Message from the Ukrainian tax office: “Have you captured a Russian tank or armored personnel carrier and are worried about how to declare it? Keep calm and continue to defend the Motherland! There is no need to declare [them as income].” https://t.co/xduC7YlXa9

— Matt Bevan (@MatthewBevan) March 2, 2022

HT: Instapundit.

Monster Hunter Nation:

The more complicated the regulatory burden, the more smaller companies can’t compete. Make the laws complicated enough and the only companies that stay in business are the ones who can afford to pay for twenty guys like me. (my last regular accounting job paid extremely well, and nearly everything I did was jump through government mandated hoops, filling out government mandated paperwork which nobody in the government would probably ever read)

Trump has those resources. I bet he’s got a room full of accountants, and their leader is probably a grizzled old CPA with an eye patch and a raven who sits on his shoulder. The raven also has an eye patch and an accounting degree. This man has wrestled bears, and he’s going to take advantage of every tax break in the US Code for his client, and do so gleefully, knowing that many of those laws were signed by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

On the other side, you know damned good and well that the IRS has sent their most fearsome auditor against him. This man sold his soul to the devil, and then fined the devil for failing to list that soul as a depreciable asset. When he shows up to audit your company, he appears a flash of fire and brimstone, as a Finnish death metal band plays his theme song. He is an auditor bereft of mercy, compassion, or pity, and beneath his leathery wings serve a legion of IRS goblins, who will crawl into every nook and cranny of the Trump Corporation’s P&L looking for errors, and if a mouse so much as shits a turd large enough to unbalance that ledger, there will be hell to pay.”

RTWT

HT: Karen L. Myers.

I don’t have much use for his pacifistic, isolationist, hippy dippy approach to Foreign Policy, but I think you have to give him credit for being spot on right about tax reform.

Chris Buckley:

Over 6 Billion man hours will be spent this year complying with the tax code. That’s the equivalent of 3 million full time workers . For perspective, the entire Federal government civilian workforce is about 2 million. So for every government worker, the government needs 1.5 workers just to collect the money they spend. That’s efficiency.

April 15th: “[F]or nearly half of U.S. households it’s simply somebody else’s problem.

About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That’s according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.”

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St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village on Manhattan’s West Side, the last Roman Catholic hospital in New York City, is closing after 160 years.

Via Walter Olson and Matt Lehrer,

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Guilty and White once more:

Jonathan Kay, managing editor of the National Post, attends a workshop on racism at the Toronto Women’s Bookshop:

The central theme of the course was that this twinned combination of capitalism and racism has produced a cult of “white privilege,” which permeates every aspect of our lives. “Canada is a white supremacist country, so I assume that I’m racist,” one of the students said matter-offactly during our first session. “It’s not about not being racist. Because I know I am. It’s about becoming less racist.”

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It is difficulty to shoot an AK missing its buttstock accurately

The Taliban are compensating for bad equipment and poor marksmanship with well-planned ambushes. Captain Grace describes their tactics.

We operated the entire deployment, on every patrol, in the horns of a dilemma. Insurgent forces would engage our forces from a distance with machine-gun fire and sporadic small arms and carefully watch our immediate actions. From day one, at the sound of the sonic pop of the round, Marines are taught to seek immediate cover and identify the source/location of the fire. Cover is almost always available in Afghanistan in the form or dirt berms, dry/filled canals and buildings. Marines tend to gravitate toward the aforementioned terrain features. So what the insurgents would do was booby-trap those areas with I.E.D.s. Whether they were pressure plates or pressure release, they were primed to detonate as Marines dove for cover. Back to the horns of a dilemma. Do I jump for the nearest cover? Run to the nearest building? Jump in the nearest canal? Do I take my chances and stand where I am and drop in place? Not necessarily the things you need to be contemplating as rounds are impacting all around you.

Hat tip to Isegoria.

Tax Preparation tips from the Onion.