The Taxman Cometh


Book Description

A rogue IRS agent leads a raid on the wrong house and destroys Finn O’Casey’s world. A sympathetic neighbor, the leader of organized crime, is not what he seems to be. Both men thought O’Casey was a mild-mannered accountant. They thought wrong. O’Casey, a former member of an elite special operations unit, goes dark and rejoins his former colleagues and promises vengeance for those responsible. The moral: Be careful who you choose as a victim.




The Taxman Cometh


Book Description

Used car dealer Sam Samson never backs down from a fight, whether it's against an irate customer like Pete Not-So-Happy, an American Indian who's as big as Hulk Hogan, or against the IRS, which is even bigger than Hulk Hogan. When IRS Special Agent Elliott Mess, who looks like Robert Stack as Eliott Ness in "The Untouchables," steals Samson's money, they get into an altercation. At his trial for tax evasion, and assaulting an IRS agent, Samson is asked why he filed no tax returns for 17 years. He says he forgot. The jury buys this argument, but Mess rigs the trial. Samson decides he ain't gonna take it anymore. He declares war against the United States government. Guess who wins.




Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue


Book Description

An engaging and enlightening account of taxation told through lively, dramatic, and sometimes ludicrous stories drawn from around the world and across the ages Governments have always struggled to tax in ways that are effective and tolerably fair. Sometimes they fail grotesquely, as when, in 1898, the British ignited a rebellion in Sierra Leone by imposing a tax on huts—and, in repressing it, ended up burning the very huts they intended to tax. Sometimes they succeed astonishingly, as when, in eighteenth-century Britain, a cut in the tax on tea massively increased revenue. In this entertaining book, two leading authorities on taxation, Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod, provide a fascinating and informative tour through these and many other episodes in tax history, both preposterous and dramatic—from the plundering described by Herodotus and an Incan tax payable in lice to the (misremembered) Boston Tea Party and the scandals of the Panama Papers. Along the way, readers meet a colorful cast of tax rascals, and even a few tax heroes. While it is hard to fathom the inspiration behind such taxes as one on ships that tended to make them sink, Keen and Slemrod show that yesterday’s tax systems have more in common with ours than we may think. Georgian England’s window tax now seems quaint, but was an ingenious way of judging wealth unobtrusively. And Tsar Peter the Great’s tax on beards aimed to induce the nobility to shave, much like today’s carbon taxes aim to slow global warming. Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue is a surprising and one-of-a-kind account of how history illuminates the perennial challenges and timeless principles of taxation—and how the past holds clues to solving the tax problems of today.




The Tax Man Cometh


Book Description

This book was written with two purposes in mind. First, to make Fauquier's hitherto unpublished colonial tithable lists available to the research public; secondly, to provide an explanation for the tax and fiscal laws that brought the tithable lists into being. The tax lists cover the colonial Virginia time period into the Revolutionary War. Designed to meet the needs of researchers--family historians, professional genealogists, historians, African-American family researchers as well as those interested in colonial Virginia history. The book is organized into three parts--includes a historical introduction and transcripts of Fauquier's nineteen never before published colonial tax lists of 1759-1782. Four different indexes are included: 1759-1778 list, 1759-1778 tithables, slave holders and slaves, 1782 tithables, 1782 slave holders and slaves. Officials mentioned in this work include Thomas Marshall, George Lamkin, John Marshall, Gilson Foote, John Kirk, Armistead Churchill, John Kirk, William Grant, John Moffet, Thomas Keith, William Pickett, William Blackwell, Charles Chilton, John Blackwell, and William Heale. These tax lists were discovered in a 1994 preservation and repair project funded by the Library of Virginia. The Tax and Fiscal records were done by the Justices who took the lists of Tithables from Fauquier's residents and by the Sheriff and other officials who took the tax and were responsible for their transmission to the colonial capital. The colonial tax lists, those taken before 1782 were loosely termed Tithable Lists--included both property and land. During and after 1782, these lists were divided into two distinct tax lists which included personal property tax lists and land tax lists.




Business Taxation and Financial Decisions


Book Description

Managerial decisions are considerably influenced by taxes: e.g. the choice of location, buying or leasing decisions, or the proper mix of debt and equity in the company's capital structure increasingly demand qualified employees in an economic environment that is becoming more and more complex. Due to the worldwide economic integration and constant changes in tax legislation, companies are faced with new challenges – and the need for information and advice is growing accordingly. This book's goal is to identify and quantify possible tax effects on companies' investment strategies and financing policies. It does not focus on details of tax law, but instead seeks to address students and practitioners focusing on corporate finance, accounting, investment banking and strategy consulting.




Widening Income Inequality


Book Description

“One of the world’s most inspired and unusual poets . . . [Seidel’s] poems are a triumph of cosmic awe in the face of earthly terror.” —Hillel Italie, USA Today Frederick Seidel has been called many things. A “transgressive adventurer,” “a demonic gentleman,” a “triumphant outsider,” “a great poet of innocence,” and “an example of the dangerous Male of the Species,” just to name a few. Whatever you choose to call him, one thing is certain: “he radiates heat” (The New Yorker). Now add to that: the poet of aging and decrepitude. Widening Income Inequality, Seidel’s new poetry collection, is a rhymed magnificence of sexual, historical, and cultural exuberance, a sweet and bitter fever of Robespierre and Obamacare and Apollinaire, of John F. Kennedy and jihadi terror and New York City and Italian motorcycles. Rarely has poetry been this true, this dapper, or this dire. Seidel is “the most poetic of the poets and their leader into hell.”




Bob Bullock


Book Description

Renowned for his fierce devotion to the people of Texas—as well as his equally fierce rages and unpredictable temper—Bob Bullock was the most powerful political figure in Texas at the end of the twentieth century. First elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1956, Bullock held several key statewide posts before capturing the lieutenant governor's office in 1990. Though nominally the state's number two official, Bullock in fact became Texas's top power broker, wielding tremendous influence over the legislative agenda and state budget through the 1990s while also mentoring and supporting a future president—George W. Bush. In this lively, yet thoroughly researched biography, award-winning journalists Dave McNeely and Jim Henderson craft a well-rounded portrait of Bob Bullock, underscoring both his political adroitness and his personal demons. They trace Bullock's rise through state government as Assistant Attorney General, Secretary of State, State Comptroller, and Lieutenant Governor, showing how he increased the power of every office he held. The authors spotlight Bullock's substantial achievements, which included hiring an unprecedented number of women and minorities, instituting a performance review to increase the efficiency of state agencies, restructuring the public school funding system, and creating the state's first water conservation and management plan.




The Whiskey Rebellion


Book Description

This book assesses the rebellion in relation to interregional tensions, international diplomacy, frontier expansion, republican ideology and the social and political conflict of the l780s -1790s.




Landscapes of Privilege


Book Description

James and Nancy Duncan look at how the aesthetics of physical landscapes are fully enmeshed in producing the American class system. Focusing on an archetypal upper class American suburb-Bedford in Westchester County, NY-they show how the physical presentation of a place carries with it a range of markers of inclusion and exclusion.




The New Tycoons


Book Description

Inside the Trillion Dollar Industry That Owns Everything What do Dunkin' Donuts, J. Crew, Toys "R" Us, and Burger King have in common? They are all currently or just recently were owned, operated, and controlled by private equity firms. The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything takes the reader behind the scenes of these firms: their famous billionaire founders, the overlapping stories of their creation and evolution, and the outsized ambitions that led a group of clever bankers from small shops operating in a corner of Wall Street into powerhouse titans of capital. This is the story of the money and the men who handle it. Go inside the private worlds of founders Henry Kravis, Steve Schwarzman, David Bonderman, and more in The New Tycoons, and discover how these men have transformed the industry and built the some of the most powerful and most secretive houses of money in the world. With numerous private equity firms going public for the first time, learn how these firms operate, where their money comes from and where it goes, and how every day millions of customers, employees, and retirees play a role in that complex tangle of money Author Jason Kelly tells the story of how thirty some years ago a group of colleagues with $120,000 of their own savings founded what would become one of the largest private equity shops in the world, completing the biggest buyout the world has ever seen, and making them all billionaires in the process Presents a never-before-seen look inside a secretive and powerful world on the verge of complete transformation as the industry and its leaders gain public profiles, scrutiny, and political positions Analyzing the founders and the firms at a crucial moment, when they've elevated themselves beyond their already lofty ambitions into the world of public opinion and valuation, New Tycoons looks at one of the most important, yet least examined, trillion-dollar corners of the global economy and what it portends for these new tycoons.