Tax Foundation Debunks Anti-Obama Tax Smear
You don’t have to have a thousand unread messages in your inbox to believe that sometimes email is a bad thing. An example: apparently an anti-Barack-Obama screed has been circulating via email that lists a dozen of Obama’s alleged tax proposals, all of which (in the email) amount to taxing basically every American. Each of these proposals makes it sounds like he’s going to go after everyone’s firstborn son.
But as the Tax Foundation helpfully points out, basically every assertion made in this email is false.
Some of the assertions in the email (“Obama would tax all capital gains on home sales at 28 percent”) can’t possibly be reasonably construed from anything Barack Obama has ever said or written. In other words, it’s not a matter of some knucklehead doing his best to understand Obama’s plan and just mis-interpreting it. Somebody went out and just lied– made up a bunch of the nastiest stuff they could think of about Obama and called it the truth.
Hard to say how far afield this email has traveled. A quick Google search on specific phrases within the email reveals that it can be found on some very entertaining websites. For example, next time you find yourself poking around on “forums.gunbroker.com,” you can find the email here. The Iowa John Birch Society is all over it too. While it’s distressing to see it posted approvingly anywhere, the good news is that each of these web forums allows readers to comment, and sensible folks have already pointed out that the email in question is completely unsubstantiated.
More pernicious is a website with the harmless-sounding name www.before-you-vote-2008.info/ that has posted the offending email in its entirety, in apparent approval of its contents right here. As long as this idiot wants to keep shelling out $20 a year to own this web domain, he can leave the anti-Obama email in all its unexamined glory as long as he wants.
Of course, in the end, if any American voter reads the anti-Obama email and believes it uncritically, that’s their fault for being lazy. And one could optimistically hope that no one would be that lazy. But the underlying problem is that tax policy is complicated enough that it’s not all that easy to verify or (as is universally true in the case of this email) disprove assertions about candidates’ tax plans.
And even if people don’t explicitly believe the specific assertions made in the email, the theory animating the sender was probably that if you tell a lie enough times about someone, it does affect your perception of them– even if you don’t explicitly believe it’s true.
Someone I respect greatly, who is nonetheless a pessimist about human nature, once gave me the following metaphor for how elections are won and lost: presidential campaigns are like a picture window. One party has a red magic marker and the other candidate has a blue magic marker. Every time the Republicans run an ad, they’re putting a red dot on the window, and every time the Dems run an ad they’re putting a blue dot on the window. If, on election day, there are more blue dots than red dots, the Democrats win.
If my friend’s metaphor is wrong, then this scurrilous anti-Obama email doesn’t matter. But if he’s right, maybe it does.
Which is why the Tax Foundation deserves kudos for taking the email apart point by point and showing that it’s full of lies.
KEEPING TRACK OF BUSINESS MILEAGE
We were discussing keeping track of business mileage, and it came up that most of us tax pros, and probably most other business persons, make multiple trips to the same locations on a regular basis – in my case to Office Depot for supplies, to my mail drop (which is also a client), to the bank, and to various business clients.
I was reminded of a practice many, many, many years ago when I was a “para-professional” (official title was “Business Services Associate”) in the Small Business Department of Deloitte, Haskins + Sells – one of the then “big eight” international CPA firms. We had to record the mileage to and from our client’s offices on our time report. The firm would reimburse us for business miles – and would turn around and bill the client for the mileage. But rather than have to count the miles for each individual trip the firm provided employees with a chart that listed the round-trip mileage from our office to each of the firm’s clients. If Client A indicated 20 miles each time I would go to Client A I would record 20 miles on my report.
I expect that the mileage was clocked on the first visit from the office to the client, and that mileage was used as the standard for every trip from then on. If a client moved the standard would be changed accordingly.
My colleague mentioned that she had heard of clients who looked up the mileage between the addresses of their office and the business location in Yahoo or Google, and used that figure instead of actually clocking the mileage. I felt this could short change the driver. Isn’t the mileage provided on these online services more “as the crow flies” than actual driving miles? I think it is much “more better” to do as I think DH+S did – on your first round-trip to a location to which you will be making multiple stops record the exact mileage from your odometer. You can then use the same miles each time you make a round-trip from your office to the location.
There is a downside to using a pre-determined mileage figure. In reality each individual round-trip to a location is not always exactly the same number of miles.
On one trip excessive traffic may cause me to take an alternate route to save time – i.e. get off a major highway and take back roads, which is more actual miles but less travel time. Or road construction or an accident may force me to take a detour that ends up being more miles. On another trip I may stop to buy office supplies or visit the Post Office to mail business packages on the way to or from a client, which would add a couple of miles to that specific trip.
I realize that we are not talking about thousands of miles lost – but if you do a lot of client visits the added miles could add up.
The bottom line is that clocking each and every individual business trip is the best and most accurate way to record your true business mileage. This is not difficult – you just have to get into the habit. You can use a simple pocket date book to keep track of business trips. Enter the location, business purpose and miles driven. For example – “Office Depot (Union City) to purchase office supplies 4 miles” or “Business Client, LLC (Watchung) to do payroll and accounts payable 56 miles” or “Wachovia (Union City) to make deposit for client 3 miles”.
If you are the lazy type – or forget to set the odometer – you can always use a standard mile amount – the “DH+S method”. But remember – you still have to keep a record of the date, location, and business purpose for each trip in some kind of log or record book.
TTFN