a problem until it absolutely has to, i.e. as long and the Chinese are willing to fund the orgy we will continue on, but I am not so sure it is as simple as that.

On a memorable Bill Moyers show back in 2004 Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to U.S. President Richard Nixon, argued that the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government." This unholy alliance between government and business interests (which can now count the Supreme Court in its club) must feel that when our drunken debt party ends and austerity hangover arrives they will not be touched by it. That remains to be seen, but make no mistake austerity is coming and it is going to be painful, but the plutocrats are certainly correct that austerity will be directed first and hardest on the poor and less fortunate in our society and they will be spared at least for a little while.

The phrase “no man is an island” kept coming back to me as I wrote this, the feeling that one cannot, no matter how much money and power you possess, fully or permanently insulate yourself from the pains of your fellow citizens. So I decided to find out the origin of that great aphorism, it is from John Donne (1572-1631);

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The Unemployment Debate or the new Congressional Turkey

2010-11-28T08:12:00.000-05:00

OK, so this is not one of your cheerful thanksgiving blogs espousing the joys of feasting, family and friends. At the excellent Tannery Reading Series in Newburyport last Saturday author Rishi Reddi summed it up about best for me when she said “Thanksgiving sucks.”

All holiday cheer aside congress will be tackling the extension of unemployment benefits in December. There has been much intellectual (and not so intellectual) debate on this issue by many leading economists and the Republican leadership. The argument centers on the idea that the extension of unemployment benefits effectively disincentivise work and actually further exacerbates the problem, and of course there is the “we can’t afford it” fallback position. Needless to say these economists can prove their cases using extensive historical data. I get it, the concept is rather simple, I am paid to stay home therefore I decide not to work, or I refuse work because my unemployment check is bigger than the pay at the job I was offered. I suspect the argument has some merit, in that there must be some drain on human incentive when a regular (free) check is coming in. That being said I have NEVER heard a client (in my office) receiving unemployment elucidate that thought; they would all rather be working. Very few people enjoy or derive pleasure in long term unemployment, it is demeaning and dehumanizing. Furthermore unemployment checks are not much more then subsistence and do not provide a comfortable living.

I see this issue in really simple terms, no need for any pie charts, graphs or historical data. Behind all these horrible unemployment numbers are real US citizens that are suffering, many with families, and these are folks that cannot find any job and (in many cases) cannot even move to a new part of the country to seek job opportunities because they cannot sell their house. Relocation has historically been a remedy for unemployment but these days that cure that been short circuited by our housing crisis. On the opposite side of this equation is a government that can spend millions of dollars defending Chinese workers busy in Afghanistan mining that countries national resources, spend millions on foreign aid and farm subsidies for corporate farms, support the obscene corporate welfare that is a significant part of our current defense budget and is willing to bail out all sorts of industries that have gotten themselves into trouble. Republicans passed the first bailout (TARP) under George Bush after only hours of “debate” but is perfectly willing to have a knuckle busting fight about helping its fellow citizens in trouble thru absolutely no fault of their own, are you fucking kidding me!

After all the economic analysis, good or bad, accurate or inaccurate we find our fellow citizens in trouble, how can we not help them? I feel like saying to all the economists that write on this subject with such alacrity, I really like your thesis and think there may be real merit in them but we still need to vote for the extension of unemployment benefits because at the end of the day we cannot continue the immediate suffering for our fellow citizens just to “bend the curve” of long-term unemployment a few points.

Weekend Music – Aimee and Zaney – local girl and boy makes good!

2010-11-21T20:56:00.002-05:00

On Friday we took a short walk to see Amiee Mann at our own Nock Middle School here in Newburyport. I first saw Aimee Mann almost 30 years ago as the bass player in a band called “The Young Snakes” in Boston (she always laughs when I tell her that). She had a freak hit with “Voices Carry” in the band ‘Til Tuesday in 1985 and has gone on to a stellar career as a solo artist. She appeared in a trio setting Friday night with her playing acoustic guitar along with a bass and keyboard player. The resulting, rather short, set was somewhat of a mixed bag. In this spare setting you missed all the wonderful Brian Wilson/Beatles pop gloss that inhabits many of her records. The other outcome of this band was perhaps highlighting the somewhat limited nature of her melodic skill. All that being said it was a good show; her skills as a lyricist and singer are high even if she tends to return often too familiar chord changes and melodic hooks. Her set drew songs from many of her records, but favored her latest CD “@#%&*! Smilers” from which she drew 4 tunes. She also treated the audience with 3 new songs from a proposed musical based on her thematic disk about a boxer “The Forgotten Arm.”

On Saturday morning we when to the lovely Portsmouth Music Hall with our 6 year old to see Dan Zanes and Friends in concert. As parents of a 6 year old we have become acquainted with a lot of modern children’s music, and while much is junk there is a fair amount of stellar offerings, and one of those is Dan Zanes. NH native Dan Zanes rocked Boston back in the mid-1980’s with his band The Del Fugeos but 10 years ago launched his career as a children’s entertainer. I think if him as the Keith Richards of children’s music with his relaxed and scruffy rockers persona. Based in Brooklyn, his band tours the world with its enchanting mix of folk standards, traditional tunes mixed with great children’s music. There else are you gonna hear a Broadway tune by Frank Loesser along with Pete Seeger’s classic children’s song “All Around the Kitchen,” the traditional work anthem “Pay me my Money Down,” “Waltzing Matilda” and a few Spanish songs thrown in to boot! All are performed flawlessly by Zanes on guitar, mandolin and banjo and his friends which includes (gorgeous) Sonia de los Santoson on guitar, Elena Moon Park on violin and trumpet, Saskia Sunshine Lane on bass and Colin Brooks on drums. The band is all first-rate and has a wonderful organic vitality. They never played down to the many kids in the audience but simply treated them (and the adults) to a superb set of traditional and roots acoustic music performed with rollicking wit and energy. At the end of the day the fact that this wonderful show was a “children’s concert” became a moot point.

Rocking @ the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame or, the second line comes to Cleveland!

2010-11-16T17:52:00.001-05:00

I have just returned from a weekend @ the R&R Hall of Fame in beautiful Cleveland, Ohio, the occasion was their 15th annual Music Master’s series which was honoring New Orleans legends Antoine “Fats” Domino and Dave Bartholomew. The week offered a variety of events highlighting the careers of these seminal musician’s but I chose to attend the 2 main events on Saturday.

The first was the all-day conference @ Case Western followed by an evening concert that showcased the magnificent music of New Orleans. The week was co-sponsored by my friend Ira “Dr. Ike” Padnos and the Ponderosa Stomp Foundation and the keynote speaker at the conference was my buddy and Fats Domino biographer Rick Coleman.

The 2 honorees are the godfathers of New Orleans R&B; Fats Domino and his band leader & arranger Dave Bartholomew. Dave is a lesser known name but he and Fat’s had an almost Lennon/McCartney kind of symbiotic creative partnership. Fat’s was the performer but Dave was the band leader, arranger and trumpet player. Even outside of his work with Fats’ Dave is one of New Orleans greatest arrangers, musicians and talent scouts and directly responsible for many, many groundbreaking recordings coming out of that great city from the mid-1940’s right thru the 1950’s and beyond. By the way, the 3rd element of this holy trinity of New Orleans music was also present at the conference and that was engineer and the owner of J&M Recording Studio Cosimo Matassa.

The conferences were similar to the ones run by the Ponderosa Stomp in New Orleans but not as focused on direct oral histories, and a bit more of an expert “talking heads” approach. The day started with an excellent and informative keynote address by Rick Coleman, his deep love of the music always enthusiastically apparent – Rick wears his musical heart firmly on his sleeve. New Orleans writer Jeff Hannusch’s interview Lloyd Price was superb as was Dr. Ike’s extraordinary panel with all the surviving original members of the great Dave Bartholomew band that backed Fats on so many hits (the youngest being in his 70’s, the oldest in his 90’s!); Billy Diamond, tenor sax man Herb Hardesty, drummer Bob French, guitarist Ernest McLean, and songwriter/producer Eddie Ray. The day was capped with music historian John Brovan’s insightful interview with honoree Dave Bartholomew.

After a quick dinner we arrived at the gorgeous Palace Theatre for the VIP reception and the evening’s concert. The show was emceed by Hall of Fame president Terry Stewart and actor Wendell Peirce and started out on a perfect note when the Rebirth Brass Band marched into the grand theatre playing Professor Longhair’s “Mardi Gras in New Orleans.” One of the most exciting aspects of the show for me was the house band; Mac “Dr. John’’ Rebennack and his Lower 9-11. Many years ago I was privileged to see Mac back up an entire roster of performers during the Newport R&B festival and he was a stunning combination of restrained taste and subtlety and I knew he was going to provide the perfect backing for this evening of (mostly) aging performers.

Most of the evenings performers did a tune made famous by Fat’s and Dave and then performed one of their own signature songs. The Dixie Cups did a rollicking “I’m Walking” followed by their own hit “Chapel of Love.” Robert Parker did “I Hear you Knocking” followed by his smash “Barefootin’.” Irma Thomas lent her molasses smooth voice to a bluesy “Blueberry Hill” and followed it with her seminal hit “Time is on my Side” (move over Mick!). Lloyd Price romped thru “Ain’t That a Shame” followed by his 1952 chartbuster “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” Reggae masters Toots and the Maytals highlighted the deep influence that Fat’s and New Orleans R&B had on Jamaican music with smoking versions of “Be My Guest” and “Let the Four Winds Blow.” Dave Bartholomew at almost 90 then took the stage with the “Blues in B Flat” that clearly proved he still had his trumpet chops, this was followed by his definitive “The Monkey (speaks his mind).” There was a wonderful duet with Irma and Lloyd Price on the Fats Domino signature tune “Walking to New Orleans.”

The night was capped by a brilliant set with the good Dr. doing 5 Domino classics including Fat’s first hit from 1949 (and arguably the first Rock and Roll record) “The Fat Man” with original guitarist Ernest McLean playing along!

The joyous 3 hour concert came to a close with the entire cast on stage doing (what else!) “When the Saints go Marching In.” Led by the ebullient Rebirth Brass Band the party spilled out down the aisles and into the grand lobby in a Cleveland style second line and the band continued its impromptu lobby concert for about 15 minutes to the ecstatic audience that lined the lobby stairs and up into the balcony.

A fitting and joyous end to a well-deserved week that hopefully began to shine a light on the importance of Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew and all the great music that has come out of New Orleans.

Health Care Legislation

2010-10-30T14:54:00.004-04:00

I finally have to respond to the WSJ’s running (seems like daily) diatribe on what they term Obamacare. Obamacare is the federal health care legislation written largely by Senator Max Baucus and Speaker Nancy Pelosi with the President rarely taking a stand on anything within the legislation itself. In a Thursday op-ed piece the Journal stated: “…Mrs. Pelosi, who would lose her speakership and perhaps resign if Democrats lose their majority. But we suspect she has long believed that losing was possible but worth the risk to pass Obamacare. You have to break a few careers to make a European entitlement state.”

As I read the constant vitriol spewing from the right regarding this seriously flawed health care legislation there is virtually never a mention of the many Americans who go bankrupt, die and suffer under our current health insurance system. When the Journal tosses off a phrase like: “You have to break a few careers to make a European entitlement state’ they forget that behind that offhand and divisive phrase stand tens of thousands of suffering American citizens. I would ask them to contemplate and respond to their fellow citizens who have the health care that is worse than that found in some 3rd world countries (the World Health Organization rates us 37 below Costa Rica, Dominica & Chile).

I completely understand and sympathize with folks concern over the economic cost of this new entitlement, especially in light of the overwhelming anxiety over our growing deficit, but health care for US citizens is a moral issue much the way civil rights was and a solution must be found.

Two incidents have always stood out to me as road markers for the almost complete screw job Americans got in the federal health care legislation. The first was Rahm Emanuel’s deal with the pharmaceutical companies BEFORE the crafting of the legislation even began. The second was the forced removal by congressional security police of supporters of “single payer” health coverage from the “public” hearings of Senator Max Baucus. All the while he had a phalanx of health insurance lobbyists sitting behind him at these hearings. This shameful incident was covered by (the much missed) Bill Moyers on one of his Friday news shows on PBS. In retrospect I think this was in fact a metaphor for the American people, who were summarily ejected from the health care debate in its entirety (no wonder people were pissed off!).

As we watch the fascinating experiment by the British in their newly embraced austerity it is interesting to note that the only aspect of public service to NOT be subjected to the austerity knife is public health care. Every other civilized country (and some un-civilized ones too) have come up with solutions to public health care. Many in congress had other schemes, ones that included much needed cost containment, tort reform, greater efficiencies and an emphasis on personal responsibility but they were pushed aside for this mammoth, complex and costly plan does virtually nothing to address the core problems in the American system.

Clearly operating within the confines or out debased, corrupt and morally bankrupt government is not the answer. I think a solution will only be found when the American people conjure up the moral fortitude to demand of itself a solution that gives all citizens proper healthcare. We simply cannot call ourselves civilized and ethical, much less Christian when our citizens die for lack of proper healthcare.

Getting Lowe with Joe Lovano

2010-10-22T10:54:00.000-04:00

Had another one of those great music weekends seeing songwriter extraordinaire Nick Lowe on Friday and saxophone master Joe Lovano on Saturday.

Nick Lowe is making a short, rare U.S. tour with his full English band so this show became a must attend date for me. Lowe’s band is a real English all-star group featuring Geraint Watkins (keyboards), Robert Trehern (drums), Johnny Scott (guitar) and Matt Radford (bass). Having seen Nick more times than I can remember his voice seems so much better now than I remember it from the old days of the Rockpile band. Rockpile was the simply put one of the greatest traditional rock band ever, with Nick on bass, Billy Bremner and Dave Edmunds on guitar and Terry Williams on drums. As a live act they rank as probably one of the best 10 bands ever, spewing out a crushing blend of rock, blues, rockabilly, and country. I always thought Nick was a bit of a shaky singer back in those days but not so at the Somerville Theatre Friday night. His singing was spot on as was his relaxed and funny stage patter (his routine on the cost of bringing the band to America was classic underplayed British humor). His band had a very heavy British rockabilly flavor and recast some of the older classics “I Knew the Bride,” “Cruel to be Kind” in that mold to great success. The show drew mostly from Lowe’s later material, which was fine as the quality of his output has remained consistently superb throughout his long career.

The opening act was another “new wave” fav – Graham Parker who (like Lowe) continues to produce one great record after another while laboring in relative market obscurity. Parker played a solo set and was, as you would expect, funny, acerbic and smart. Such great fun to see him again, I reminded him after the show of his date at the Paradise where he and his band the Rumor blew out the entire electrical system in the club because they were playing so loud, he laughed heartily.

On Saturday we ventured to the new “Backstage Bistro” at the North Shore Music Theatre to have an excellent dinner and to see Joe Lovano and his band Us Five. Sponsored by the new North Shore Jazz Project, Us Five is an amazing jazz quintet made up of Lovano on saxophones, James Weidman on piano, Petar Slavov on bass and Francisco Mela and Otis Brown III on drums. The 2 drummers set up on either side of the bass player and Lovano, providing a stunning, complex dialog of rhythm behind Lovano. The duel drummers were instantly the most unique element of the group, at times playing together at other times trading off between each other. Lovano was amazing, possessing the lighter tone of John Coltrane, who he defiantly channeled in some of the more blistering parts of the show. Lovano’s seeming unending flow of inventive improvisation was a wonder to behold. In that respect he reminded me of Sonny Rollins, at time I would think he just can’t keep this up but he did – over and over again. The set was mostly made up of material from the bands wonderful Blue Note CD “FolkArt” as well as from their upcoming release.

It is become increasingly rare for jazz artists to have the economic stability to maintain a steady group, Lovano is able to do this and his listeners benefit from the cohesion and musical telepathy that such a band can generate.

November – vote (or don't vote) @ your peril!

2010-10-03T11:13:00.001-04:00

I am a fan of Peggy Noonan’s Saturday opinion pieces in the WSJ. She leans right but always brings intellect to bear and generally takes a larger more global & historical perspective that I find refreshing. This past Saturday she quoted Republican Mitch Daniels as follows:

Good practical advice on all this comes from Indiana's Gov. Mitch Daniels, who met this week in New York with conservative activists, journalists and historians. Our country is in real peril, he said, we have a short time to do big things to get it right. Republicans "need to campaign to govern, not merely to win." If Democrats are "the worst, the most malevolent" in their campaigning, "don't match 'em, let 'em." Be better. Be serious about the issues at a serious time.

This excellent quote gets at the heart of 2 matters, the general feeling that we are at the precipice on a number of issues and that the next 5 to 10 years might be critical to our very survival. The second is that politics have come to mimic their multi-national corporate handlers in that the primary concern is the next election cycle (the political equivalent to the next corporate quarterly profit report) and that there is precious little long term, strategic thinking, i.e. we run to win not to govern.

So the key question to Tea Party morons and the republicans is this, are you campaigning to win (throw the bums out!) or to actually govern. Would Mr. Daniels regard Massachusetts Attorney (and birther) Bill Hudak with his yard festooned with Obama as Osama Bin Laden pictures a "serious" candidate for a "serious time?" The huge amount of corporate money flowing into republican campaigns gives one precious little hope for the future as the moneyed interests are seeing this groundswell of public anger as a great tool in which to bring a friendlier corporate environment into Washington. Less annoying regulations, environmental concerns, global warming, functioning educational system and most of all LOWER TAXES!

As far as I can tell, for many on the right, EVERYTHING revolves around a mania about taxes (this, of course might just reflect my own proclivity!). It seems, at times, that conversation on all issues pivots primarily on the subject of taxes. This obsession, and the incredible energy being devoted to it, is small minded, anti-intellectual, shortsighted and ultimately destructive to our country.

More Stupid E-Mail Tricks

2010-10-01T11:32:00.001-04:00

The following is an e-mail I received from a client who asked; “is this true?”

Did you know that if you sell your house after 2012 you will pay a 3.8% sales tax on it? That's $3,800 on a $100,000 home etc.

When did this happen? It's in the healthcare bill. Just thought you should know.

SALES TAX TO GO INTO EFFECT 2013 (Part of HC Bill) - REAL ESTATE SALES TAX

So, this is "change you can believe in"?

Under the new health care bill - did you know that all real estate transactions will be subject to a 3.8% Sales Tax? The bulk of these new taxes don't kick in until 2013 (presumably after Obama's re-election). You can thank Nancy, Harry and Barack and your local Democrat Congressman for this one. If you sell your $400,000 home, there will be a $15,200 tax. This bill is set to screw the retiring generation who often downsize their homes. Is this Hope & Change great or what? Does this stuff makes your November and 2012 votes more important?

Oh, you weren't aware this was in the Obamacare bill? Guess what, you aren't alone. There are more than a few members of Congress that aren't aware of it either (result of clandestine midnight voting for huge bills they've never read).

MY ANSWER – This e-mail is mostly deceptive and false - it refers to the "Medicare" tax and it applies to all capital gains transactions (not just homes) starting in 2013, but it would only apply (1) IF the transaction was taxable (above the $250K/$500K sale of home exclusion) and then (2) only if the individual was in the income range to have this Medicaid tax applied. So it will probably affect very few people, in my practice I have never seen a sale of home taxed since the $250/$500K exclusion law was passed by President Bill Clinton.

It makes you wonder what ignorant shithead wrote this piece, or decided to pass it along. It is clearly deceptive using the $400K and $100K examples - there are WAY too many variables in this calculation to use a simple generalization like that. If a couple sold a home for less then $500K the transaction would not even be reported on thier tax return, let alone taxed!

This is a prime example of the crap hurling around the Internet these days, I am reminded again and again of something my brother Mark Riley said many years ago; “the Internet is the greatest source of mis-information in the history of mankind.” I would only add that, that goes double for e-mails, so be careful what you pass along. I have yet to get 1 of these kinds of e-mails that is true.

New Orleans – CODA

2010-10-01T11:08:00.003-04:00

It is Sunday 9/26/10, the glorious 9th annual Ponderosa Stomp has ended and we are spending our last day in NOLA. We begin the day with a 2 hour “Cradle of Jazz” tour by John McCusker. This is my second tour with John who possesses that wonderful combination of knowledge and passion when it comes to traditional jazz and New Orleans. Amazing as it seems, John is the only person (to my knowledge) who does a jazz tour in NOLA and it is a must do event for anyone interested in the “Cradle of Jazz” in New Orleans. McCusker also has a great DVD of his tour called “The Story of Jazz – New Orleans Stomp” that you can buy on Amazon.com.

After a lunch of po-boys we went to see Fats Domino with his biographer and music historian Rick Coleman, who is hard at work on his forthcoming history of New Orleans R&B. Unfortunately Fats was taking a nap so we visited with his son Antoine Domino III for a while. Antoine was in the garage running Fat’s 2 Rolls-Royce Cornish automobiles (1 gold and 1 baby blue) to keep them in “ready to go” shape in case his dad wanted to use them, parked in the driveway was Fat’s Mercedes 600S, his daily driver, as well as a Cadillac.

Next up was a wonderful visit with New Orleans music legend Frankie Ford (“Sea Cruise”). Frankie has a wonderful home full of fascinating memorabilia from his 50+ years in music. He regaled us with stories of his career and antidotes of many of the legends he worked with and knew. During our discussion he spoke of Ernie “The Emperor of the World” K-Doe and he said something fascinating; that Ernie (who was an unrepentant alcoholic) suffered from “that New Orleans disease.” When I asked him what he meant he said simply: “here is my foot, someone get me a gun to shoot it.”

This comment hit me like a ton of bricks, as it struck me as a real truism of our beloved city. New Orleans does seem to have an odd propensity to shoot off its own foot in so many ways. You see this in its lack of support of the music it professes to love so much, you see it in the post-Katrina rebuilding of the city and the incompetence of city government (not that government incompetence is any more endemic in NOLA then it is elsewhere, it just feels more accepted). New Orleans seems at times to work hard against its own self-interest, but maybe that is just part of its quirky character that we all love so much. It is a hard city not to love, with all its faults, so I will end this by saying God Bless New Orleans and its great people, music and food!

Dateline New Orleans – The Ponderosa Stomp, Day 2

2010-09-27T00:35:00.003-04:00

My day begins at noon with the first of 4 educational conferences. The first is with the irrepressible R&B shouter Tommy Brown who is articulate, funny and informative about his 50+ years in music. This is followed by a superb session moderated by the great Holly George-Warren called “Here Come the Girls.” This panel is with guitar player and singer Barbara Lynn and the lovely La La Brooks. In this panel these 2 great women discussed their careers from the female perspective. This great panel was followed by a rather strange session with noted New Orleans record dealer Jim Russel. The afternoon was topped off with New Orleans pioneer arranger, bandleader and trumpeter Dave Bartholomew. Bartholomew is one of the great icons of New Orleans music and the session was a real treat moderated by the great British music historian John Broven and our own Dr. Ike.

Next we had a wonderful dinner with historian John Broven, Fats Domino biographer Rick Coleman, studio legend Cosimo Mattassa and singer Gerri Hall then it was off to the evening’s shows.

The second nights shows were more typical Stomp shows then the first night because they featured 2 of the Stomps great backing bands, Paul “Lil Buck” Sinegal and the Topcats and Deke Dickerson and the Eccophonics. One of the most distinctive features of the Stomp is joining these (often) aging performers with absolutely top notch backing bands, giving them settings probably far better than anything they would be able to muster on their own.

The first half of the night featured Lafayette guitar master Lil Buck backing a total of 8 performers. These included funk/R&B singer Willie West, swamp blues harmonica master Lazy Lester who played as good a set of “lazy” swamp blues as you could ever hear. Lester was followed by blued eyed soul singer Roy Head who literally tore the roof off with his high energy set ending with his signature smash “Treat Her Right.” Roy preceded Stomp favorite Barbara Lynn. I love spending time with Barbara who is such a quite, reserved lady. Barbara, who has lived in Beaumont Texas her entire life, is soft spoken and just a delight to be with, but put her on stage and her guitar might as well be a Tommy gun. She delivered a blazing show that had the audience eating out of her hand and screaming as she powered thru a set of R&B classics as well as her own giant hit “You’ll Lose a Good Thing.” Barbara was preceded by a surprise 2 song guest set by Ronnie Spector who looked and sounded great. Ronnie and Barbara were followed by elderly R&B singer/songwriter Sugar Pie DeSanto who did a superb (if oddly sexual) set of classic soul and R&B.

The nights last 4 acts were all backed by Deke Dickerson and his band the Eccophonics. Like Lil’ Buck, Dickerson is a master of (seemingly) all musical styles. Over the years we have seen him do Rockabilly, Western Swing, garage rock, country and all with enormous skill and sensitively. First up was Louisiana rockabilly icon Joe Clay. Joe’s always crowd pleasing set was followed by legendary truck driving country singer Red Simpson. Red’s understated delivery was masterful and Deke brought just the right amount of Bakersfield twang to the occasion – this set was a real treat. Next up was R&B singer Little Jesse who did a red hot, foot stompin’ set of classic R&B, ending with is totally rocking masterpiece “Hit, Git and Split.” The night ended with the original guitar hero of rock and country gentleman Duane Eddy who did a perfect set of his famous guitar instrumentals.

With a twang the 9th annual Ponderosa Stomp drew to a close. As always a great time, being thrilled in seeing performers you never thought you would see, many you barely knew about, but virtually all delightful, surprising and entertaining. The Stomp is a direct look into the face of so many American musical traditions. The Stomp is also an odd little cult; you see many of the same faces each year because for music fans once they come to the Stomp they simply refuse to ever miss it again. During one of the conferences the speaker asked the audience if there was anyone from Europe, in that one small group there were individuals that had flown in from Finland, Germany and England to attend the Stomp! I meet many folks from the Boston area and from all over the country so unique is The Ponderosa Stomp. I suspect most would agree with me when I say God bless the Ponderosa Stomp!

For more information please visit www.ponderosastomp.com

Dateline - New Orleans - The Ponderosa Stomp, Day 1

2010-09-25T10:38:00.001-04:00

It is 2:12AM and I am back in my hotel room after the first day of the 9th annual Ponderosa Stomp. The STOMP is America’s preeminent festival of obscure (and sometimes not so obscure) American garage rock, soul, rockabilly, R&B, swamp pop, surf, Cajun and other native styles. The DNA of the STOMP is the singular vision of its founder Ira “Dr. Ike” Padnos – eclecticism you can dance to, obscurity with a groove. This is a vision that connects with the deep roots that join all these great American musical traditions. The STOMP is very near and dear to my heart and after coming for 7 years it never ceases to surprise, delight and educate in very deep ways.

Day 1 began @ 10:00AM with a dedication of J&M studios @ the corner of Rampart and Dumaine as an official Rock n Roll Hall of Fame historic landmark. The ceremony was attended by the great Cosimo Mattasa who ran the famed studio from 1945 to the mid-1960’s and recorded almost all the music that came out of New Orleans for most of those years and bandleader and arranger Dave Bartholomew. It was a small ceremony but well attended and much deserved.

After the dedication @ J&M (which is now a Laundromat) I attended a short series of clips put together by film historical Joe Lauro showing vintage film of artists that had played the Stomp in past years. This was followed by a fascinating (work in progress) film on the New Orleans piano genius James Booker. After this it was a series of conference interviews that lasted all afternoon. First with guitar master Duane Eddie, followed by singer Gloria Jones, the surf greats The Trashmen and one of the lead vocalist for Huey Piano Smith and the Clowns, Gerri Hall, who lead the audience in a sing-along of their smash hit “Doncha Just Know it.”

A quick dinner and off to the evenings show, tonight was almost a perfect paradigm if what makes the Stomp so incredibly special. At 8:30 was Texas rockabilly pioneer Huelyn Duvall, followed by one of the most authentic R&B blues shouters I have ever heard, the irrepressible Tommy Brown (think Roy Brown, Wynonie Harris, Joe Turner, etc). Tommy was followed by La La Brooks, the lead singer of the Crystals (“And then he Kissed Me”,” Da Do Ron Ron”, “He’s a Rebel”). Ms. Brooks has the most amazing afro (huge and beautiful) I have ever seen and is a stunning & gorgeous performer and singer (sorry to gush - I may be in love!). Her set was spot on pop perfection backed by Boston’s own Jenny and the Delinquents! La La was followed by group I had never heard of “The Relatives” from Dallas Texas. Their set of funky, blazing gospel harmonies was mind-blowing; driving, soulful and uplifting. The Relatives was followed by Chicano rock pioneers Thee Midnighters from East LA. They played an incendiary set of great garage rock including their 1965 local LA hit “Whittier Boulevard.” The final set of the night were the Mid-West surf giants The Trashmen who played a killer set of perfect 1960’s garage/surf music including their timeless hit “Surfin Bird” (played twice @ Dr. Ike’s request).

So in the course of about 4 hours one careened with a sublime internal “Ponderosa Stomp” logic from 1950’s Texas Rockabilly, to a late 1940’s/early 1950’s blues/R&B shouter, to sublime early 1960’s Phil Spector AM radio pop, to blazing, righteous gospel followed by 2 slabs of rocket fueled mid-1960’s garage rock. That my dear reader is the summation of what is so extraordinary about the Ponderosa Stomp; it is not for the faint of heart, it is (in a word) music geek central. It is for listeners (and they fly from all over the world!) that really see and feel the deep vein that runs thru all this great American music – God bless the Ponderosa Stomp.

For more info visit www.ponderosastomp.com

Austerity, American Style

2010-09-22T23:24:00.000-04:00

Much has written about David Stockman’s 7/31/10 Op-Ed piece in the in the New York Times; “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse.” It was a damning indictment of modern government economic policy starting back in the Nixon administration and moving forward, Stockman was head of OMB for the Regan administration. Stockman attacks deficit spending, Republican tax cuts, increased military budgets, Wall Street and the financial sector and the printing of money. He argues (among other things) that the Bush tax cuts, that he feels did not make sense in the first place, should be allowed to expire as part of a call for a new austerity.

Stockman’s article is something all Americans should read. I say this not because I think the piece is necessarily “correct” but because it is correct enough, and comes from the unique perspective Stockman offers. I think Stockman leans too heavily on increased taxation and not enough on spending cuts and government streamlining and re-organization – things that could have a significant impact on our governments spending (including ending the wars in Iraq & Afganistan).

All that being said the other thing Mr. Stockman had brought into the discussion is the idea of austerity. It seems that there is little doubt that the extreme size of the deficit is (when any adults happen to be elected to congress or the White House) going to lead to some very tough choices in our public and private life.

What remains to be seen, is if Americans, who have shown a very slight taste for austerity, have the moral fortitude to stomach this. Years of drunken, debt fueled spending (both public and private) have left Americans little equipped to fight this coming battle.

Iggy and an Ode to the Joy of the “really cool” American Songbook, OR my week in music OR the summer of 2010 swings to a close

2010-09-06T12:08:00.000-04:00

As is often said, variety is the spice of life and for me music is one of my key “spices,” and last week proved exceptional. On Sunday 8/29/10 we went out to Tanglewood to hear our friend John Relyea sing the bass/baritone lead in the BSO’s annual Tanglewood closing performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

The 9th symphony, so familiar and the subject of much parody (The Beatles "Help") with its famous “Ode to Joy” chorus has the singular ability to blow past all that familiarity and strike the listener deep in the heart. It is at once huge and epic and yet utterly human, melodic and accessible. It is “King Lear,” it is “Lord of the Rings,” or “Mozart’s Requiem” – epic yet intimate, and ultimately a very moving work of art. Beethoven’s ability to write such a powerful “Ode of Joy” at such a (seemingly) low point in his life reminds us that Joy is a choice we make in our life and not a natural feeling that springs forth as a result of some outside force, event, emotion or person.

I cannot really pretend to critique the performance that day under the baton of the aging maestro Kurt Masur as I am not familiar enough with classical music, but the very sold out audience on the beautiful, sunny and warm afternoon were apparently as overwhelmed by what they had heard as I had been and the performers were called back for 3 curtain calls. It was the type of performance one felt very privileged to attend, deeply life affirming and dare I say it, joyous.

On Tuesday we found ourselves and the House of Blues in Boston to see Iggy and the Stooges. This show was blisteringly loud, ferocious and amazing and to quote my learned friend Mark Poulin who attended the show with me pithily observed “as advertised.”

The Stooges were a band who existed for a few incendiary years in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and recorded 3 legendary albums, including an all-time classic “Raw Power.” The band we saw that night was essentially the “Raw Power” band with the great James Williamson on guitar, and the set list was all Stooges material. This was about as far as you could get from a bland retread of past glories. This group of AARP members (all over 60) was up to playing these proto-punk masterpieces with an energy level that equaled the “Raw Power” of the old days. Iggy Pop was amazing; shirtless, bruised and broken but still possessing a remarkable life force (and voice) that connected is a very direct way with the largely younger audience (James Williamson describes Iggy as an “in your face” front man). He still stage dives (!?!) and works as hard as any performer I have ever seen to connect in a really personal, physical way with his audience. He is rewarded with for all his life-long hard work with what can only be described as a quasi-violent, semi-controlled love fest with Iggy as a sort of benevolent, grand old wizard at the helm, and thoroughly enjoying every minute of the mosh pit madness taking place around him.

On Saturday we ventured back out to Tanglewood for its jazz festival. In the afternoon we attended the second annual live taping of the “Radio Deluxe” show with John Pizzarelli, his wife Jessica Molasky and his great quartet. John Pizzarelli is one of my favorite performers, a fine jazz guitarist and an excellent singer dedicated to the ongoing health of the American songbook. In a funny way he always makes me think of Bruce Springsteen. John has a similar quality as a performer in that he clearly loves being on stage and always appears to always be having the time of his life. Being in the audience I am always thoroughly convinced that there is simply no other place John would rather be then on that stage at that moment in time, and that is a quality I have only witnessed consistently in one other performer, Mr. Springsteen (must be something in that New Jersey water!).

As I said, the concert was a live taping of John Pizzarelli’s ”Radio Deluxe” radio show that is heard coast to coast (locally on WNBP in Newburyport, MA) and of course streaming on www.johnpizzarelli.com. The show is done in an urbane style of the classic, live radio; with stories, conversation, humor, special guests and music. Its core value is a celebration of the American Songbook but it also consistently pushes the listener to new music and performers. Ms. Molasky is a well-known Broadway singer and actress and seems to have a bit more expansive tastes then her husband and often adds a more contemporary flavor to the show.

The show opened with John and the quartet and included a couple of wonderful performances with Ms. Molasky including an inventive “mash up” of “While me Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Killing me Softly with His Song” with John doing the George Harrison tune and Jessica doing the song made famous by Roberta Flack.

The special guest this year was singer Jane Monheit who sounded and looked spectacular, as she and John did an exquisite duet of “Tonight you Belong to Me” and Jane closed her short set with a smokin’ version of Annie Ross’s “Twisted.”

I was VERY heartened to see John’s dad Bucky Pizzarelli’s Benedetto 7 string guitar on stage when we arrived knowing that we were going to get to see him. At almost 85 years young Bucky is a jazz & jazz guitar national treasure and one of the most joyous (there’s that word again!) performers I have ever seen. He sits on stage, laughs and simply beams with happiness. His playing is still flawless and it is always an honor to see and hear him. He and John did a short interview segment and then played a gorgeous duet on Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages.”

That night we heard Kurt Elling and his trio. If you have not heard Kurt sing, it is a really a singular experience. He is somewhat of an acquired taste, heavily mannered and improvisational in his interpretation of songs but also very artful and deeply felt in his delivery. In this he always makes me think of my friend, the late great Betty Carter who had a similar approach to jazz singing (I suspect Kurt recognizes this as well, he recorded Betty’s song “Tight” on a recent CD).

The evenings opening set was Elling’s backing group, the Lawrence Hobgood trio. If you have not heard Mr. Elling you might not know that he has one of music’s greatest accompanist/arrangers/collaborators in Mr. Hobgood, and their opening set was simply gorgeous. Some of the set was drawn from Mr. Hobgood’s highly recommended CD “When the Heart Dances.” Hobgood told me after the show that it was the Tanglewood Jazz Fest staff who suggested he do the opening set for Mr. Elling – Bravo!

Kurt Elling, suave and handsome, has the really cool hipster persona that amazingly does not come off as fake or overly ironic. Like Ella Fitzgerald he is very much part of the band and interacts directly with the group as he sings and the interplay is fantastic. He treated us with such ballads as “Stairway to the Stars” and “Dedicated to You,” and a genre bending, inventive arrangement of the Beatles “Norwegian Wood” with guest guitarist John McLean. His intonation is perfect and his range is stunning and for us he capped off a really amazing week of music. For this listener we really dug the way he closed out our summer is a really cool style.

They call me the Wolf

2010-08-27T11:24:00.001-04:00

One of the amazing qualities of all great art is its ability to transcend its own time. When listening to Ben Webster and Harry Carney solo on Duke Ellington’s “Cottontail” from May 4, 1940 with its complex structure and its blistering yet elegant swing you are encountering music that is intensely a part of the era it was created in yet simultaneously existing like ether, beyond time and space (by the way, feel free to substitute your own favorite film, song, book, poetry, play, theatre, dance, architecture, performance, visual art or music in this passage). The highest artistic creations run deep into the veins of human existence and emotion, allowing it to literally transcend the superficial attributes, noise and concerns of modern life and strike us deep where we live. It embodies and expresses the most profound and primal human emotions in ways that can’t be understood, only felt; joy, sadness, fear, love, etc.

I guess because I knew the bluesmen Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf fairly well I often think of this seeming paradox by visualizing a kid somewhere hundreds of years from now listening to the Wolf singing “Smokestack Lighting” or Muddy singing “Feel Like Going Home” and being totally blown away. He (or she) will not need to know anything about these great men, or understand the tumulus life they lead or the virulently racist American they grew up in. They will not need to know anything about their hard life in the Mississippi Delta or the violent south side of Chicago they performed in and lived with their families or the musicians that played on these recordings. The powerful voices and sounds will come out of the darkness and pierce their heart right where they live and (perhaps) change their life. That is the indefinable magic of the arts, and it is important to be touched by this every day.

America’s “Night of the Living Dead” OR “Plan 10 from Wall Street” OR “I Spit on your Grave – the Goldman Sachs Story”

2010-08-18T14:02:00.004-04:00

Like one of the midnight madness horror movie marathons (you remember those, where you find yourself watching “Plan 9 from Outerspace” @ 3 in the morning!) it is really difficult to move past the particular horrors that was our 8 years under President Cheney and George W.’s leadership (oops!). Recent polling has indicated that Americans are now feeling that the lives of their children will NOT be as prosperous or as good as theirs has been (for an excellent take on these polls read Peggy Noonan or Mort Zukerman’s op-ed articles in the WSJ over the last several weeks). I think this feeling that the lives of our children will be better than our own has been the real cornerstone of the American dream (not the big car or house). This represents a real sea change in how American’s view themselves and their country. With all the Bush administrations crimes & misdemeanors, the final, massive “fuck-you” was TARP in October of 2008 (the bailout of Wall Street) and all this has me thinking; did George W. and his cohorts in congress preside over the mortal wounding of our country and secondarily are the Obama administration moving us closer to the brink or further away?

Grover Norquist & the great Bush tax cut debate!

2010-08-17T12:33:00.003-04:00

A client recently sent me this e-mail from a friend “who is very smart” and wanted to know what I thought. It turns out this little diatribe is from Grover Norquist (http://www.atr.org/) who was George W. Bush’s main tax advisor (need we say more). When I was in northern Maine on vacation last week I read an op-ed piece is a little newspaper there that taken almost verbatim from this piece. See my comments after each section;

In less than six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011:

First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief
In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families.
These will all expire on January 1, 2011:
Personal income tax rates will rise. The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed). The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent. All the rates in between will also rise. Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates. The full list of marginal rate hikes is below:
- The 10% bracket rises to an expanded 15%
- The 25% bracket rises to 28%
- The 28% bracket rises to 31%
- The 33% bracket rises to 36%
- The 35% bracket rises to 39.6%

RESPONSE - The current administration has always maintained that these bracket changes would not affect those making under $250K so therefore would be little or no change to the 10, 15, 25 or 28% brackets. So the change is mostly just to the 33% & 35% brackets. Keep in mind that these “tax increases” were in fact enacted by the Republican congress and President Bush when they had them sunset on 12/31/2010. Lastly, there is starting to be a lot of pushback regarding these changes, I would not put too much money on anything happening necessarily this year.

Higher taxes on marriage and family. The "marriage penalty" (narrower tax brackets for married couples) will return from the first dollar of income. The child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child. The standard deduction will no longer be doubled for married couples relative to the single level. The dependent care and adoption tax credits will be cut.

RESPONSE - The marriage penalty is (essentially) a mathematical trick of the code (not a secret plot by evil tax code writers or congress) would most likely be fixed as it has in the past - I doubt that the MP is something anybody really wants. Personally I think the dependent care and adoption credits probably should be ameliorated in some ways to broaden the tax base a bit more.

The return of the Death Tax. This year, there is no death tax. For those dying on or after January 1 2011, there is a 55 percent top death tax rate on estates over $1 million. A person leaving behind two homes and a retirement account could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones.

RESPONSE – We will agree as adults here to NOT use the infantile “republican-speak” term “death tax” and use the proper terminology ESTATE TAX instead. The estate tax was allowed to lapse (as the Bush administration planned) this year, something I doubt is anybody expected to actually happen. In all likelihood it will be pegged at somewhere between 3 and 5 million and as such would (statistically) affect only a handful of American taxpayers. There has been 0 discussion regarding it going back to the levels mentioned above.

Higher tax rates on savers and investors. The capital gains tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 20 percent in 2011. The dividends tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 39.6 percent in

2011. These rates will rise another 3.8 percent in 2013

RESPONSE - This refers to the Bush lower rate on dividend income and LT cap gains - I suspect this will happen and I truly doubt if ANYBODY reasonable expected these preferential rates to last for very long. My vote would certainly be to keep the LT cap gains rate @ 15% and increase the dividend rate. The other thing I would add here is that one of the tricks of these particular Bush tax cuts is that the alternative minimum tax (AMT) often added back some of the tax savings delivered by these 2 cuts with higher AMT taxes.

Second Wave: Obamacare
There is over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. Several will first go into effect on January 1, 2011. They include:
The "Medicine Cabinet Tax" Thanks to Obamacare, Americans will no longer be able to use health savings account (HSA), flexible spending account (FSA), or health reimbursement (HRA) pre-tax dollars to purchase non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin).
The "Special Needs Kids Tax" This provision of Obamacare imposes a cap on flexible spending accounts (FSAs) of $2500 (Currently, there is no federal government limit). There is one group of FSA owners for whom this new cap will be particularly cruel and onerous: parents of special needs children. There are thousands of families with special needs children in the United States and many of them use FSAs to pay for special needs education. Tuition rates at one leading school that teaches special needs children in Washington, D.C. (National Child Research Center) can easily exceed $14,000 per year. Under tax rules, FSA dollars can be used to pay for this type of special needs education.
The HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike. This provision of Obamacare increases the additional tax on non-medical early withdrawals from an HAS from 10 to 20 percent, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10 percent.

RESPONSE - These are all true (to the best of my knowledge – I don’t think there are any “experts” yet on the new health care legislation as many of the details have not been worked out yet)

Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hike
When Americans prepare to file their tax returns in January of 2011, they'll be in for a nasty surprise-the AMT won't be held harmless, and many tax relief provisions will have expired. The major items include:
The AMT will ensnare over 28 million families, up from 4 million last year. According to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, Congress' failure to index the AMT will lead to an explosion of AMT taxpaying families-rising from 4 million last year to 28.5 million. These families will have to calculate their tax burdens twice, and pay taxes at the higher level. The AMT was created in 1969 to ensnare a handful of taxpayers.

RESPONSE - AMT has been ensnaring folks consistently for the last 8 years, this INDEED was a technique of the Bush administration tax code to ameliorate the effect of some of the Bush tax cuts, for instance very few investors really got the 15% dividend and cap gains rates after the AMT was calculated on their return.

Small business expensing will be slashed and 50% expensing will disappear. Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly-deduct, or "depreciate") equipment purchases up to $250,000. This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. In January of 2011, all of it will have to be "depreciated."

RESPONSE - It is very unlikely this will happen, NO Democrat or Republican is going to have the stomach to attack this classic small business tax break.

Taxes will be raised on all types of businesses. There are literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place. Then biggest is the loss of the "research and experimentation tax credit," but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs.

RESPONSE - It is very unlikely this will happen – many of these credits are historically re-authorized year by year by congress and are always re-authorized

Tax Benefits for Education and Teaching Reduced. The deduction for tuition and fees will not be available. Tax credits for education will be limited. Teachers will no longer be able to deduct classroom expenses. Coverdell Education Savings Accounts will be cut. Employer-provided educational assistance is curtailed. The student loan interest deduction will be disallowed for hundreds of thousands of families.

RESPONSE – These are fairly small items in tax terms and I am sure they will effect some folks negatively but in the scheme of things do not seem to be something to get worked up over.

Charitable Contributions from IRAs no longer allowed. Under current law, a retired person with an IRA can contribute up to $100,000 per year directly to a charity from their IRA. This contribution also counts toward an annual "required minimum distribution." This ability will no longer be there.

RESPONSE - Only seen this once in my career, largely meaningless in my opinion

Final comments - this is typical sort of "red meat" rant, ignoring all fact patterns and current tax trends, as I said it is from a website run by Grover Norquist, the notorious tax/economic adviser in the Bush administration. Folks like Norquist have NEVER met a tax increase that they like, or a tax decrease that they don’t like - no matter how preferential or biased it is to one group or another or unsupported by any meaningful economic data!

Seems to me that during his little rant he should take responsibility for helping pass tax cuts during wartime (Iraq) that were clearly unsustainable AND then having them sunset on a specific date! This type of writing is meant to spread fear and hatred of the current administration & the Democrats. I have no problem attacking the current administration and the Democrats on policy, but this sort of unfocused and uninformed anger is not going to lead to any meaningful change in our political system, and that is really sad.

A superb website to see the effects of proposed income changes on your personal tax return is http://www.mytaxburden.org/ run by the Tax Foundation

My friend Jennie Lee

2010-08-15T21:12:00.002-04:00

Several years ago I decided that I needed to learn yoga. I had been going to the gym on a regular basis but kept bumping into this thing called yoga and I wanted to understand it. NOW, there was no way I was gonna haul my fat ass around in a group/class situation so knew I needed private instruction. Our office had just done Jennie Lee’s tax return and I knew she taught yoga so I called her. One on one instruction is her specialty thru her Transformative Yoga Therapy model. Over the next 3 years she quietly yet forcefully pushed me forward to a (I think) real understanding of the practice of yoga. When I started I wanted to use it primarily as an exercise routine, and bypass all the spiritual mumbo-jumbo but to her great credit she did not allow me to do that. During our sessions, without making a big deal about it, she never lost the focus of yoga as a spiritual practice. Now keep in mind that these sessions probably sounded anything but spiritual as I cursed my corpulent self into all sorts of contortions that fat people are simply not designed to do! Jennie was, of course, inspirational and the perfect coach for me; she often said that she had never heard anyone say “fuck” so many times while doing yoga!
This week as I did my yoga while on vacation in Maine I thought of her as I often do, I recently told her that her voice would be in my head for the rest of my days: breath, straighten out the back, don’t forget to breath, engage your core, don’t think about the move, just do it (don’t overthink it!) and (of course) DON’T FORGET TO BREATH!

I was also thinking about an excellent article Jennie wrote for Yoga Therapy Today (you can read it on her website) in which she spoke about yoga’s ability to meet you wherever you are (this is something she often said as we worked together). As I enter my 5th year of doing what I semi-respectfully call “fat guy” yoga I know that this is true. Even when you are tired, depressed, anxious, or worried (and fat!) you can do yoga it will meet you where you are and work with you and uplift you. In all this Jennie Lee gave me a lifelong gift and I miss her and wish her well on her new life away from Newburyport, I am sure there are great things awating her! For information please visit her website - www.stillnessinmotion.info

Obama - Bush and the world of PSC's

2010-07-19T17:57:00.003-04:00

The United States relies on contractors to provide a wide variety of services in Iraq and Afghanistan, including security. Private firms known as private security contractors (PSCs) are hired to protect individuals, transport convoys, forward operating bases, buildings, and other economic infrastructure. While DOD has previously contracted for security in Bosnia and elsewhere, it appears that in Iraq and Afghanistan DOD is for the first time relying so heavily on armed contractors to provide security during combat or stability operations. As of March 31, 2010, there were more than 27,000 armed private security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Recent contracting trends indicate that the number of such contractors in Iraq may decline while the number in Afghanistan may continue to increase. Many analysts and government official believe that DOD would be unable to execute its mission without PSCs.

The above paragraph is from a 6/22/10 "Congressional Research Service" report on the use of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since Iraq, the use of contractors has been both war’s dirty secret - growing exponentially in cost of lives and treasury. These contractors allow our cowardly & craven leaders cover up the extent of our involvement in both wars as conversation always pivots on the US troop numbers never on the amount of private contractors.
This use of what amounts to mercenaries (in many cases) was embraced by President Bush, but it has increased under President Obama with none of the “accountability” that he promised during his campaign.
I have a novel idea - if this war is worth fighting lets (1) increase taxes to pay for it and then (2) re-institute the draft so it is fought by regular US citizens being paid military rates of compensation and not highly paid private contractors!

FILE UNDER - "That's what you think!"

2010-07-19T17:17:00.000-04:00

John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told C-SPAN's "Newsmakers" program that "Bush's stock has gone up a lot since he left office," adding: "I think a lot people are looking back with more fondness on President Bush's administration, and I think history will treat him well."

Economic Stimulus, Capitalist Style!

2010-07-13T21:22:00.000-04:00

No it is not quite “Marriage, Italian Style” but it could be just as stimulating! U.S. corporate cash reserves have grown (apparently) to an all time historic high of almost 2 trillion dollars. Maybe the idiots in Washington could figure out how to foster companies to loosen the purse strings and invest some of this money (rather than borrowing cash from the Chinese and having the Government spend it!).

There is little doubt that there is a rather deep seated anti-business bias that runs thru the Democratic Party. I suspect that this is a remnant of some ill fitting counter culture baggage. I would hasten to inform the great party that this is America, if you are trying to stimulate the economy you might wish to consider engaging business owners and their checkbooks!

How about starting by figuring out what tax policy is going to be for the coming year/years? Whether taxes are going to go up or down, the unknown is a lot more damaging then a clear, stated policy one way or the other.

As I sat with clients this week to do tax planning I kept having to preface every remark with the caveat “as of right now …….” I thought, how absurd, that in July I cannot give a client a reasonable idea of the tax consequences of a particular action in 2011! Businesses and business owners do not do well with ambiguity; it makes tax and strategic planning impossible. We have known for 10 years that the infamous Bush tax cuts were going to sunset in 2010 and yet we still sit in July of 2010 with a no Federal estate tax policy and no real idea what the tax code is going to look like when the clock ticks past midnight on January 1, 2011.

Keep in mind the scheduled tax change (if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to simply sunset) are fairly extreme, we would in an instant move back (essentially) to the tax code in place @ the end of the Clinton administration. While this would NOT be the end of the civilization as we know it, and the fires of hell would probably not open up and consume our country (I say this with all due respect for W.S.J. opinion makers who would disagree and could no doubt PROVE me wrong!) it would nonetheless represent a fairly extensive, one time change to the federal tax code. I would also add that the liquidity of Federal tax policy makes it impossible for many states to establish their taxation schemes for 2011 and that increases the unease for business owners.

Clarity in tax & fiscal policy would make executives and business owners all over America feel more comfortable about moving forward with business expansions, hiring and purchasing, and that, my friend would be, much like Sophia Loren in "Marriage, Italian Style," a source of stimulation!

Pixar and “the best movie ever!”

2010-07-08T17:13:00.000-04:00

Recently took our 5 year old to see “Toy Story 3” in IMAX 3-D and was knocked out. Having seen all the Pixar movies more times that I care to remember I am always astounded by the consistent quality of their films. The reason for this consistency is their abiding love of character and story and a striking fidelity to both, in Pixar films there is never gratuitous technology, everything serves the forward movement of the story. This is amazing for a company that was (initially) built on its technological achievements and it sets them apart from most major Hollywood filmmaking which, at times, seems to be all about gratuitous use of technology.

Toy Story 3 has the earmarks of all great Pixar movies including its incredible ability to embrace directly very serious subject matter, yet still do so in the context of a children’s movie. Toy Story 3 addresses, with great nuance and emotional resonance: death, love, fear, sex, abandonment and evil. It is full of feeling, humor and excitement, including a very daring escape sequence. It is awash with film references, both to their own movies as well as other classic films, and much like Wall-E it picks up structural and visual elements from film history to move the story along. While all along maintaining its own unique individuality and transporting for all time Woody and Buzz into the pantheon of great movie characters.

Is Toy Story 3 up to the genius and grace of Wall-E (one of films great masterpieces) or the brilliance of Ratatouille? Not quite, but when you are up in this stratosphere of creation and sheer genius any one-upmanship is merely child’s play (so to speak!). Toy Story 3 is immensely entertaining, you will laugh and cry and your time in the theatre will fly by, or as my 5 year old said as the movie ended; “Daddy, that was the best movie ever!” and who was I to argue.

Fareed Zakaria on Afghan War

2010-07-05T21:07:00.000-04:00

Huffington Post - 7/4/2010

Fareed Zakaria criticized the Afghanistan war in unusually harsh terms on his CNN program Sunday, saying that "the whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate, a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem."
His comments followed CIA director Leon Panetta's admission last week that the number of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan may be down to just 50 to 100 members, or even fewer.
"If Al Qaeda is down to 100 men there at the most," Zakaria asked, "why are we fighting a major war?"
Zakaria noted that the war is costing the U.S. a fortune in both blood and treasure. "Last month alone there were more than 100 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan.," the CNN host said. "That's more than one allied death for each living Al Qaeda member in the country in just one month.
"The latest estimates are that the war in Afghanistan will cost more than $100 billion in 2010 alone. That's a billion dollars for every member of Al Qaeda thought to be living in Afghanistan in one year."
To critics who suggest that we need to continue fighting the war against the Taliban because they are allied with Al Qaeda, Zakaria countered that "this would be like fighting Italy in World War II after Hitler's regime had collapsed and Berlin was in flames just because Italy had been allied with Germany."
"Why are we investing so much time, energy, and effort when Al Qaeda is so weak?" Zakaria concluded. "Is there a more cost-effective way to keep Al Qaeda on the ropes than fight a major land and air war in Afghanistan? I hope someone in Washington is thinking about this and not simply saying we're going to stay the course because, well, we must stay the course."

4th of July

2010-07-05T12:08:00.000-04:00

How sad and cynical it is for our nation’s leaders to play on patriotism to support our current war efforts. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have nothing to do with preserving freedom or protecting our nation. These “leaders” extol our servicemen and women for “fighting to preserve our freedom” when all most of them have ever fought for is to preserve their bank accounts (and of course guarantee funding for their next campaign).

Of course, all Americans “support” our troops, I feel like crying whenever I hear about some poor soldier losing his or her life in Afghanistan, but this does not make this war worthwhile, reasonable or “win-able.” It is a war driven by our military industry (talk about corporate welfare!) to fill defense contractor’s pockets and pour cash into congressional districts and feed campaigns.

Republicans can make a stand on extending unemployment benefits to American citizens in the name of “deficit reduction” but they are happy to spend millions of dollars a day in Afghanistan and Iraq (funded by our foreign debt holders) and that is A-OK (please do not construe this comment as being supportive of Democrats – they are just as guilty). Hey, Tea Party morons, here is something to really get MAD about!

For more info on the cost of our war efforts visit www.costofwar.com run by the National Priorities Project.

God Bless Matt Taibbi

2010-06-30T14:11:00.000-04:00

The latest flap regarding Rolling Stone’s printing of General McChrystal’s drunken, professional suicide has engendered several comments from fellow reporters including (and I quote Mr. Taibbi’s 6/28/2010 Blog post): “I thought I'd seen everything when I read David Brooks saying out loud in a New York Times column that reporters should sit on damaging comments to save their sources from their own idiocy. But now we get CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan slamming our own Michael Hastings on CNN's "Reliable Sources" program, agreeing that the Rolling Stone reporter violated an "unspoken agreement" that journalists are not supposed to "embarrass [the troops] by reporting insults and banter."

Mr. Taibbi titled this BLOG posting “Lara Logan, You Suck” (I fucking love this guy!). The whole BLOG post is well worth reading (www.rollingstone.com/politics & click on Matt Taibbi) if you have any love or regard for actual news and the importance of a vigorous, honest public dialog. This whole flap has reminded me of the scene from Cameron Crowe’s movie “Almost Famous” where the music journalist Lester Bangs (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) coaches the young writer about being friends with the rock stars he is writing about; “My advice to you, I know you think those guys are your friends, you wanna be a true friend to them? Be honest, and unmerciful.”

War in Afghanistan

2010-06-29T09:21:00.000-04:00

Please take note of a 6/25/2010 story by Matthew Rosenberg in the WSJ, this is the opening paragraph: “More than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years, a sum so large that U.S. investigators believe top Afghan officials and their associates are sending billions of diverted U.S. aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad.” Another alarming quote: “One figure often cited by Afghan and Western officials is $10 million a day leaving Afghanistan. That is $3.65 billion a year, more than a quarter of the current GDP.” This is taxpayer money (borrowed from foreign investors no less – but that is another subject) to fight a war for which no reasonable person can even define what “winning” would even be! This report follows a Washington Post piece by Karen DeYoung on 6/22/2010 that begins with the following paragraph: “The U.S. military is funding a massive protection racket in Afghanistan, indirectly paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its supply convoys throughout the country, according to congressional investigators.”

This war effort is Mr. Obama’s greatest mistake. Whatever you think of Health Care and Financial Reform legislation at least there is potential that some American citizens might actually be helped and that is clearly not something you can say about the Afghan war. American’s should be outraged and every wasted life and every wasted dollar lost in this useless, meaningless war – GET THE FUCK OUT NOW!

The problem with Republicans

2010-06-28T11:22:00.001-04:00

While anti-Obama sentiments rage around the country fueling the Tea Party movement and anti-incumbency fever is it going to be enough to win the next presidential race? The party has rallied around Mitch McConnell who simply plays the politics of opposition (simple opposition is certainly easier than pursuing actual ideas and legislation). This all may be an effective strategy in the mid-terms but I don’t think it is going to work in a presidential contest. In a presidential race you need to actually have a vision and plan and (at least appear) that you possess the intangible quality of leadership.

While the bloom is certainly off the Obama rose, he will enter the next presidential cycle with some real accomplishments running against a Republican party that appears to pride itself in a “just say no” agenda. Yes, Mr. Obama’s accomplishments are questionable; massive Health Care legislation that institutionalizes future deficit spending and does nothing to control costs and (again) massive Financial Reform legislation that does nothing to ameliorate “to big to fail” and institutionalizes future bail outs while creating a huge new “consumer protection” agency (again fueled by deficit spending). Whatever you think about these 2 accomplishments it is not going to be enough to just rail against them, the next Republican presidential candidate will need to have an actual plan to make our country better, you know, some vision for America. See anybody on the Republican horizon that fits that mold?

4 June Shows, 4 Stories – Dave Rawlings, Alan Toussaint, Jim Hall & Sonny Rollins

2010-06-17T17:04:00.000-04:00

On Friday June 4th we ventured to the Portsmouth Music Hall to see the Dave Rawlings Machine, the 4 piece acoustic band lead my husband & wife team Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch. The group was positively effervescent in its joyous delivery and the audience responded in kind for an uproarious concert. The music was mostly taken from the (sadly) less enchanting new CD “The Dave Rawlings Machine.” The set was peppered with some choice covers, notably Robbie Robertson’s “The Weight,” and Dylan’s classic “Queen Jane Approximately.” While fully serviceable (the audience loved them!) these covers suffered a bit as no one in the band is quite up the task of singing these great songs. Gillian performed two of her tunes (including the wonderful “Look at Miss Ohio”) and provided incredibly intuitive backup to Dave both on the guitar and vocals. All in all a great night of roots/country music, Rawlings remains (in this writer’s opinion) one of the best guitarist in the world on his old 1935 Epiphone archtop. To the delight of the audience, after a 3 song encore the group came out for a second encore and walked to the very lip of the stage and Gillian led them in a wonderful acapella version of “Go to Sleep (Little Baby).” www.myspace.com/daverawlingsmachine

The next day, Saturday the 5th we traveled up to Burlington, Vermont to the Discover Jazz Festival to see New Orleans legend Allan Toussaint. I was lured there as the show was titled “The Bright Mississippi” after Toussaint’s recent recording of the same name (from a Thelonius Monk tune). The show was also to feature Don Byron who plays clarinet on that same CD. Toussaint started the show with his regular band and proceeded to perform a set that can only be described as really good lounge music. I have seen Toussaint twice recently and have come away with the same opinion; he is a really charming and superb supper club performer. He sings some of his famous songs, but of course he is no Lee Dorsey (“Workin’ in a Coalmine”) or Ernie K-Doe (“Mother in Law”) so while pleasant, they tend to be shadows of the original versions. Mid-set the bass player switched to an upright bass and Don Byron appeared and the group did indeed do 4 tunes from “The Bright Mississippi” and they were sublime. “The Bright Mississippi” is one of the most nuanced and greatest essays on traditional New Orleans music I have ever encountered, and these live versions did not disappoint. Immediately after this set we were back to the lounge, that included a revolting sing-a-long of “The City of New Orleans,” with its refrain, “good morning American, how are you.” The audience loved all this, and apparently did not miss the fact that Toussaint played virtually no traditional New Orleans piano (in the style of Longhair, Booker, or Washington). This omission is stark as he can do can play in those traditional modes as well as any man alive, he did not even venture into his own early material (the Tousan Sessions) – very disappointing. www.allentoussaint.com

On Friday and Saturday the 11th and the 12th, we were back in Burlington to see the guitarist Jim Hall on Friday and tenor saxophone master Sonny Rollins on Saturday. Both of these giants turn 80 this year and they clearly showed the physical ravages of time, both somewhat crippled and stooped with age; that is until they began playing. What a profound testament to the power of music to see these 2 men perform!

Hall, who is the dean of American jazz guitarist, was clearly the most effected by his age, there were more missed notes and difficulty at faster tempos but there were also (as there always is with him) moments of almost transcendental, lyrical beauty and his tone is still singular in the guitar world. The first half of Hall’s set was with some of his orchestrated pieces and featured Vermont area brass players. This set was a mixed bag as some of the players seemed to not be up to the task at hand, perhaps due to experience or lack of rehearsal. The second half was with Hall’s amazing quartet of Scott Colley on bass, Joey Baron on drums and Greg Osby on alto sax. The highlight of the second set had to be a sublime reading of Billy Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge” with great solos from Hall and Osby. Other highlights were a lush reading of standard “All the Things You Are” and 2 Sonny Rollin’s compositions; “Sonnymoon for Two” and “St Thomas.” www.jimhallmusic.com

Sonny Rollin’s was simply staggering, when he walked out on stage I hardly recognized him, with his “Larry Fine” style grey afro, stooped and smaller then I remembered but when he counted off the first tune, a blistering blues he might as well have been 20 years old. On the opening number he soloed for well over 10 minutes calling to mind his friend John Coltrane’s famous live version of “Chasin’ the Trane.” It was an unrelenting barrage of invention, melody and energy that defied both his appearance and age. Rollins played for almost 2 hours without a break, his 5 piece band was fabulous including the recent addition of guitarist Russell Malone and fiery drummer Kobie Watkins. Rollins rarely broke between tunes, counting off directly into the next number like a man possessed, swinging his horn and stomping on the floor for emphasis. Certainly a highlight for jazz fans was the appearance by Jim Hall on 2 tunes near the end of the night: “In a Sentimental Mood” & “If Ever I Would Leave You.” Jazz stalwarts will know that one of Rollins most famous recordings, “The Bridge,” included both Jim Hall and Rollins current bass player Bob Cranshaw as part of that historic quartet. Rollin’s introduced Hall as a “young man” sitting in on guitar as Hall made his way to the stage with his cane. It was truly a “surreal” moment (to quote Guitarist Russell Malone) to see these 3 men together again. www.sonnyrollins.com

The Obama Apologists

2010-06-04T15:09:00.000-04:00

There is nothing more pathetic then the current Obama apologists; it generally shows itself in the phrase I have heard several times in the past week or so: “he still has time to turn it around.” The “it” of course is his presidency. These are folks who elected a man with virtually no real political track record, fueled by autobiographies, the promise of “hope and change” and some great speeches. God knows we need a lot of both hope and change, but it is a fool’s quest to elect someone who is both untested and untried and “hope” for “change.” In this scenario what exactly is the basis for being disappointed? President Obama is clearly a very intelligent and thoughtful man which is something you cannot say about our last President, but it is proving to not be good enough as he appears to not have any clear leadership abilities or core vision. He seems to be more of a manager then a leader. His chose of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff signaled that Mr. Obama was going be a good corporate Democrat and do what he was told, with Mr. Emanuel doing the side deals on his behalf to make sure the campaign money kept rolling in.

One of the great ironies of the last presidential election is that it was a race between a largely unknown candidate, Mr. Obama, and one with a substantial track record, Senator McCain, but quick as a wink the “maverick” John McCain morphed into some sad shill of his campaign manager Steve Schmidt. While, no doubt McCain rolled out of the Presidential campaign severely bruised he had the ability to emerge as one of our elder statesmen but that is not to be. John McCain sadly has now fully bought into the obstructionist Mitch McConnell (right) wing of the Republican Party and is now groveling in Arizona, begging to keep his job and even calling on Sarah Palin to campaign for him!

It is hard to know where the Obama presidency with wind up, he has made some severely tarnished attempts at major legislation with health care and financial reform, both pieces of legislation shot full of holes by the intensive lobbying by both the health related industries and Wall Street. These 2 bloated and half-assed pieces of legislation will do little for the American people but I suspect will haunt us for many years. Of course the real downfall of the current administration may end up being the decimation of the Gulf Cost by BP, time will tell. Meanwhile all we can do is “hope” for “change.”

The New Paradigm, or a tale of the “Turd Blossom”, lesbian bondage, a Death Star and “Citizens United”

2010-05-31T16:01:00.000-04:00

It appears that Karl Rove is always a man to watch (but perhaps not so much to read, as his op-ed pieces in the WSJ tend to be un-insightful and one reads them primarily because of their author rather than to gain any real perspective, but I digress). Mr. Rove (who George W. referred to as “Turd Blossom”) clearly continues to be the country’s greatest political strategist and is the perfect model of a modern major Machiavellian (pardons to Gilbert & Sullivan). Much has been written about him and Ed Gillespie’s recent work thru the new political organizations American Crossroads & the American Action Network (National Journal & Rolling Stone.) The CEO of American Crossroads is former Chamber of Commerce executive Steven Law. American Crossroads was developed as a (essentially) shadow organization of the RNC, weakened by the leadership of Michael Steele (whom you might have run into if you have visited any Hollywood lesbian bondage clubs recently), it has received over $30 million in secured commitments from big money Republican donors that have been shunning Steels’ RNC. Rove is moving quickly to take full advantage of the recent “Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission” case in the Supreme Court that will allow corporations and non-profits to actively & directly participate in the election process. American Crossroads will apparently unite with fellow dark star The Chamber of Commerce by funneling money into the Chamber to be spent on key House and Senate races. Rove & Gillespie, “advisors” to American Crossroads, will be, according to operative Mary Matalin “making sure that everybody is expending themselves properly, as opposed to duplicating efforts or working at cross-purposes. That’s something that the committees and the campaigns really don’t do – legally cannot do.”

I have never been one for conspiracies, they always seen to me to be complex explanations of simple events, but the use of the word “agenda” in Justice Stevens’s dissenting opinion in the “Citizens United” case has haunted me. Does Chief Justice Roberts have an agenda to inexorably seal the landscape of American politics? There seems to be little doubt that Mr. Rove clearly sees that he is now able to set up an independent financial powerhouse fueled by corporate money and channel it directly into the election process, what heroin addicts’ call “mainlining.” He is no longer bound by those pesky 527 groups that, while useful, were not allowed to directly support a specific candidate. In setting up American Crossroads Rove and Gillespie (operating in “unofficial” capacities) simply side-step the RNC completely and move directly to support candidates that work for their wealthy corporate donors. I fear that even now as major corporations control so much of the public policy in our nation, the” Citizens United” case essentially seals our fate and becomes the final nail in America’s coffin. The amount of cash amassed at the boarder will crush any attempt to overcome this dreaded combination of power, influence and money. I am afraid this is not Star Wars where the small band of rebels can destroy the Death Star! To quote Republican strategist Ed Rollin’s: “Independent expenditures will play a very, very significant role. There are no rules anymore.”

Two big questions remain:
• Was this the type of legislation Chief Justice John Roberts was expected to accomplish when he was nominated to the court? Remember Justice Roberts, the architect of the “Citizen’s United” case, vowed to Senator John McCain to respect judicial precedence at his confirmation hearings and “Citizen’s United” is clearly not a case of respecting judicial precedence.
• And finally, where is the American public in all this? Where are all those ANGRY folks in the Tea Party movement who “want their country back?”

What is the New Right?

2010-05-30T10:53:00.000-04:00

You start to see patterns emerge as talking points come into focus, a phrase I have heard about 3 times in just the last week on various shows and op-ed pieces is (I paraphrase) “ the more you ask government to do the less well it will do everything.” This is a handy little phrase, it seems the intellectual level of America is such that (like in advertising) you need something short, bite sized and having some vague sense of veracity. Certainly the size of an organization can lead to inherent inefficiencies but there are innumerable large business entities, and indeed other countries that seem to accomplish a level of effectiveness that belies the above aphorism.

Our political leaders primary concern is the money needed to succeed in the next election cycle. The common good of our country and its people is ground under in this pursuit of cash. Any sense of what is best for our country as a whole has been lost as America’s overbearing sense of individualism has morphed into a narcissistic and selfish quest to satisfy our personal needs and desires. This political lust is fueled by right and left wing television & radio opinion that is presented as news and the fact that in today’s digital environment one can easily make sure that no contrary opinions, facts or thoughts ever cross our path. Lost is any sense of intellectual compromise as our political dialogue is debased to name calling and short term one-upmanship. The fact that the horrible tragedy of the oil spill in the gulf can become a political football of sorts is a perfect testament to this environment.

I have always felt that Ronald Regan’s thought that you “do not want the Government doing any more then it has to do” was spot on. Of course, the devil is in the details as to whether that cut off point is on the libertarian end of the spectrum or the progressive, but one thing is certain; if our government was focused more on the general public welfare instead of serving the interests of contributors it would be a more efficient entity.

One can clearly see the hand of moneyed interests in the recent twin travesties of the health care bill and the upcoming financial reform bill. In both cases the astonishing level of lobbing by the healthcare and financial services industries has made sure that (as Matt Taibbi put it in Rolling Stone when discussing the financial reform) there are “freeway-wide loopholes that screw any chance of meaningful change.” The public cries for more regulation are pathetic as any regulation passed is simply a sad dog and pony show that is designed at the outset to be ineffective.

So we are left with a government that is a perfect case of failure by design. In that light; Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Oil spill, Wall Street bailouts, the mortgage debacle and the suffering of untold American citizens at the hands of a government whose goal should be their best interested make all too much sense.

The GREAT Corporate Tax Rate Debate

2010-05-28T17:26:00.002-04:00

There has been a steady drumbeat over the past year or so on the pages of the WSJ and other business journals concerning the (comparatively) high corporate tax rate in the US. This rate is seen as strangling American business interests and putting us at a disadvantage.

As I always do when I read these opinion pieces (especially when they are published in media controlled by Mr. Murdoch) I ask; “what issue they not addressing?” In this case these articles rarely address the preponderance of pass-through entities in the U.S. tax system. The extensive use of the pass-through entities makes the U.S. tax landscape very different from many other major countries. Pass-through entities such as LLC’s, S corporations and partnerships allow the business to “flow through” the company profits directly onto the tax returns of the members, shareholders and partners (respectively). This is critical because US personal income tax rates are some of the lowest in the world; to quote Eric Toder, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and former director of the office of research for the Internal Revenue Service: “When you look at the overall (personal) tax burden, the U.S. is quite low." This lower personal tax rate, of course, has driven the use of pass-through entities in the American business community as well as the institutionalizing of large bonus payouts seen in US corporations, and not typically seen to such an extent in the European business community (when a business pays bonuses to officers they effectively remove the funds from the corporate taxation and transfer it to the lower personal tax rates).

It is hard to know what to really make of all this propaganda as many European countries also have a VAT tax that further muddies the business tax waters. I think a real side by side comparison is, and the end of the day, very difficult. During periods of great prosperity in the US, such as the postwar period of the 1950’s thru the 1960’s personal tax rates topped 91% (this was the top personal tax rate from 1951 through 1963, when it took a precipitous drop to 77% in 1964!) and top corporate rates were in the 48% to 52% range (according to an IRS data sheet).

The bottom line is that while tax rates certainly affect the business environment, it is hardly the primary controlling factor (which often seems to be the take-away when reading these overheated op-ed pieces). We have a saying in the tax planning world; “don’t let the tax tail wag the dog” meaning that you make decisions based on what is best for you and your business and then you factor in tax considerations NOT the other way around. Might tax considerations change your plans?, absolutely, but you cannot operate any business based on the eccentricities of any tax code.

Tea & Capitalism

2010-05-27T09:51:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite comedians Patton Oswald was on the Bill Maher show (HBO) this week and, during a discussion of the Tea Party (who Maher always calls the “Tea Baggers”) stated that Tea Party adherents mistook large corporations and big business in general as being synonymous with free market capitalism. This very important point harks back to one of my favorite comments on business from Ralph Nader during the first (Republican sponsored) “bail-out.” Nader stated that the only real capitalist in American were the small business owners, because they were the only business owners “allowed to fail.”

The hideous marriage of government and their corporate handlers has created a perfect storm in our country, with government propping up failed business with taxpayer money. It is on this axis that the focal point of the Tea Party anger should rest but it does not, corporate Republican extraordinaire Dick Army (I suspect) is making sure of that. An essential ingredient of REAL free market capitalism is the ability to fail. I live and breathe free market capitalism every day and so do the bulk of my clients and one thing is for sure – if myself or any one of my clients go out of business I can assure the Government will not give a shit – THAT is an indispensable tenant of the free market and it needs to extend from Riley and Associates to Goldman Sachs and General Motors!

Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 - Tax Provisions

2010-03-30T13:26:00.000-04:00

There's an increase in the Medicare tax for high income earners. Currently the Medicare tax rate is a flat 2.9% on all wage income, with both the employer and the employee paying exactly one-half of this amount. Starting in 2013, the flat 2.9% Medicare tax will continue to apply to wages under $200,000 (or under $250,000 for married couples filing a joint return). There will be an additional 0.9% Medicare tax on wages over $200,000 ($250,000 for joint filers). This additional tax is to be withheld from wages, or if not withheld, it is to be paid directly by the employee. This additional Medicare tax also effects self-employed persons paying the self-employment tax.

Additional Medicare tax on investment income. HR 4872 would modify the health care act to impose the expanded 3.8% Medicare tax on investment income for people with income over $200,000 (or $250,000 for joint filers). Investment income for the purposes of the Medicare tax base would include interest, dividends, royalties, rent, passive activity income (such as income passed-through from partnerships and S-corporations), and gain from the sale of property.

Tax credit for smaller businesses to provide health insurance coverage. Businesses employing 25 employees or less may become eligible for tax credits of up to 35% based on employer-paid health insurance premiums. Larger employers who fail to provide health insurance coverage may become liable for tax penalties.

Tax penalty for individuals who fail to maintain adequate insurance coverage. Individual persons will be required to maintain adequate health insurance coverage starting in the year 2014. There's some new terminology here: minimum essential coverage. This term is defined in the newly added section 5000A of the Internal Revenue Code. Health insurance provided by employers, Medicare and Medicaid coverage, and individually-purchased insurance will generally meet the definition of "minimum essential coverage." Individuals will also be able to keep their existing health insurance policy as providing essential minimum coverage under a grandfathering provision. Individuals who don't maintain continuous health insurance coverage will become liable for tax penalties: $95 per person in 2014, $325 per person in 2015, $695 per person in 2016, and adjusted for inflation after that. Lower-income persons will be exempt from the requirement to maintain coverage. Also exempt are people who have a religious conscience objection to insurance coverage.

Tax credits to help purchase health insurance for lower-income people. Individuals and families earning between 133% and 400% of the federal poverty level will be eligible for tax credits to subsidize the cost of health insurance coverage. The credits will in effect cap the cost of health insurance premiums between 2% and 9.5% of total household income. Medicaid coverage would be expanded to include individuals earning less that 133% of the federal poverty level.

Flexible spending arrangements for health care expenses are reduced. FSA contributions will be reduced to $2,500 maximum starting in the year 2013.

Health savings accounts will have increased penalties for non-medical withdrawals. The current 10% penalty is doubled to 20% for any withdrawal or distribution that made for non-medical expenses. Similarly, the penalty for non-qualifying distributions on Archer medical savings accounts raises from 15% to 20%.
The floor on the medical expense deduction raises to 10%. Currently, out-of-pocket medical expenses are tax-deductible to the extent the expenses exceed 7.5% of a person's adjusted gross income. Starting in 2013, only medical expenses that exceed 10% of AGI will be tax-deductible.
Adoption tax credit increases to $13,170 and is extended through the year 2011. Also, the adoption credit is now refundable.
Economic substance doctrine is codified as law. Basically, the economic substance doctrine means that a tax strategy can be disallowed as abusive if the taxpayer's economic situation apart from the person's tax liability does not change in any substantial way. There's automatic penalties ranging from 20% to 40% for engaging in tax strategies that do not meet this definition.
Expanded information reporting for health insurance coverage. The Internal Revenue Service will be in charge of monitoring that individuals have health insurance coverage, assessing penalties for failing to maintain adequate coverage, and for paying tax credits to subsidize insurance coverage for lower-income people. There will also be information shared between the IRS and the Department of Health and Human Services, particularly to screen health care providers for tax compliance problems and to recover tax debts owed by health care providers directly from HHS payments.

Information reporting for income payments of $600 or more expanded to include corporations. Currently, businesses are required to issue a Form 1099-MISC to report various types of payments, primarily issued to individuals. Starting in 2012, this requirement is expanded to include gross payments of $600 or more to both corporate and non-corporate recipients, and are further expanded to include both payments for services and for property.

Sarah, Superman and Soul Music

2010-02-12T07:25:00.000-05:00

Reading about the recent TEA Party convention in Nashville made me think what an odd mix of stuff is going into this "revolution." In some meaningful ways the TEA party folks do indeed have something to be upset about, oddly they do not really know what that is but their mood and anger is sensing something that is real. At its core I think it is a fear of unsustainable deficits and a big government that essentially appears to have no regard or concern for the common good or the future of our nation. Of course mixed in with this is an almost virulent anti-intellectualism, racism, xenophobia and to put it simply, an odd sort of proud stupidity. Into this stage strides Ms. Sarah Palin. Liberals often wonder why fans do not see Ms Palin as stupid, but they are missing the point. Her supporters in the TEA party movement wear their lack of regard for any nuanced thinking or even knowledge of our country’s history VERY proudly. Her "stupidity" IS her calling card and a point of pride against the "professor of law" we now have in the White House. How else can you possible explain cheers when she derides Detroit law enforcement officers for reading the Christmas Day airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights! I thought it strange that a group that harbors such a deep distrust for our government would be so quick to give up rights that folks fought and died for to this very same government! OR the cheers for Mr. Tancredo when he derided "People who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in English" for helping to elect Obama. This is odd when addressing a country literally built on immigration (in fact he was only addressing a crowd of 600).

It is sad that this revolution is so ill-focused and dumb, all gut emotion and no intellect, for they are touching something real in their very justified anger toward our wayward government. Our leaders and their corporate handlers are ever so slowly selling our very country down the drain and that is indeed something to get mad about.

So in ending this little diatribe I was thinking that Superman had his "Truth, Justice and the American Way" and Sarah has her “Energy, Tax and Lift American Spirits.” I think Sarah’s theme for her TEA party speech should have been soul great Eddie Floyd's song "Raise your Hand" with is lyric: "Just raise your hand cause I'll understand"

2010 filing season gets underway; IRS expects many early filers

2010-02-10T13:03:00.001-05:00

The IRS opened the 2010 federal income tax filing season on January 15 when it announced it would start accepting electronically filed 2009 individual income tax returns. The IRS anticipates that more than 60 percent of individual taxpayers will file their 2009 returns electronically and it is preparing for a large number of individuals to file early. Triggering early filing is the expected interest in refunds because of the economic slowdown.
E-file
Electronic filing has exploded since the IRS first accepted e-filed returns. More than 95 million returns were filed electronically with the IRS in 2009 compared to just 4.2 million in 1990.
Paper returns take four to six weeks for the IRS to process before refunds are issued. According to the IRS, taxpayers who e-file their returns and use direct deposit should receive their refunds in as few as 10 days. However, more complex returns generally take longer for the IRS to process and issue a refund if one is due.
Some taxpayers may not be able to e-file their 2009 returns. The IRS cannot electronically process 2009 returns that include Form 5405, First-Time Homebuyer Credit and Repayment of the Credit. Taxpayers claiming the first-time homebuyer credit on a 2009 return must file a paper return. Taxpayers submitting Form 5405 must attach documentation substantiating their homebuyer credit. The IRS can only process these documents manually.
Refunds
Thanks to recent legislation, taxpayers have one more option to save their refunds. You can use all or part of your refund to purchase up to $5,000 in U.S. Series I Savings Bonds. The total amount of your purchase must be a multiple of $50. The bonds will be issued in the taxpayer's name or, if married filing jointly, the bonds will be issued in the names of both spouses. Bonds will be delivered to taxpayers by mail.
You may also be able to split your refunds among different accounts if you choose direct deposit. The IRS allows taxpayers to select up to three different accounts. This is a great option to deposit part of your refund into a retirement savings account.
Preparers
Your federal income tax return is one of the most important and sensitive documents you sign. Trust its preparation to a professional.
Our office adheres to a high professional standard and code of ethics. Unfortunately, not all preparers do and some taxpayers have been harmed by the actions of unscrupulous preparers. The consequences can be severe. Although the preparer signs the return, you are responsible for the accuracy of every item on your return.

Avoid preparers who claim they can obtain larger refunds than other preparers. If a preparer asks you to sign a blank return that should also raise a red flag.

The filing season can be stressful. It doesn't have to be. Our office is ready to help you. Please contact us today if you have any questions.

Kiplinger 10 part "What is Deductable" quiz

2010-02-06T16:04:00.000-05:00

Fun 10 question "is it deductable" quiz from Kiplinger's - http://content.kiplinger.com/quiz/what-is-tax-deductible/ (we got them all correct, but you knew that!)

Hiromi live at Sculler's Jazz Club

2010-02-04T13:24:00.002-05:00

Had the profound pleasure and honor to see Japanese jazz piano giant Hiromi at Sculler’s in Boston last night (2/3/2010). She was playing in support of her superb new solo piano album on Telarc “Place to Be.” The petit 30 year old Hiromi unleashed one of the most astonishing displays of instrumental virtuosity I have ever witnessed. From the explosive opening Gershwin tune to the last number, the Boston tribute called “Cape Cod Chips.” She was unrelentingly amazing, at once lyrical and dynamic with a laser beam focus. As an artist who seemed to totally inhabit every tune she played and never once lost her bearings no matter how long or florid her arpeggios or the intricacies of the rhythmic patterns. In that case her only antecedent seemed to be Art Tatum or perhaps her mentor Oscar Peterson (for whom she did a heartbreaking tribute last night). There was no doubt from anybody witnessing this amazing show that we were hearing something that was rare, wonderful and totally delightful. Her piano virtuosity was such that you felt that she could play anything she desired at any point in time, musicianship that was proscribed by no physical boundaries whatsoever. I need to be very clear that while her technical skills are often mentioned, I felt that all that skill was put into service for the music alone and never used in a gratuitous manner. Every tune Hiromi played last night was deeply imbued with a selfless joy of making music.

I spoke briefly with the gracious and humble Hiromi after the show, and on walking back I passed jazz impresario Fred Taylor who books Sculler’s Jazz Club. I remember him from back in the halcyon days of the Jazz Workshop and Paul’s Mall on Boylston Street and I looked at him and said the only thing I could think of; “wow” to which he replied back “wow.”

You can read more about Hiromi on her website - http://www.hiromimusic.com/

Taxes by State

2010-02-03T12:38:00.001-05:00

Awesome link from bankrate.com showing basic tax info by state - http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/check-taxes-in-your-state.aspx

2010 Haiti donations deductable on 2009 tax return

2010-02-02T12:45:00.000-05:00

Washington 1/22/2010 - Taxpayers will be able to write off charitable donations to Haiti earthquake relief efforts when they file their 2009 taxes this spring under a bill President Barack Obama signed Friday.
The measure sped through Congress, receiving final approval Thursday.
Under current law, donors would have to wait until they file their 2010 returns next year to take the deductions. The bill would allow donations made by the end of February to be deducted from 2009 returns.
The hope is to encourage more donations. Obama has enlisted two former presidents – George W. Bush and Bill Clinton – to help raise money for quake victims.
A similar law was enacted in 2005 for donations to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004.
The White House announced this week that the president and first lady Michelle Obama donated $15,000 from their personal bank account to the Haiti relief effort.

How Do I? Convert my traditional IRA to a Roth IRA?

2010-02-01T20:40:00.000-05:00

Beginning in 2010, the income limitations that have prevented taxpayers with modified adjusted gross incomes of $100,000 or more and married taxpayers that filed their returns separately from converting a traditional individual retirement account (IRA) to a Roth IRA are eliminated entirely. As a bonus to kick off "unlimited Roth conversions," any income tax payments due on 2010 conversions may be deferred into 2011 and 2012. For higher-income individuals, 2010 presents a long-awaited and much anticipated opportunity to convert their savings into a Roth IRA providing tax-free distributions during their retirement years.
Eligibility for a Roth conversion in 2010 does not automatically make it a good decision for every taxpayer. Indeed, under the right circumstances, converting to a Roth IRA can provide potential significant tax and financial benefits. But every individual's needs and circumstances are unique, and a Roth IRA conversion must be assessed in light of your particular tax and financial situation. In addition, converting to a Roth IRA is not a "do-it-yourself" transaction, and you should consult with a tax professional about the benefits and drawbacks relating to your personal situation.
The new conversion opportunity does not apply to funds held in a 401(k). The conversion opportunity applies to traditional IRAs, in addition to SIMPLE IRAs and SEP plans.
Conversion methods
A conversion to a Roth IRA may generally be accomplished by one of three means:

-- Rollover. An IRA rollover involves making an eligible distribution from your traditional IRA that is rolled over into a Roth IRA within 60 days after the distribution. If the rollover does not occur within 60 days, it will be treated as an early withdrawal subject to a 10 percent early withdrawal tax as well as federal (and possible state) income taxation.
-- Trustee-to-trustee transfer. If your IRA trustee is the same trustee for your traditional IRA and Roth IRA, you may have that trustee make the account transfer on your behalf. Additionally, if the trustee is not the same, your traditional IRA trustee can also transfer the funds to your new, Roth IRA trustee on your behalf, even if they are not the same trustee for the accounts.
-- Account redesignation.
Regardless of type of means you use to convert to a Roth IRA, amounts converted from a non-Roth IRA to a Roth IRA are treated as distributed from the non-Roth IRA and rolled over to the Roth IRA. As mentioned above, a rollover must generally be effectuated within 60 days.
Income tax consequences
The government is encouraging Roth conversions not only to shore up retirement savings but also to gain short time revenues. It accomplishes the latter because a conversion from a traditional IRA is counted as a taxable distribution in which income taxes must be paid. Unlike such distributions outside of a Roth conversion, however, no early withdrawal penalty is imposed. Since you would be taxed on your traditional IRA distributions eventually anyway upon retirement, having the distribution taxed at the time of a Roth conversion can be viewed as an acceleration of that tax. In return, however, the funds that become part of your Roth account, including future earnings of them, become tax free forever into the future.
For conversions taking place in 2010, you have the option to elect to recognize the taxable income generated on the conversion amount ratably in adjusted gross income (AGI) in 2011 and 2012, instead of recognizing it all in 2010. This election does not spread the tax that would otherwise be paid in 2010 to 2011 and 2012; rather, it spreads the income realized in 2010, half into 2011 and half into 2012. That income, half in 2011 and half in 2012, is taxed at 2011 and 2012 rates, respectively, along with any other income normally realized for those years. It is important to "do the math" on this election before making any decision.
Conversion transaction
The institution or brokerage at which you maintain your traditional IRA will generally have a Roth Conversion Form, or similar document, that you must fill out to complete the transaction. The form may ask you for the name and account number of the IRA that you want to convert, whether you want to convert the entire amount of the traditional IRA, or only a part of the account, and the amount of the IRA you want to convert to the Roth IRA (or number of shares). Typically, the form will also inform your federal and state income tax withholding obligations regarding the transaction. You will have the opportunity to elect withholding, or elect not to have anything withheld from the funds in order to meet your anticipated income tax obligations from the transaction.
Note. Whether you pay the taxes on the transaction from the funds transferred to the Roth IRA itself, or with outside funds, is an important decision you make. In general, taxpayers are better off paying the tax, if they can, with funds outside the account. You should discuss the taxation aspect of the conversion with your tax advisor.
If you have any questions about converting your traditional IRA to a Roth IRA, please contact our office. Since, in essence, you are voluntarily pre-paying your taxes it is critical that you fully understand the tax consequences before you make this move! We can help determine if converting your account is the best decision considering your financial and tax situation and needs, and help you with the transaction.

Major Tax Deadlines - Febuary 2010

2010-01-29T14:37:00.001-05:00

February 1

Employers must provide 2009 W-2 statements to employees.
February 1

Payers must provide 2009 Form 1099s to payees. (Brokers have until February 16 to provide Form 1099-B and consolidated statements to customers.)
February 1

Employers must generally file Form 941 for the fourth quarter of 2009 and pay any tax due.
February 1

Employers must generally file 2009 federal unemployment tax returns and pay any tax due.
February 16

Deadline for providing Forms 1099-B and 1099-S to recipients.

RIP - JD Salinger

2010-01-29T13:46:00.000-05:00

There has been much discussion on the legacy of writer JD Salinger these last few days and his most famous creation “Catcher in the Rye” published in 1951. It struck me that to fully appreciate the revolution that was “Catcher in the Rye” it is instructive to think about what it would have been like to encounter that novel back in the early 1950’s. While it is still an amazing read putting yourself (or at least attempting to) back to 1951 and imaging what it would have been like to read this book then, starts to give the reader a fuller appreciation of how culturally ground breaking it was.

It brings me to mind of an French interviewer who said to Miles Davis that he did not understand what the “big deal” was with he and Gil Evan’s revolutionary “Birth of the Cool” sessions recorded in the late 1940’s, Miles response (typically succinct): “man, you should have heard them back in 1947!”

I think with much great art it is important to try and see it in the context of when it entered the world. If it is great art there will always be a timeless quality, and it will easily transcend its origins, but its time and place within its own culture is always enlightening and will bring a fuller appreciation of the work.

Key 2009 Provisions of the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act

2010-01-24T16:11:00.000-05:00

Tax credit for workers: for 2009 and 2010 there is a “making work pay” tax credit of up to $400 for working individuals and up to $800 for couples filing joint returns. The credit was advanced to most taxpayers through reduced withholding throughout the year.
Temporary suspension of taxation on unemployment benefits: the jobless get a little more help with a $25 increase in weekly benefit checks through 2009 and suspension of federal tax on the first $2,400 of unemployment benefits received in 2009
Retirees and disabled individuals: those receiving government benefits, including Social Security, Railroad Retirement, SSI, and VA benefits received a one-time payment of $250 in 2009
First-time home buyer credit: increased to $8,000 for qualified first-time homebuyers purchasing homes after Dec. 31, 2008 and before May 1, 2010; repayment requirement waived unless sold or no longer principal residence within 36 months. Also, if you enter into a binding contract to buy the home by that date you still qualify if the closing is before July 1, 2010.

A reduced credit up to $6,500 is also now available for long-time homeowners. These are homeowners who have lived in their homes at least 5 consecutive years out of the 8 years before buying and moving into a new principal residence. This new credit is for homes purchased after Nov. 6, 2009.
“American Opportunity Tax Credit” for education: an ‘enhanced’ Hope credit applies to the first four years of college; it provides 100% credit for the first $2,000 and 25% for the next $2,000 on qualified expenses such as tuition and books; the credit is 40% refundable, meaning even taxpayers who have no tax liability can receive a credit for 40% of qualified college expenses, up to $1,000
529 plans: qualified computer technology and equipment is now allowed as higher education expenses from the plan, so distributions from 529 plans to buy a computer, for example, for college will not be taxable
Earned Income Tax Credit: increased EITC amounts for families with 3 or more children and additional marriage penalty relief
Additional Child Tax Credit: earnings threshold is lowered to $3,000, helping more people qualify for the credit and receive more money; for 2008 the earnings threshold was $8,500
Vehicle purchase: state and local sales taxes paid for purchases of qualified new motor vehicles are deductible either as part of the standard deduction or as an itemized deduction; the per vehicle deduction is limited to the tax that would be paid on a vehicle that cost $49,500.
AMT: the one year typical patch for 2009 of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) to prevent as many as 24 million middle-income households from being hit with a tax that was originally designed to prevent the very wealthy from avoiding taxes.

Independent Voters

2010-01-24T10:53:00.000-05:00

I think the famed independent voters of Massachusetts (and indeed all states) need to find independent, 3rd party candidates to vote for. At this point independent voters are simply involved in a stupid ping pong game back and forth between corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats. NOBODY is going to win in this game, lets use this movement (if that is what this is) to break the back of the 2 party system in this country and create a viable, independent 3rd party that is NOT controlled by corporate interests or the party infrastructure.
Even though a flood of money entered the Massachusetts campaign at the very end of the election it seems fairly clear that Mr. Brown had probably won by then. This means that Brown was able to win this election without all the baggage, and this strikes me as very hopeful as long as we move on from here in some meaningful way. As long as independent voters continue to use their anger to simply dump incumbents and not formulate a meaningful path to take our country out of the hands on big money then there is little hope for America.

The Latest from the MA DOR on 2009 tax filing season

2010-01-22T10:01:00.000-05:00

As the 2009 Income Tax Filing Season starts the Department would like to update you on some of the many changes at the Department of Revenue impacting this year’s Filing Season.

The Department of Revenue has expanded its free Web File for Income (“WFI”) Program. This free web-based program for filing Individual Income Tax Returns is available for use by all full-year residents who do not have to report installment sales income. Since January 19, 2010 WFI has been available online 24/7. Practitioners can use this free web-based program on behalf of their clients.

In addition:
The Senior Circuit Breaker credit has been increased to a maximum refundable credit of $960.00. (See TIR 09-16)

The Health Care mandate now requires that taxpayers have health insurance benefits that meet Minimum Creditable Coverage (MCC) requirements. For more information, see the special section on Minimum Creditable Coverage in the Schedule HC instructions. And for more information on penalties for 2009 see TIR 09-01.

Military Spouses Residency Relief Act, P.L. 111-97 was signed by the President on November 11, 2009. This Act limits the ability of states to tax a service member’s spouse. Additional information on how taxpayers affected by this Act need to file their taxes will be forthcoming.

The Department has issued TIR 09-15 outlining the Massachusetts tax treatment of losses from criminally fraudulent Ponzi-type schemes differs from that of the Internal Revenue Service.

The Filing Season Video is up on the DOR home page. This video discusses changes for the filing season impacting individual income and corporate excise taxpayers.

Supreme Court rejects limits on corporate spending in electoral campaigns

2010-01-21T14:32:00.000-05:00

A very sad day in American, this (seemingly non-sensical) ruling opens the door for unlimited, direct corporate influence for American elections (as if they did not already have enough control over American civic life)!

A divided Supreme Court on Thursday swept away decades of legislative efforts to restrict the role of corporations in election campaigns, ruling that severe restrictions on corporate spending are inconsistent with the First Amendment's protection of political speech.
The court split 5 to 4 over the ruling, with its conservative members in the majority.
"When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought," the court said in a decision written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. "This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves."

Mitt "Obi-Wan" Romney

2010-01-20T06:50:00.000-05:00

Scott Brown the new senator from Massachusetts said last night in his acceptance speech something that I thought was very important:
"In every corner of our state, I met with people, looked them in the eye, shook their hand, and asked them for their vote. I didn't worry about their party affiliation, and they didn't worry about mine. It was simply shared conviction that brought us all together."
He alluded to the fact that he was elected by "independents" several times in his speech and that his fight was against "the machine." With all the mewing you are going to read about what this election means to Democrats and Republicans it may just be that what this election means is that you are becoming irrelevant.
The people of Massachusetts elected a guy named Scott Brown who embodied what they were feeling and that voters felt would go to Washington and do what they wanted him to do, and these supporters really did not give a shit what his "party affiliation" was - WOW, what a concept!
The election clearly has all sorts of interesting sociological elements with its anti-Obama undertow but I think the overarching concern of Brown voters was a deadly fear of bloated Government and out of control spending (all fueled by borrowing from foreign countries) - all the other issues are simply window dressing.
Beyond all this, Coakley was clearly a rotten candidate who did not get down to work until the very end and (as Mr. Brown eluded to) I suspect she was indeed relying on "the machine" to get her elected, but I think those days may be gone. (FYI to the Democratic Party in Massachusetts - we don't need to hear and "Kennedy - Lion of the Senate" bullshit anymore)
The question now becomes does Scott join the ranks of Republicans in Washington and fall in lock step in the great Rovian Army or does he see his mandate to stay independent, We shall see!
SO if I were creative, my you tube video this morning would be a parody of the Mos Eisley Cantina scene in Star Wars where Mitt "Obi-Wan" Romney and Scott "Skywalker" Brown would be standing outside the Capitol building and Mitt would warn Scott of the "retched hive of scum and villainy" that lay within and tell him to "watch his step."

RIP - Willie Mitchell and Teddy Pendergrass

2010-01-18T10:16:00.000-05:00

There are 2 “twin tower” record labels of Memphis Soul and R&B – STAX & Hi Records. Willie Mitchell was central to the great success of Hi Records as band leader (a fine trumpet player in his own right), producer, composer, arranger, talent scout and engineer for so many classic records. The artist most often mentioned in conjunction with Mitchell is the Al Green, but there is also Ann Peebles, Otis Clay, O.V. Wright and Syl Johnson. His other critical achievement was the organization of what is called the great Hi Rhythm section of the Hodges brothers; Teenie on guitar, Charles on organ and Leroy on bass and Howard Grimes on drums. The influence of this amazing musical unit, so soulful and powerful, permeated the essential sound of so many of these timeless records. I had the profound pleasure of sitting on stage behind Teenie, his brothers and Howard as they backed Otis Clay at the Ponderosa Stomp in New Orleans this past year (2009), a vivid memory that will be with me forever.
Teddy Pendergrass was the big man with the BIG voice in the Philly Soul standard bearers group Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. Pendergrass emerged as the greatest interpreter of the '70s "Philly Soul" sound created by the writing-production team of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff with such classics as “Don’t Leave me this Way,” “Bad Luck,” “I Miss You” and “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.” He was suave and handsome (nick named “Teddy Bear” by his lady fans) with a powerful, sexy and silky voice that was one of the great sounds of 70’s soul. His career essentially ended following a spinal cord injury in an auto accident in 1982. Subsequent to his accident he devoted himself to a variety of philanthropic activities that you can read about on www.teddypendergrass.com.

God Bless both of these great giants of American Music

TEA parties and NASCAR jackets

2010-01-16T09:58:00.001-05:00

I recently heard a radio show with some TEA party morons, one of whom said, in response to the (undeniable) racist element of their movement, that they were not worried about Obama’s “blackness but his redness.” This speaks to the direct heart of these folks fear of big government. When Americans are polled on which they fear the most, big Government or big business the answer is always big Government. This oddly misses what to me is the real issue. Communism is defined as the workers control of the means of production. This is generally going to mean that government (representing the workers) is going to be in control, and that is what this speaker alluded to. Sadly in this country what is really happening is that corporate interests are controlling government not the reverse (the exact opposite of communism/socialism). The TEA party folks are completely missing the point of the real dynamic of what is happening in our country. Using lobbing money and donations major corporate interests are controlling congress and the white house (so much for change!) to protect their interests at a deadly cost to our country. Keep firmly in mind when you vote for either of major parties you have a simple choice: corporate Democrat or corporate Republican – corporate interest are ALWAYS going to be protected first and foremost! THIS is the actual source of the “public anger” that is so palpable in our current political discourse – people have this overwhelming (and accurate) sense that there is no concern in Washington for what the Greeks called the “Greater Good.” This is not because politicians are “out of touch,” quite the opposite, I think they are firmly “in touch” with what matters to them; doing the bidding of their corporate handlers!

Are TEA party followers stupid for worrying about the size of government, absolutely not, I just urge them to keep their eye on the ball and not lose sight of the role of big business in the growth of big government!

Now you may wonder where the NASCAR reference comes in! Robin Williams in his recent HBO comedy special opined that members of congress should be required to wear jackets much like NASCAR drivers wear that are covered with the names of their sponsors.

What to expect on your 2009 return

2010-01-13T15:46:00.000-05:00

So what's new? If the question is about your 2009 federal income tax return, the IRS has been ready with the answer since June, when a draft copy of this year's Form 1040 was released.
Here are six items you can expect to see.

A reminder that the first $2,400 of unemployment benefits received in 2009 are tax-free.
An adjustment to income for the educator deduction. Up to $250 of qualified out-of-pocket costs for classroom supplies can be deducted, even when you don't itemize.
An increase of the $3,650 exemption for you and your dependents if you provided housing for victims of the 2008 Midwestern disasters. You can claim an additional $500 for each person you helped (up to a $2,000 maximum).
A new deduction for real estate taxes you paid in 2009. You can add up to $1,000 ($500 for singles) to the standard deduction of $11,400 for joint returns ($5,700 for singles).
You can also increase your standard deduction by adding state and local sales and excise taxes on new cars bought between February 17 and December 31, 2009. The deduction is limited to taxes paid on the first $49,500 of the purchase price. Income limits apply.
A potential refund of a portion of the American opportunity education credit. When the amount of your credit exceeds your 2009 tax, you can get a refund of up to $1,000 per eligible student.

Tax Policy and the role of "the RICH"

2009-12-28T09:18:00.000-05:00

A good friend of mine recently sent me an article from the Investors Business Daily called "Filing While Rich: The IRS vs. Success." It was the usual "the rich are getting screwed" drivel that you can read dozens of times a month in various business publications. This one was particularly stupid in that it accused the IRS of essentially discriminating against wealthy taxpayers in the audit process (absurd in the my extensive experience). The closing paragraph is typical; "a CBS News-New York Times poll earlier this year found that 74% of Americans favored raising taxes on those making more than $250,000. And in the midst of all this envy and jealousy, the richest 1% of Americans pay more than 40% of all income taxes, according to the most recent IRS statistics; the richest 5% pay nearly 61% of income taxes; the richest 10% pay 71% of income taxes; and the top 50% pay no less than 97% of all income taxes."
I counter this with an alternative data; In 2004 the Survey of Consumer Finances done by the Federal Reserve Board indicates that the top 1% of households held 34.3% of wealth in the country and the next 4% held 24.6% (FYI - according to the FRB survey the top 20% of households in the US controlled a whopping 84.6% of wealth in the country). So if the business media can CONSTANTLY vomit out the richest pay all the taxes mantra then one can easily counter that in 2004 the top 5% of households in this country held 58.9% of all the wealth in this country.
Does this mean that they SHOULD be paying 60% of the taxes, absolutely not, because taxation is based on INCOME not on wealth. Many wealthy individuals may in fact have low "taxable" income as many folks with high taxable income may have low "wealth." So let us be clear on this, what I am saying is that the 5% who pay 61% of the taxes is not necessarily the same group that controls the 58.9% of wealth in this country. I just feel that in the war of raw data, these wealth %'s are important to keep in mind, especially when being assaulted by "the rich are getting soaked" opinions.
The importance of all this data is NOT the rate the rich pay so much as to the apparent fact that a large % of the American public (40% or so) does NOT pay any federal income taxes. This creates a structural problem in American society when such a large % of population does not pay anything. In essence we have a situation where a large % of the population has no "skin in the game" (as a good friend of mine always says) and therefore has little reason to be seriously involved in social and fiscal policy as it has (apparently) little financial effect on them. To me this is always the real story when I read these opinion pieces.

2009-12-22T10:22:00.000-05:00

I think the combination of the federal tax credit for new home buyers and the new credit for folks who have owned a home for at least 5 years AND our historic low interest rates is going to make the 1st quarter of 2010 the glory days for home buyers!

2009-12-22T09:41:00.001-05:00

Greetings this holiday season, on this blog I will be writing on a variety of subjects of interest as well as keeping up with tax changes.