Monster Hunter Nation

Time 2020-10-09 20:04:38

Web Name: Monster Hunter Nation

WebSite: http://monsterhunternation.com

ID:76257

Keywords:

Monster,Hunter,Nation,

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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 thecomments are all about the “morality” of paying your “fair share”. Which isn’thow any of this works in real life. Just stop it with your vapid hot takesalready. You clearly have a child-like grasp of a complex topic, and your wordsare making America dumber. As a former accountant, please allow me to explain why all oftoday’s newly formed tax experts are fucking morons, and we should metaphoricallyput 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 toget into any of the specifics of the leaked Trump taxes. Why? Because:We don’t know how full of shit the NYT is, andyou don’t do taxes based on rumors and innuendo. You do taxes based uponfinancial statements and the company’s books. This shit is super complicated and my happy assis retired and likes getting paid more money to write books instead of readingthrough thousands of pages of IRS regs.First off, “morality” doesn’t have jack shit to do with taxation.You pay what you legally owe. Nobody willingly pays the government more thanthey legally owe. This has always been this way since America has had incometaxes. There is endless court precedent. You pay what you legally owe. That’sit. If you pay less than you legally owe, then the government will fine orimprison you. If you pay more than you legal owe, the government will laugh andlaugh, because you are an idiot, and you deserve to be poor. Every single person who barks about how somebody else shouldbe 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 incollege. This class was all accounting majors by this point. At the beginningof the semester the professor (who’d had a long career as a tax guy) gave us animaginary family as our clients and had us do their taxes. One kid didn’t takeadvantage of all the obvious deductions for his clients. When the professorasked why, the kid said some mushy thing about how he didn’t think it was FAIR tokeep that money from the government… Holy shit. The professor ripped this kid anew asshole. HOW DARE YOU!?! IT IS NOT THE GOVERNMENT’S MONEY! IT IS YOUR CLIENT’SMONEY. YOU OWE THEM YOUR BEST! IT IS YOUR SACRED DUTY TO SAVE THEIR MONEY! YOUDISGUST ME AND YOU SHOULD NEVER BE A CPA! 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 whodon’t understand accounting or tax law, to complain about how somebody elseused the existing laws created by congress to pay less than what that personthinks is “fair.” Regular people have heard the bullshit term loopholes tossedaround so much that they start to believe that it is some magical easy buttonthat 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 atsome point in time congress (both democrat and republican both!) decided thatthey 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. Wewant you to drive electric cars so if you buy an electric car you get a taxbreak this year. YAY! Uh oh, we want you to stimulate the economy by buyingthis kind of machinery faster, so you have to depreciate your assets this otherway or you’ll pay more! BOO! You get a discount for paying your employeeshealth 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 (orwhat favors they are doing for their friends). Why was mortgage interestdeductible? Because at one point congress said “we really want people to ownhouses!” Even regular people have things that are considered “loopholes” tosomebody. So when the blue check mark journalism major (who probablydropped out of PoliSci because “there’s too much math”) declares that it is immoralthat some rich dude didn’t pay his fair share because he used loopholes, thoseare basically a bunch of meaningless buzz words strung together to prey on thefeelings of the gullible. Joe Biden has been making shit like this up for fortysomething years now. Congress meddles in business and your personal lives totry to steer outcomes. And as a result the tax law just keeps getting biggerand bigger, and more complicated and confusing, until it is the bloatedleviathan we have today. How big is the US tax code? NOBODY KNOWS! (and I’m onlypartially kidding with that answer, because there’s thousands of pages ofactual laws, and I don’t think anybody can actually pin down how many thousandsof pages there are of supporting documentation and IRS regs and findings thattranslate those broad laws into the nitty-gritty real world applicationaccountants have to deal with). It is this complexity that makes it hard to figure out what anyoneactually owes. The more complicated your affairs, the more of these laws yourun into, the more “loopholes” you may be able to take advantage of. We’ve already determined, nobody willingly pays more thanthey owe. The real problem is determining what you actually legally owe. Andthis is where it gets sticky. Because the laws are very complex, the morecomplicated 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 detailsbecause this was over 20 years ago, but when I was getting my accounting degreewe learned about this challenge someone did, where they got something like ahundred different tax preparers, ranging from Big 5 (back then)firms, medium sizefirms, small firms, individual CPAs, TurboTax, H R Block, the works… to dothe taxes of the same hypothetical family of five. This family had a smallbusiness, some investments, some rental property, so on and so forth, but nothingsuper 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 eachof those answers could be argued as being correct… And yet each of thoseanswers could also be determined as wrong by an IRS auditor. Sometimes there is confusion about what can or cannot bededucted. Some things are clear. Others are questionable. Some things the IRShas clearly stated are good to go, others you make your best guess, and then hopethe auditor doesn’t disagree. There is an old tax preparer saying, pigs getfat, hogs get slaughtered. Which brings us to today, with people freaking out about howTrump allegedly didn’t pay taxes for 10 out of 15 years and how that’s UNFAIR. Assumingthat the anonymous tip isn’t total bullshit—and this is the New York Times we’retalking about and they love to just make shit up—and that the information isaccurate (which means that whoever leaked it committed a felony, but that’s awhole different discussion)… my answer is so? Is it plausible that a billionaire paid no taxes for aperiod of several years? Yep. Totally. See all that stuff I wrote above aboutthe complicated tax code and how it is an accountant’s sacred duty to takeadvantage 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 manytimes again. One thing that’s really unfair about our tax system is thatit is rigged in favor of people who have more resources. Government meddlingmakes it more costly to conduct business. The more complicated the regulatoryburden, the more smaller companies can’t compete. Make the laws complicatedenough and the only companies that stay in business are the ones who can affordto pay for twenty guys like me. (my last regular accounting job paid extremelywell, and nearly everything I did was jump through government mandated hoops, fillingout government mandated paperwork which nobody in the government would probablyever read) Trump has those resources. I bet he’s got a room full ofaccountants, and their leader is probably a grizzled old CPA with an eye patchand a raven who sits on his shoulder. The raven also has an eye patch and anaccounting degree. This man has wrestled bears, and he’s going to takeadvantage 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 theIRS has sent their most fearsome auditor against him. This man sold his soul tothe devil, and then fined the devil for failing to list that soul as a depreciableasset. When he shows up to audit your company, he appears a flash of fire andbrimstone, as a Finnish death metal band plays his theme song. He is an auditorbereft of mercy, compassion, or pity, and beneath his leathery wings serve alegion of IRS goblins, who will crawl into every nook and cranny of the TrumpCorporation’s P L looking for errors, and if a mouse so much as shits aturd large enough to unbalance that ledger, there will be hell to pay. Is it unfair that rich guys can employ Gandalf level CPAs andtake 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 guyswould be utter fools not to take advantage of them. I recall a similar freak out several years ago when it cameout that some giant mega-corp (I think it was GE, but I don’t remember) didn’tpay any taxes due to some Obama green energy tax breaks. Only that time the freakout was coming from the right (who hate Obama) and the Bernie Bros (who hate allbusiness). It’s the same kind of thing though. If the laws are on the books, ofcourse 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 writingstupid 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 backto that soulless abomination from the IRS (which again, I say with all duerespect, Mr. Auditor Sir, please don’t hurt me) to hook his ebony talons intothe 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 gothrough several audits with various government agencies. Why do you ask?

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