Destroyer of Worlds (Book 3 in the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior) came out last month and is available in stores now. The audio book was supposed to come out the same day but had a production delay. I’m happy to announce that Destroyer of Worlds will be available from Audible in December.
My next book release is Gun Runner on February 2nd. This is a new stand alone sci-fi novel written by me and John D. Brown (Servant of a Dark God, Bad Penny). This is the story that came about as a result of a panel at LTUE, where John and I had to plot a novel live in front of an audience, and all the big ideas we were given to work with came from my 11 year old son. The outline came out really good, and a few years later John and I had the chance to actually write it. I really enjoyed this one.
The next release after that is Monster Hunter Bloodlines which will be out Summer 2021. This is the next regular series MHI novel, and goes back to Owen Zastava Pitt’s point of view. I’m still working on this one right now, and should have the manuscript wrapped up by New Years.
After that, I don’t have official release dates scheduled yet, but I can tell you what I’ve got in the pipeline. After MHB I’ll be finishing a dark fantasy novel that I’ve been collaborating on with Steve Diamond. We have a working title, but no official title yet. Think world with fairy tale magic, but in a setting that’s equivalent to World War One eastern front.
After that there are more novels planned for Saga of the Forgotten Warrior (it is a 5 or 6 book series) Monster Hunter (there’s several more), and I have a new Grimnoir trilogy planned (set in the 1950s).
Normally at this point I’d tell you about upcoming signings, tours, and appearances, but all of that is still unknown at this time. Usually I hit a bunch of conventions every year and have at least one book tour. Right now there is nothing planned.
I posted that last night on Facebook, and sure enough, this morning my feed is filled with people who don’t know shit about taxes retweeting the stupid opinions of other morons who also don’t know shit about taxes. This is just as annoying as last week when these same idiots all suddenly became Constitutional Scholars. Or the month before that when they were all experts on use of force laws and police tactics. Or the month before that when they suddenly got their epidemiology degrees from the University of Internet and turned into infectious disease experts.
Holy shit, you Dunning-Krugerands are annoying. Of course the
comments are all about the “morality” of paying your “fair share”. Which isn’t
how any of this works in real life. Just stop it with your vapid hot takes
already. You clearly have a child-like grasp of a complex topic, and your words
are making America dumber.
As a former accountant, please allow me to explain why all of
today’s newly formed tax experts are fucking morons, and we should metaphorically
put a brick in a sock and beat them over the head with it until they shut up.
I’m going to keep this blog post simple. I’m not going to
get into any of the specifics of the leaked Trump taxes. Why? Because:
We don’t know how full of shit the NYT is, and
you don’t do taxes based on rumors and innuendo. You do taxes based upon
financial statements and the company’s books.
This shit is super complicated and my happy ass
is retired and likes getting paid more money to write books instead of reading
through thousands of pages of IRS regs.
So big picture time…
First off, “morality” doesn’t have jack shit to do with taxation.
You pay what you legally owe. Nobody willingly pays the government more than
they legally owe.
This has always been this way since America has had income
taxes. There is endless court precedent. You pay what you legally owe. That’s
it. If you pay less than you legally owe, then the government will fine or
imprison you. If you pay more than you legal owe, the government will laugh and
laugh, because you are an idiot, and you deserve to be poor.
Every single person who barks about how somebody else should
be paying more? They themselves are paying the minimum they can get away with.
As they should. As should you.
I remember when I was taking my first tax class back in
college. This class was all accounting majors by this point. At the beginning
of the semester the professor (who’d had a long career as a tax guy) gave us an
imaginary family as our clients and had us do their taxes. One kid didn’t take
advantage of all the obvious deductions for his clients. When the professor
asked why, the kid said some mushy thing about how he didn’t think it was FAIR to
keep that money from the government… Holy shit. The professor ripped this kid a
new asshole. HOW DARE YOU!?! IT IS NOT THE GOVERNMENT’S MONEY! IT IS YOUR CLIENT’S
MONEY. YOU OWE THEM YOUR BEST! IT IS YOUR SACRED DUTY TO SAVE THEIR MONEY! YOU
DISGUST ME AND YOU SHOULD NEVER BE A CPA!
That class was one of my favorites.
Basically, you pay what you owe, no more, and anyone who claims otherwise is full of shit.
Second, “loopholes” is a term most often used by people who
don’t understand accounting or tax law, to complain about how somebody else
used the existing laws created by congress to pay less than what that person
thinks is “fair.” Regular people have heard the bullshit term loopholes tossed
around so much that they start to believe that it is some magical easy button
that rich guys can just push that makes it so they don’t have to pay taxes.
Nope. They’re just laws. These “loopholes” exist because at
some point in time congress (both democrat and republican both!) decided that
they wanted to promote some type of behavior or discourage some other behavior.
So they basically put a reward into the law saying if you do this thing we like,
you’ll pay less taxes! Or the opposite, congress wanted to discourage some behavior,
so if you do that thing we don’t want, it will cost you more.
Both sides have done this forever, state and federal. We
want you to drive electric cars so if you buy an electric car you get a tax
break this year. YAY! Uh oh, we want you to stimulate the economy by buying
this kind of machinery faster, so you have to depreciate your assets this other
way or you’ll pay more! BOO! You get a discount for paying your employees
health insurance, YAY! Oh, wait… Not that kind of health insurance.
BOO!.
So on and so forth, up and down, these perks come and go,
all based upon whatever behavior congress is trying to promote at that time (or
what favors they are doing for their friends). Why was mortgage interest
deductible? Because at one point congress said “we really want people to own
houses!” Even regular people have things that are considered “loopholes” to
somebody.
So when the blue check mark journalism major (who probably
dropped out of PoliSci because “there’s too much math”) declares that it is immoral
that some rich dude didn’t pay his fair share because he used loopholes, those
are basically a bunch of meaningless buzz words strung together to prey on the
feelings of the gullible.
Joe Biden has been making shit like this up for forty
something years now. Congress meddles in business and your personal lives to
try to steer outcomes. And as a result the tax law just keeps getting bigger
and bigger, and more complicated and confusing, until it is the bloated
leviathan we have today.
How big is the US tax code? NOBODY KNOWS! (and I’m only
partially kidding with that answer, because there’s thousands of pages of
actual laws, and I don’t think anybody can actually pin down how many thousands
of pages there are of supporting documentation and IRS regs and findings that
translate those broad laws into the nitty-gritty real world application
accountants have to deal with).
It is this complexity that makes it hard to figure out what anyone
actually owes. The more complicated your affairs, the more of these laws you
run into, the more “loopholes” you may be able to take advantage of.
We’ve already determined, nobody willingly pays more than
they owe. The real problem is determining what you actually legally owe. And
this is where it gets sticky. Because the laws are very complex, the more
complicated your finances, the more likely you are to have confusion over your taxes.
Let me give you an example. I can’t remember the exact details
because this was over 20 years ago, but when I was getting my accounting degree
we learned about this challenge someone did, where they got something like a
hundred different tax preparers, ranging from Big 5 (back then)firms, medium size
firms, small firms, individual CPAs, TurboTax, H&R Block, the works… to do
the taxes of the same hypothetical family of five. This family had a small
business, some investments, some rental property, so on and so forth, but nothing
super complicated. Then they had the hundred different preparers do their taxes…
And they got a hundred different answers of what they owed that year. And each
of those answers could be argued as being correct… And yet each of those
answers could also be determined as wrong by an IRS auditor.
Sometimes there is confusion about what can or cannot be
deducted. Some things are clear. Others are questionable. Some things the IRS
has clearly stated are good to go, others you make your best guess, and then hope
the auditor doesn’t disagree. There is an old tax preparer saying, pigs get
fat, hogs get slaughtered.
Which brings us to today, with people freaking out about how
Trump allegedly didn’t pay taxes for 10 out of 15 years and how that’s UNFAIR. Assuming
that the anonymous tip isn’t total bullshit—and this is the New York Times we’re
talking about and they love to just make shit up—and that the information is
accurate (which means that whoever leaked it committed a felony, but that’s a
whole different discussion)… my answer is so?
Is it plausible that a billionaire paid no taxes for a
period of several years? Yep. Totally. See all that stuff I wrote above about
the complicated tax code and how it is an accountant’s sacred duty to take
advantage of all the stupid laws congress has passed to save their client’s money?
Pretty much that. It has happened many times before, and it will happen many
times again.
One thing that’s really unfair about our tax system is that
it is rigged in favor of people who have more resources. Government meddling
makes it more costly to conduct business. 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.
Is it unfair that rich guys can employ Gandalf level CPAs and
take advantage of more complicated tax laws, while regular people use TurboTax?
Yep. But in the meantime, as long as those tax laws are there, the rich guys
would be utter fools not to take advantage of them.
I recall a similar freak out several years ago when it came
out that some giant mega-corp (I think it was GE, but I don’t remember) didn’t
pay any taxes due to some Obama green energy tax breaks. Only that time the freak
out was coming from the right (who hate Obama) and the Bernie Bros (who hate all
business). It’s the same kind of thing though. If the laws are on the books, of
course companies (and individuals) are going to take advantage of those laws.
THAT IS WHY CONGRESS PUT THEM THERE.
Now, it is perfectly okay to get mad at congress for writing
stupid laws and needlessly complicating everything with their endless meddling.
But it’s stupid to get mad at the people for obeying the laws that are in place.
If it comes out that Trump broke the law, then it goes back
to that soulless abomination from the IRS (which again, I say with all due
respect, Mr. Auditor Sir, please don’t hurt me) to hook his ebony talons into
the Trump Corp’s meaty flank, to pull it down and feast upon the carcass.
Why yes… During the course of my accounting career I did go
through several audits with various government agencies. Why do you ask?
😀 (that said, the IRS auditing the various
corporations I worked for was always way nicer than being audited by the DCAA.
What a fucking nightmare clusterfuck that organization is. I’ve been through
ATF audits and they were way better than the DCAA. Though for pure incompetent
malfeasance, the SBA still takes the cake.)
That’s how it works. On one side CPAs, and the other,
hellspawn audit demons, and they’ll argue, and battle, and go to court over
what is and is not owed to the government, and then the client will pay what is
legally owed plus any applicable fines and penalties (and not a dime more). Both
sides of this titanic eternal struggle are far smarter than anyone at the New
York Times and they have access to the actual financial data, unlike all the
blue check mark idiots on Twitter who are whinging on today about their feelings.
Barf.
Your feelings don’t mean shit. Same as the rest of us, Trump
owes what he owes. And the IRS will determine if that number is accurate or not.
