Take a look at our Internal Revenue Code. No, really, take a good look. (You can buy it on Amazon for just $161.89: two thick paperbacks totaling 4,968 pages. You even get free Prime shipping!) At first glance, it’s all about the revenue. For FY 2019, federal income taxes should hit nearly $1.7 trillion. Payroll taxes will top $1.2 trillion. Corporate taxes, $225 billion. And estate taxes will generate somewhere around $20 billion, depending on how many billionaires die (#dropinthebucket).   But...

Wall Streeters have a lot to give thanks for this holiday season. Earnings are up, so bonuses are up. And that, in turn, means taxes are up, too. The New York Post just reported that Wall Street Bankers Are Throwing Excessive Parties To Dodge Taxes. But will the wining and dining actually put money back in their pockets? Or is the tax angle just a convenient excuse to party up a storm on the company tab?   Wall Street culture rewards bankers for results. They generally start out with low...

If you were coaching your kid’s basketball team, you wouldn’t win many games if you told them to aim for the backboard. Your opponents might love you, but there would be at least one dad in the stands screaming at you the entire time. So why have some tax collectors given up aiming for the hoop and settled for rebounds?   At first glance, the tax code looks like 70,000+ pages of incomprehensible gobbledygook. (Sometimes you really can judge a book by its cover.) But scratch the...

Reality television has introduced us all to the joy of the “big reveal.” HGTV specializes in this sort of story. The perky couple, handsome brothers, or plucky first-time homeowners spend most of an episode covered in plaster dust and paint. Then after the final commercial break, they pull back the curtain on the dream interior so viewers can feel inadequate about their own homes. (VH1’s Dating Naked did things a little backwards, with the “big reveal” up front, but...

Big-league baseball players like the ones who just wrapped up the World Series enjoy careers that last 5.9 years on average, and with 162 games per year, they enjoy lots of chances to be heroes. But eventually, even the best of them hang up their cleats and join the rest of us in the real world. The lucky ones find high-profile gigs running car dealerships or calling games from the broadcast booth. But every once in a while, a former player manages to makes headlines where you’d least expect...

Legend holds that in 1494, an Italian friar named Luca Pacioli was sitting under an apple tree when an apple bounced off his head. In a flash of insight, he invented the “double-entry bookkeeping” system where each entry has a corresponding and opposite entry to a different account. Those entries, called debits and credits, help accountants avoid headaches — if the debits and credits don’t balance, there’s a mistake somewhere. (Some of you may be thinking that was Sir Isaac...

Life is full of ups and downs, and sometimes the downs can be so low that it doesn’t feel like there’s ever going to be an up again. How many people have dreamed of faking their own death and disappearing under a new identity, never to return to their problems again? It’s called “pseudocide,” and it’s popular enough that novelists have a field day writing thrillers about it. John Grisham pulls some variation of that stunt in half a dozen books, and J.K Rowling,...

Streaming TV services like Netflix have changed how we watch television, dropping an entire season of a series at once for us to binge on. They’ve even breathed new life into “quality television,” a phrase that used to provoke laughs from that insufferably smug type of person who used to brag that they didn’t even own what we all used to call the “idiot box.”   Netflix has mined TV gold from all sorts of settings. Orange is the New Black explores life inside...

Fall is officially here, and that means whiskey season is back. Most drinkers probably don’t think much about taxes when they visit their favorite bar or spirits shop. Liquor levies are generally based on volume, not price, so you pay the same amount of tax on a $4 fifth of Olde Ocelot as the swells pay for their $269 Pappy Van Winkle. But did you know that whiskey played a central role in our country’s first tax protest, which took place around this same season 224 years ago?   Turn...

Some of the world’s most popular board games give players the chance to live out professional fantasies. Aspiring property sharks can cheat each other with the classic Monopoly. Would-be Sherlock Holmeses can track down killers with Clue. Armchair generals can settle down to an evening of Risk. But until today there’s never been a game to let aspiring tax planners outwit the Internal Revenue Code. Shouldn’t that be at least as much fun as figuring out it was Colonel Mustard in...