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  • Name: Nick Farr
  • Location: Washington, DC
  • Web: nickfarr.org
  • Bio: Financial Accountant & Community Architect
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Haven’t paid taxes in a while? Make arrangements now.

If you haven’t paid taxes in a while (or ever), now is a good time to reach out to state and local tax authorities.  They’re hungry for money and eager to cut a deal.  You can structure a payment plan, limit the “look-back” period, or pay now for pennies on what your real obligation might be.  Contact a CPA in your area, get ready to cut a deal and sleep better this April!

Amplify’d from newsroom.dc.gov
DC Home
Office of Tax and Revenue
OTR Encourages Businesses and Individuals to Take Advantage of its Voluntary Compliance ProgramRead more at newsroom.dc.gov
 

Don’t want your taxes going to war? Check a box!

Regardless of your feelings on defense spending, we should give everyone the right to “opt out”.  Doing so is as easy as putting a check box on the 1040.  Why hasn’t this been pitched as a serious alternative?  (See COMT on Wikipedia).

Amplify’d from www.flickr.com
See more at www.flickr.com
 

No more filming in NYC without subsidies?

Life on Mars is one of the few shows manage to watch on a weekly basis.  Of course, I watch it whenever I have the time for it, thanks to abc.com’s Full Episode Viewer.  Were it not for that, and hulu.com, I’d probably be missing some really worthwhile TV.  (Yes, I do believe such a thing exists.)

Life on Mars is clearly filmed in NYC.  It’s a period piece, and while they do a really good job of finding neighborhoods and set pieces that look like they could be from 1973, I have a lot of fun picking out areas I know of and things they couldn’t take out of the shot (i.e. Sidewalk level billboards.)

All that praise aside, I am rather disappointed that shows like this appear to be possible only because of the tax and other incentive subsidies for it.  Here’s a great article from the times about that.

Amplify’d from cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com
New York Times
City Room | Blogging From the Five Boroughs

Pushing for Permanent Film Incentives

Life on Mars
The film and television industry, one of the few fields generating profits in the deep throes of this recession, is fighting to extend the incentive programs that has created film jobs here in the past few years. At a news conference at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, dozens of film and television workers gathered to ask politicians to make the New York State Film Production credit program a permanent measure.
But the state, facing its own fiscal restraints, is limiting the program’s future funding. At a breakfast hosted by the Association for a Better New York breakfast on Feb. 26, Marisa Lago, president of the Empire State Development Corporation, suggested an alternative program that would cut the state tax break to 20 percent from 30 percent and limit refunds to $100 million a year.

Indeed, the program has been crucial to the city’s recruitment efforts.

“If it weren’t for the credit, this show would not be shooting in New York” said Richard Masur, an actor and former president of the Screen Actors Guild while standing on the set of the television program “Life on Mars.”

Read more at cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com