My husband and I will spend New Year’s Eve with a group of our oldest friends. What better way to remind ourselves of our attachments and our long histories of care for each other. With age, however, things change. We’ll count down to midnight at 11 p.m. (maybe 10:30), raise a glass, pass kisses all [...]
How safe are your municipal bonds? That depends on which ones you own. “Muni bond defaults are far more likely to default than at any time in recent history,” says bond expert Alex Anderson, vice president of Envision Capital Management. Most of them will pay, but you have to buy them right.
The danger has been [...]
For the economy, the tax deal seems all good news. That’s not only because most workers get a tax cut, in the form of a 2 percent reduction in Social Security taxes next year. The Big Big Boom comes from the fact that the bill is financed entirely by deficit spending – [...]
I want to alert you to a tax loophole for the “lucky sperm club” (otherwise known as the heirs of the rich) that gets almost no publicity. Congress could plug it, when it reconfigures estate taxes for 2011 and beyond. Without public outcry, however, there’s no pressure to do so – and let’s face [...]
What was billed as the Great Year-End Tax Wrestle seems to be ending with a whimper instead of a bang. The White House might surrender to the Republicans and their own Democratic conservatives. Odds are, Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy will continue, at a 10-year cost of nearly $700 billion. The revenue loss would [...]
