The left hand (pun intended) doesn't know what the left hand (yes, intentional) is doing.

I love the Enron example for oh so many reasons. One of the most frequent visitors to the Lincoln bedroom during their rise in the 90s was..........Ken Lay. If I remember correctly the Pres at that time was the guy Alan voted for and would defend endlessly today. It took a change at the Justice department to begin prosecution of Lay and Skilling. Then there's the Cap and Trade program for supposedly controlling CO2 emissions. The whole scheme was designed by......................Enron. Let's see, they were crooks who devised programs to fleece the regular citizens, correct? HMMMM.

So, after the fact, when prosecution began and the facts started coming out the Congress, run by folks who Alan and his soul mates support as champions of the little guy, passed a law known as Sarbanes/Oxley, or SARBOX for short, that was supposed to prevent those evil corporate leaders from cheating the common folk. Great law, imposed gazillions of dollars of unproductive expense on virtually all US corporations. And to what effect you ask? Well, let's look at one example that has an ironic twist.

Just last month the head evil capitalist, corporate leader of a company called MF Global was invited to testify before Congress as the company he led had just failed, primarily because they had "misappropriated" some $1.2 billion of investor funds (auditors this week increased that amount to $1.6b). Not only was their mishandling of the client money illegal, the CEOs claim to not know what happened to it is illegal under the terms of SARBOX. So, we have a law that doesn't get the job done, but it still costs the American economy a lot of apparently wasted money...............which, if economics is understood, costs jobs. But wait there's the ironic twist. The CEO named John Corsine (D, NJ) was a US Senator in the early 2000s, was a cosponsor of SARBOX, and voted for it's eventual passage, and attended the signing of the bill. What a country, what a country...............

Given his connections with certain party members, what do you think the odds of his spending any time at Club Fed are?

Then we have the two wealthiest guys in the country; one is my neighbor (only a slight exageration, and I think he lives closer to Alan) Bill, and the other a country bumpkin from Omaha named Warren. Both these evil corporate demons have exhorted "the wealthy" to pay more in taxes, even saying they'd happily pay more.........you know that fair share thing. Bumpkin Warren even invoked his poor, poor secretary who he says pays a higher tax rate than he does. Clever wording that.....makes it sound like she pays more taxes than he does, but in reality it's only a different rate number applied to a different class of asset. Deceitfu? Wash your mouth out, we're talking about Saint Warren of Omaha here!!! Anyway, both Bill and Warren have thes things called Foundations. For those unfamiliar with tax law, Foundations are a legal vehicle that the wealthy can use to channel as much of their wealth into tax free. Disclaimer: charitible foundations can be a good thing, and as stated are legal, so I'm not against them. But, when you see a wealthy guys named followed immediately by the word Foundation, that's what we street people call a tax dodge, the white shirt and tie guys call it legal tax avoidance. Now I'm not too bright, but it seems to me if Bill and Warren REALLY meant what they said about wanting to pay more in taxes............to be fair of course........then all they'd have to do is lead by example and not put that money in tax shelter vehicles such as Foundations, they'd just pay more taxes on it. Hmmmmmm

Well maybe that term lead by example is the problem. You see, they're both real palsy walsy with the guy in the White House who also tells us how rich he is and how he should have to pay more in taxes. He'd willingly do that he says. Says vs does.......let's see what he does in reality, not in speeches on a teleprompter. Since we have a rule that the Pres has to diclose his tax form each year, last April we got to see that the Pres and his family made some right tidy money. Good for them, I'm sure they earned it. Of course with that much money they had to hire a big time tax accounting operation who did a good, legal job of calculation his deductions. Again for folks unfamiliar with the terminology, deductions means money that is sheltered from taxes. All legal, and in many cases justifiable, but tax avoidance nonetheless. For the Pres he had something over $300k in deductions which, at his tax rate, lowered his tax liability by something over $100k. Hey, Mr. Pres buddy, here's a thought if you really mean what you say instead of just pontificating to sound good. DON"T HIRE THE ACCOUNTANTS.............forego the deduction and you'll pay more in taxes as a result. But then..........................that would be leadership wouldn't it?