Tax cut joy fades into frustration

After President Bush signed the 10-year tax cut into law last summer, checks went out to 85 million households--$300 for single taxpayers, $500 for single heads of households and $600 for married couples filing a joint federal tax return.
The problem: People didn't realize that those checks--$300 for singles, $600 for couples filing jointly--were advances based on a tax cut that saw the federal income tax rate on the first $6,000 of income for singles and the first $12,000 for married couples filing jointly trimmed from 15 percent to 10 percent. Rather than make people wait till tax-return time to see the benefits of that cut, the government mailed checks in advance.

''America: hammer & sickle style''

The benign-sounding Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 would enable corporations and their accountants to dodge investor lawsuits. The result could mean all those Houston grandmas who lost their life savings because Enron stock nose-dived from a high of $90.00 to about eighteen cents a share would have no legal recourse. They cannot sue the banks, the accountants, the lawyers, or any of Enron's 4,000 phantom partnerships, either.
Anyone expressing surprise at the supernova-like explosion of Enron and its accounting firm Arthur Andersen must have been roommates in a cave with Osama bin Laden. Eight or nine years ago, Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America laid the very groundwork by which Enron and Arthur Andersen could perpetrate their gigantic fraud on the public.
This kind of fraud we would expect from the Russia that rose out of the ashes of the former Soviet Union. When Communism fell, a primitive get-all-you-can-style capitalism rushed to fill the vacuum. There was no well-ordered, well-planned, and patient transition from one system to another. The businessmen/gangsters who comprised the “New Rich” took advantage of the rough transition and wasted no time using their bureaucratic connections to circumvent the laws they did not like and draft new laws that would enable them to strip away the assets of state-owned enterprises and ship the plunder to banks in Western Europe and North America.